Lawrence Berkeley Report Highlights Site Controls Demand Response Capabilities

Continued stress on the US electricity grid is prompting the industry to search for innovative ways to reduce usage during critical peak periods. Demand Response, whereby companies (including restaurants and retailers) voluntarily limit energy use for a specific time period, is growing in importance as a tool for ensuring grid stability. But most current Demand Response methods are manual or only semi-automated, which reduces their effectiveness and jeopardizes a comfortable shopping experience.

But according to a recent report prepared for the California Energy Commission by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Demand Response Research Center, automation is not only possible, but is being successfully demonstrated in practice. The report, "Automation of Capacity Bidding with an Aggregator Using Open Automated Demand Response," focuses on a successful test that automates the Capacity Bidding Process which is a reliability-based demand response program. The test involved San Diego Gas and Electric Company (SDG&E) and Site Controls.

In the new report, Site Controls is highlighted as a leading automated Demand Response aggregator, Listed below are a few excerpts from the report:

"While one of the aggregators was not able to identify any sites within their portfolio, the other (Site Controls) had fully automated all of their sites and so could participate in CBP (Capacity Bidding Program) with full automation." —Page 10

"Site Controls has already equipped their entire CBP portfolio to automated CBP. They report that they can achieve 4 MW of DR from these 8.4 MW of total demand with an approximate 50 percent shed for the one- to four-hour duration period." —Page 20

"Site Controls developed a software client within a short amount of time. Since their communication infrastructure is very similar to the one being used by DRAS and its clients, the software developer was able to develop their clients in a few days." —Page 21

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