Olivine report on HAN-based CAISO telemetry lab study

Last year, PG&E teamed with Olivine to explore cost effective options to meet telemetry requirements for ancillary services and large demand response resources through a technical feasibility lab test.

Using Olivine’s Remote Intelligent Gateway (RIG) – a component of Olivine DER platform – two HAN gateway devices were connected to PG&E smart meters and Olivine DER.   Acting as Zigbee to broadband gateways communicating to Olivine’s cloud RIG, both devices were able to accurately and reliably send data from the PG&E SmartMeter™ to Olivine’s RIG.  We determined that both of the selected devices were capable of meeting CAISO requirements demonstrating cost effective and provider agnostic options for telemetry.  As a result, Olivine is now working further with PG&E on a field study of more than 300 households.

Olivine’s software based, CAISO validated RIG is specifically designed to work with these and other similar devices to provide validated telemetry to the CAISO in a cost effective manner enabling the aggregation of small DERs including demand response such as Proxy Demand Resources (PDRs) to provide grid services.   From the paper:

PG&E’s Demand Response Emerging Technologies (DRET) program undertook a lab study to test a telemetry solution set in a lab environment. This particular solution set was identified as having the potential to meet the business and technical objectives of CAISO telemetry, based on a survey of the technology landscape conducted in prior work funded by DRET. It is viewed as DR provider-agnostic, meaning that it may be cost effective to implement, so that any eligible entity fulfilling the role of a DRP or providing services to such parties, would not have an institutional or commercial advantage over any other in providing its resource telemetry services. This is relevant, insofar as the data pathways are not run directly through the PG&E mesh network and can be leveraged by any DRP.

The full report is available on the web site of the Emerging Technologies Coordinating Council: http://www.etcc-ca.com/reports/caiso-telemetry-solution-over-broadband-lab-test-and-proof-concept

The follow on field study project is currently in process at this time.  Check back here (or subscribe to the Olivine feed) to receive news of the field study as it completes.