IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2019 - 56

table 2. Strategic activities.
Area

Activity

Community

Interoperability vision: Publicize the definitions, concepts, and architectural structures to support the
integration vision (for instance, layered decomposition coordination frameworks and ESI concepts for
DER facilities' external interface interactions).
Communities and ecosystems: Identify communities and ecosystems, and plan to engage them using the
road map methodology and tools for defining states, identifying gaps, and prioritizing steps forward.
Encourage an interoperability culture: Develop initial pro-forma procurement language to encourage
decision makers to fund interoperable investments. Make this readily available to the greater DER
community. Sponsor reference implementations with challenges, prizes, and projects that advance the
state of the art for interoperability. Recognize champions for interoperability in professional societies
and trade groups.
Marketing, communications, and education: Develop introductory material for tutorials on interoperability,
its benefits, and how to measure its qualities. Plan and support public presentations at conferences and
webinars and in publications (for example, technical journals and industry trade magazines).

Configuration and
evolution

Resource identification: Support unique identification management between all DER facilities and external
parties and all equipment within facilities. The support should include a path for legacy devices and
systems to be maintained.
Registration and discovery: Support registration and discovery mechanisms between all DER facilities and
external parties and all equipment within facilities. The support should include a path for legacy devices
and systems to be maintained. The mechanisms may initially be ecosystem dependent, with steps to
encourage a consolidation of approaches.
Scalability: Document requirements and demonstrate scalable approaches for DER integration and
coordinated operation.

Security and safety

Security policies: Work across ecosystems to develop best practices for security policies covering interface
specifications for the external and internal interactions associated with DER facilities. This includes methods
to quantify the risk associated with the compromise of individual DERs and the aggregate risk arising from
the compromise of large numbers of them.
Privacy policies: Work across ecosystems to develop best practices for privacy policies covering the
interface specifications that are external and internal to DER facilities.
Failure mode policies: Support electric system industry initiatives for the high penetration of DERs within
grid codes. Support best practices for safe-mode operation during failures in communications and for
DER facilities and equipment to honor grid service agreements. Move from DER-type dependencies to
generalized DER performance dependencies.

Operation and
performance

Operations and performance characteristics: Document the performance and reliability, error handling,
time-ordered dependency, time synchronization, and transaction and state management requirements.
These are important for DER facilities to qualify for specific grid services, in defining expectations, and
establishing equipment ratings and certifications.
Ratings and certification: Establish programs to rate and certify products to common operation and
performance specifications for supported grid services requirements across all DER integration ecosystems.

Organizational

Model interface specification framework: Define a template for interface specifications. The model should
cover the specification of how interoperability characteristics are addressed for each DER facility interaction
with external parties and internal equipment. This includes the following: the discovery/registration/
qualification process, negotiation process for a grid service, operations process, measurement and
verification, and settlement and reconciliation.
Grid services for interoperability: Establish or adopt a grid services reference model for DER participation
with electric system parties.

Informational
activities

DER performance characteristics: Define an information model of the performance characteristics required
to qualify for specific grid services.
Information modeling: Define the information models employed in the external and internal DER facility
interactions using well-recognized modeling language. The information models for different energy
technologies should converge to form a representation common to all types of technology to support
the ESI concept.

Technical

Consolidate protocols: For each ecosystem, develop plans to consolidate (deprecate/reduce) the number
of protocols used in new deployments. Ensure that technical communication network layers are defined
independently from informational and organizational characteristics.
Transition path: Develop transition paths for legacy protocol deployments within ecosystems.

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