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DER is emerging as a turnkey solution, optimizing smart grid processes, and Utilities are looking for innovative ways to manage DERs effectively in real-time. Here's more to it.
FERMONT, CA: Distributed Energy Resource (DER) can revolutionize the power sector. DERs can help utilities avoid or defer expensive investment in infrastructure, improve resilience, boost reliability, and enable intermittent generation to be more integrated. DERs will enable a more versatile and efficient grid supplying energy, capacity, and ancillary services to distribution and bulk power systems. And yet, DERs still pose a significant threat to utilities and power systems despite their promise. The problem is how to incorporate DERs into day-to-day activities while integrating them into long-term investment strategies.
Along with integrating DERs, it is also essential to manage them in a way that benefits consumers, maximizes value, and enhances grid operations. Utilities need to reduce risks and gain greater value from current DERs when planning for a future with even higher DER rates. Distributed Energy Resources Management System (DERMS) is the software to meet this need.
The first response to DER's challenge is the introduction of a point solution, such as a Demand Response (DR) system. Implementing a Demand Response Management System (DRMS) is a more systematic solution. Instead, it can provide dispatchable DR to all services, resources, and groups of customers. For many forms of DR schemes, such systems work well, including behavioral DR, dynamic pricing, critical peak pricing, and pricing time-of-use.
Also, DRMS solutions are a step towards a DERMS' all-DER approach. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are the enabling technologies behind. A DERMS is a software-based solution for tracking, dispatching, and managing consumer, service, and market applications in real-time, grid-connected, and behind-the-meter DERs.
DERMS allows utilities to move beyond legacy DR programs to reach out and control a wider range of DER assets to provide a much wider grid service suite. Use cases for DERMS cover a variety of applications from behind the meter to transmission and distribution system services as well as industrial applications such as Virtual Power Plants (VPP), power contracts energy trading, and ancillary services.
