Comparing OpenADR and Transactive Control
Recently, we released a white paper covering (TC) Transactive Control and OpenADR Roles and Relationships. Rightly or wrongly, the market has begun to view TC and OpenADR as competitors. This paper takes a high-level look at the roles and interrelationships between TC, Transactive Energy and Transactional EMIX (TeMIX), and OpenADR and its source standards – Energy Interoperation (EI) and Energy Market Information Exchange (EMIX).
We start with a high level overview of each of the relevant technologies and standards, followed by an analysis of where they complement each other and where they overlap.
The graphic below summarizes the key relationships between each technology.
The arrow from the EMIX bubble to the Energy Interop bubble indicates that Energy Interop uses many of the EMIX schema elements; that the EMIX TeMIX power product profiles are related to the TeMIX profile defined in Energy Interop; and that OpenADR pulls in objects from the EMIX schema, as well. EMIX serves as an “input” to the other standards/profiles in the Energy Interop bubble.
We conclude that OpenADR may serve a complementary role in that Demand Response events could be used as follows within the context of TC:
- To signal load profile changes to responsive assets based on Transactive Control ACS signals
- To signal changes to local conditions as a local input to the TC node
- To functionally duplicate the TIS/TFS message exchange to provide a vehicle for migrating Transactive Control into legacy implementations.
Energy Interoperation has a greater degree of overlap with Transactive Control, supporting the same domains and nodal topology, but it still has some notable obstacles to duplicating the functionality contained in Transactive Control. Most notably, EI lacks an application logic framework. As previously noted, EI is really more of a “tool box” than an implementable standard, and it would require considerable effort for a group of interested stakeholders to transform a “Transactive Control” profile of EI to something approximating the current PNW-SGDP Transactive Control implementation. Nevertheless, leveraging Energy Interoperation might provide an accelerated path to national and international standardization of Transactive Control, as it has done for OpenADR 2.0. In conclusion, neither OpenADR nor Energy Interoperation provides the equivalent functionality that Transactive Control provides. However, both may prove useful in facilitating the adoption of Transactive Control.
For details, read the full report on Transactive Control (TC) and OpenADR Roles and Relationships .