Q3 OpenEAC Alliance Quarterly Meeting Agenda
Open Source DER Grid Valuation
Hardly a day passes now where a public official, regulatory office, or advocacy group doesn’t issue a proclamation that data centers must pay their own way when it comes to the grid. Federal policy (IRAS in PJM), state policy (Virginia, New Jersey, Texas, New York, etc.), and local policy (too many to name) are increasingly pointing to distributed or community-based energy resource procurement as a prerequisite for data center approval.
The challenge that each one of these entities is grappling with is how to account for the value of a DER. The reason why this is so difficult is that DER value stems from a variety of inputs - system benefits, transmission grid benefits, distribution grid benefits, clean energy benefits, ratepayer benefits, and end customer benefits. Determining the value of a DER requires access unique and often bespoke data sets that each answer one piece of this equation.
If you wanted to be able to answer the question of what a DER would be worth at any given spot on the grid, you’d need to know the source and version of the data you were referencing for each of these components of the value stack. How you establish provenance is core to the acceptance of your number as a legitimate representation of the value being delivered. To date, DER valuation has been determined through regulatory proceedings by hand-picked consultants. It’s nearly impossible to know how they got their numbers, and as a result almost equally impossible to forecast what a DER might be worth in the future. For markets to work, we have to make this information available, accessible, reproducible, and auditable so that investment decisions around DERs aren’t hobbled by uncertainty.
WattCarbon has been working on solving the problem of provenance, starting with a foundational question - how do you map a DER to the grid? While this may not seem like an obvious place to start, in fact it reveals all of the different facets of the grid that make DERs actually valuable.
To give an example, let’s say you are interested in the problem of transmission constraints. How would you know where on the transmission grid to place a behind-the-meter battery? Since it doesn’t actually sit at a transmission substation, it’s impact would be indirect. But would you assign its impact to the nearest transmission substation? As the crow flies? Would you start by identifying the distribution substation that fed it first? Then the feeder line to the transmission substation? What if the transmission station was fed from two directions? Perhaps it’s better to assign to a transmission corridor! How do you define a transmission corridor? Where are the boundaries?
Let’s say you want to focus just on system level impacts. Is the right level of aggregation the balancing authority? Do you use the energy price of the LMP? The aggregate demand? Demand net of renewables? Do you also include congestion pricing so that you can look at individual price nodes or settlement zones?
If we’re going to place a DER on the grid we have to share an understanding of what we mean. This is an ontology and it’s the prerequisite to the development of robust demand-side energy markets for DERs that would allow a data center to credibly offset its grid impacts by making investments into local DERs.
This meeting of the OpenEAC Alliance will walk through a framework for how to establish locational grid provenance for DERs, mapping to the different value streams that a DER may contribute to. Our goal is to create an open-source framework that will allow any entity to reference this ontology, and even if different choices are made in terms of preferred reference values, at least this choice will be explicit so that the market can interpret the value accordingly.
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OpenEAC Alliance Quarterly Call
Thursday, August 20⋅8:00 – 8:50am
Every 3 months on the third Thursday
meet.google.com/zfs-xnjg-swr
(US) +1 413-752-1090 PIN: 108 833 115#