IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2018 - 106

in my view (continued from p. 108)
systems, geographical information systems, and other distribution control room
IT. Not every utility is achieving this "current daily" goal, and any utility faced with
a major outage taking days to restore will
fall behind.
Now add DERs to the mix. Today,
installing a PV system requires an interconnection request and approval
(and the delays in this process are major customer dissatisfaction points). But
what about when the customer brings
home a new EV with a charger? Or simply configures a state-of-the-art smart
thermostat that is capable of taking
DR signals? Today's way of handling
interconnections, new apparatus, and
databases simply won't fly. Customers are accustomed to online real-time
updates of all sorts of Internet-based
things: bank accounts, cable system
subscriptions, even (fingers crossed)
new Wi-Fi printers.

So the future "XMSs" (with the X
representing whatever management systems) is going to have to incorporate the
"self-announcement" of DERs. The DERs
will connect, possibly via the Internet, with
a utility IT system and basically say, "Hi,
here I am. I'm a model 7735 EV with
65-kWh batteries capable of charging at
200 kW and discharging at same. I live at
4545 Mercer Way, and my license plate is
3XYZ123. Please credit DER revenues
to my bank account #####." That utility
IT system is going to have to then update
databases for all the different XMSs and
ensure that things work smoothly. It will
probably have to go back to the EV and do
some tests to make sure things work.
You can imagine the same for PVs,
storage, whatever. I picked EVs to talk
about because that creates a different
problem-mobility. Today the charging
station providers manage the financial
end of that just like credit cards, affinity

programs, and a zillion other consumer
business processes are managed. But they
don't have to tell the utility anything at
all about what is happening at the charger
located on Walker St. at the 14th parking
meter down from the corner.
Utilities today live in a world where
database changes are manual or semimanual, interconnection requests take
weeks if not longer, there are relatively
low numbers of these, and integration
with aggregator databases is primarily
around metering and DR measurement
and validation, not control. Customers
have been spoiled by other industries
into thinking all this can, and should,
happen relatively painlessly and in relatively short time frames. There are
industry groups working on the business process "use cases" for DER integration and on the data definitions and
content. But are we ready with the IT
p&e
architectures to handle it?

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2018