Price responsive demand is an important tool to meet our renewable energy goals. As we adopt more TOU rates and new dynamic rates, automation of distributed energy resources is going to be critical. This is supported by the recent California Demand Response Potential Study on Shift Resources and reinforced in the California Energy Commission’s Load Management Rulemaking.
In response, a team of OpenADR stakeholders took a price data schema drafted by LBNL and mapped it to the OpenADR event payload. As a proof of concept, we implemented this mapping in Olivine DER™ along with a few real and fictitious rates. The primary goal is to demonstrate the efficacy of OpenADR for price responsive automation.
| Rate | URL |
| PG&E TOU-B | api.olivineinc.com/i/oe/pricing/signal/pge/etou-b |
| SMUD Time of Day (5-9) | api.olivineinc.com/i/oe/pricing/signal/smud/tod |
| SMUD Time of Day (5-9) EV Option | api.olivineinc.com/i/oe/pricing/signal/smud/tod-ev |
| Dynamic (distribution + PG&E DLAP) | api.olivineinc.com/i/oe/pricing/signal/paced/etou-dyn |
| NEM (includes export price signal) | api.olivineinc.com/i/oe/pricing/signal/paced/nem |
Dynamic and NEM are fictitious rates, with the former including live day-ahead energy prices from the CAISO. The other rates are modeled after the real utility rates for usage only. Please note these are posted to support the development of the pricing ecosystem for researchers and other technologists, not for production price responsive applications; Olivine makes no guaranty as to the accuracy of these rate structures nor prices!
In all cases, prices include the current time period through until the end of the next day (if prices are available).
We are considering other useful elements that can be added here to support several different use cases (e.g., a dynamic periodicity for polling, and supporting more complex rate constructs).
Feel free to play with this proof of concept. Clicking the links above will open up a browser where you can see the payload directly. It is also very easy to consume (here is a sample in Python). The pricing server itself can also support other payload variants (more on this will be released in the future).
If you would like to see more rates or have ideas about the OpenADR payload itself, please use our contact form.