The View from the Top of the Mountain: Building a Community of Practice with the GridWise Transactive Energy Framework
The topic of “transactive energy” has received growing attention over the past eighteen months. It has been a part, for example, of the NY Reforming the Energy Vision discussions and the topic of activities such as the National Institute of Standards Transactive Energy Challenge. The growing discussion stems from the realization that new approaches are needed to efficiently and reliably integrate growing numbers of distributed energy resources. In anticipation of the applicability of transactive energy systems to emerging challenges in Grid integration, the GridWise® Architecture Council (GWAC) began to build a community of practice in the area of transactive energy systems. Starting with a workshop on the topic of “transactive energy” in May 2011, the Council brought together about a dozen interested researchers and practitioners from utilities, vendors, labs and academia to compare their approaches and experience in order to create common definitions and understanding within this topical area. This was followed in March 2012 with a second workshop during which about twice as many attendees continued the discussion. At this workshop the need for both a roadmap and a document documenting the foundations of transactive energy, common vocabulary and other definitional aspects was recognized. These two workshops led to the Council organizing the First International Conference and Workshop on Transactive Energy which took place May 23 – 24, 2013 in Portland, Oregon. The Council has continued this work with additional topical workshops, the Second International Conference and Workshop on Transactive Energy held in December 2014, and is currently organizing the Third International Conference and Workshop on Transactive Energy Systems to be held in May 2016. This article provides a summary of the Council’s work to build the community of practice through creation of a Transactive Energy Framework document and related activities. In addition to seeing transactive energy discussions on the agenda for many conferences there are also group activities relating to transactive energy being coordinated by both NIST and SGIP with which GWAC is also involved. The NIST work aims to develop and enhance modeling and simulation tools and integration into modeling and simulation platforms for Transactive Energy evaluation, as well as demonstrate how different transactive approaches may be used to improve reliability and efficiency of the electric grid. This will be accomplished through development of a set of scenarios that can serve as ongoing reference points for modeling and simulation. It is also an example of helping to develop a Transactive Energy community. The ongoing Transactive Energy Coordination Group formed by SGIP reviews the progress and directions of transactive energy activities in related parts of the SGIP and collaborating organizations such as GWAC. One of its activities is assembling a core set of transactive energy use cases as representative of the transactive energy interface requirements. This will enable assessment of interoperability requirements for transactive energy applications and an analysis of standards coverage, gaps, and future needs.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 1257510
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-115726; TE1201000
- Journal Information:
- IEEE Power & Energy Magazine, Vol. 14, Issue 3; ISSN 1540-7977
- Publisher:
- IEEE
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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