An Open Source, Standards-based, Extensible, Smart Energy Management Platform

The Smart Grid is essential to meeting our future energy needs by changing how we use, distribute, and generate electricity. This energy future includes an increased amount of energy from renewable resources, load management techniques to improve resiliency and reliability, and distributed energy resources that can be managed to meet energy provider and individual customer’s needs. Two primary Smart Grid application areas are called Demand Response (DR), and the integration and management of Distributed Energy Resources (DER). DR is used to reduce peak loads or shift load in time. DR techniques, for example, would be used to improve power quality during hot summer days without unduly impacting customers. DER would be used by grid operator to use batteries to shift energy use to avoid demand charges, or a customer may use DER to maximize the use of local solar panels. Both DR and DER rely on a means to communicate information between an energy provider and one or more devices. Today these are typically vendor specific using custom hardware and software solutions. As a result, customers are locked into communication transport protocols, applications, tools, and data formats. Today’s systems are often difficult to extend to meet new application requirements, resulting in stranded assets when business requirements or energy management models evolve. The Smart Energy Framework (SEF) is a software platform for DR and DER applications. It reduces costs by enabling the deployment of these systems on commodity platforms. It is based on an emerging open source Internet of Things (IOT) standard framework and the SEF code developed for integrating smart energy applications will be made available to its open source community. The SEF will integrate smart grid standards such as OpenADR, SEP 2.0. This platform uses best practice security measures, allows for secure upgrades, and can be deployed on mobile devices, servers, as well embedded systems. During Phase I, by partnering with industry advisors and researchers, the SEF architecture and design will be specified. This includes defining the software objects and security techniques that are required to build a smart energy application using the IOT open source framework. Feasibility, relative cost, and performance of the approach will be evaluated on commodity software platforms, including embedded and real-time operating systems. Integration and deployment of smart grid DR/DER applications using SEF on vendor systems will take place in Phase II. These systems will be provided by partner vendors and customers. Activities that make SEF product-worthy such as refinements for quality, usability improvements, security reviews, certification testing, will be accomplished during Phase II. Key Words: demand response, distributed energy resources, open source, Internet of Things, extensible, commodity, management platform, standards