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POW
ER
-GR
ID.C
OM
: M
AY
2013
YOUR POWER DELIVERY MEDIA SOURCE
24 Oncor’s AMI
34 Transformer Maintenance
38 Strategic Vegetation Management
T H E O F F I C I A L P U B L I C A T I O N O F
21 | May 2013www.power-grid.com
BY CHRISTOPHER IRWIN, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
the North
American Energy
Standards Board (NAESB) and others. By
the time PAP 10 was completed, NAESB
had created the standard on which Green
Button is now based (REQ 21, or ESPI).
A half dozen other standards now possess
similar DNA.
The Green Button has its origins in a
health data access initiative called the Blue
Button developed by the Department of
Jane and Robert Brown sat down side
by side, gazing at the computer screen.
“We spent more money on electricity
last month than we did on car payments,
and I want to find out why and what we
can do about it,” Jane said. “This portal is
handy, but I went on and put our usage
into a spreadsheet and correlated it to
activities I was able to pull from our com-
bined Outlook calendars and dropped it
into this presentation,” and cut.
TAKE TWOJane Brown set the groceries on the
counter. Her phone chimed with a new
email. Her Cabin Buddy app reported
that usage at the Browns’ little place in the
woods was up 40 percent from yesterday,
and for a big change such as that, Cabin
Buddy was set up to register an alert and
follow up with an email. She called the
Johnsons to ask if they could check if the
cabin door had blown open again.
A few miles away, Robert Brown walked
through the automatic doors of Big Box
Hardware. He was approached by a staffer
holding a tablet computer.
“Would you like a customized energy-
savings shopping list?” asked the staffer.
“All you need to do is give us one-time
access to your utility usage data. We’ll
delete the data as soon as we’re done gen-
erating your list.”
Robert politely declined.
“I’m way ahead of you,” he said.
“I got the same offer by email and
uploaded my file this morning.”
Robert looked at his phone, and there
were the estimated savings per month
and year next to each potential item.
What he really wanted were the supplies
to fix that door on the cabin, but a few
lightbulbs, an air filter and a water heater
blanket were easy enough to pick up, and
because he was already here ... and cut.
THE GREEN BUTTON INITIATIVEWhich scenario is realistic? Two years
ago, the best that most U.S. electricity
customers could hope for was the first
scenario. Now, some 16 million customers
across more than 20 utilities are closer to
scenario two, thanks to the Green Button.
The UCA International Users Group
(UCAIug) launched the OpenADE
(Automatic Data Exchange) Task Force,
which contributed some of the early
emphasis to making energy usage infor-
mation faithful to international standards
and more uniform. The effort accelerated
rapidly under Priority Action Plan 10 (PAP
10) of the then-newly created Smart Grid
Interoperability Panel (SGIP). The National
Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) considered a broad consensus on
energy usage information critical to the
success of many key technologies in the
smart grid and was joined in PAP 10 by
Christopher Irwin is the smart grid stan-dards and interoperability coordinator for the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability in the Department of Energy.
© CAN STOCK PHOTO INC. / SERMAX55
Green Button GROWS
May 2013 | 22 www.power-grid.com
© CAN STOCK PHOTO INC. / SERMAX55
Veterans Affairs to put health care data into
the hands of military veterans. All that was
left to do was to provide a spark, which
was delivered by former White House
Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra
during GridWeek 2011. He challenged
utilities and industry to create a Green
Button and shared the success he saw in
the health care sector.
California, Maryland and Texas com-
mitted, and each added millions of cus-
tomers. In April 2012, the Department
of Energy (DOE) launched the Apps for
Energy contest, which challenged software
developers to build within five weeks apps
that use Green Button data. More than 60
apps were submitted. Four months after
the first Green Button data was available
to customers, an ecosystem of utilities,
vendors, developers and customers was
emerging.
That the NAESB ESPI standard is
embraced so widely means apps devel-
oped for Green Button data are likely to
work with multiple utilities. This delivers
an equally clear victory for interoper-
ability. One more win stems from the
common heritage that the NAESB stan-
dard shares with Smart Energy Profile 2.0,
the IEC Common Information Model,
and a companion effort by the American
Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-
conditioning Engineers. The data will not
be identically composed and structured,
but this convergence coupled with coexis-
tence form the second victory for interop-
erability. The final win for interoperability
requires revisiting scenario two and con-
sidering interoperability from a human
Utilities Committed to Implementing Green Button
Companies Supporting or Pledging to Support Green Button Data
American Electric Power
Austin Energy
Baltimore Gas & Electric
Bangor Hydro Electric Co.
CenterPoint Energy
Central Maine Power
Chattanooga EPB
Commonwealth Edison
Connecticut Light and Power
Consolidated Edison
Efficiency Vermont
Glendale Water and Power
JEA
Kootenai Electric Cooperative Inc.
National Grid
NSTAR
Oncor
Pacific Power
PacifiCorp
PECO
Pepco Holdings Inc.
PG&E
PPL Electric Utilities
Public Service Co. of New Hampshire
Reliant
Rocky Mountain Power
Sawnee Electric Membership Corp.
SDG&E
Southern California Edison
The United Illuminating Co.
TNMP
TXU Energy
Virginia Dominion Power
Western Massachusetts Electric Co.
Yankee Gas
Aclara
Belkin
Building Energy Inc.
BuildingIQ
C3
Calico Energy Services
EcoDog
eMeter - A Siemens Business
EnergyAi
EnergySavvy
EnerNex
EnerNOC
FirstFuel
Gas and Power Technologies
Genability
High Energy Audits
Honest Buildings
HyperTek
iControl Networks
Itron
Lucid
Melon
OPower
Oracle
People Power
Performance Systems Development
PlotWatt
Power2Switch
Retroficiency
Schneider Electric
Silver Spring Networks
Simple Energy
Smart Grid Labs
Smart Utility Systems
Snugg Home
SunRun
Tendril
Wattvision
23 | May 2013www.power-grid.com
as another point of acceleration for Green
Button this year. NIST also continues to
provide leadership with a new users guide
this year to its NIST Green Button Software
Developers Kit.
Most of the more than 3,000 U.S. utilities
are publicly owned municipal providers
or member-owned
cooperatives. That’s
why it has been a
milestone to add
municipal and
cooperative utili-
ties to the commit-
ments list last year, notably Jacksonville
Electric Authority in Florida, the Electric
Power Board of Chattanooga in Tennessee,
the Kootenai Electric Cooperative in Idaho,
and the Sawnee Electric Membership Corp.
in Georgia. With their unique approaches
to software services and their ownership
models, cooperatives might provide a dra-
matic area for Green Button growth in the
coming year.
This year marks the first international
expansion of Green Button into Ontario,
Canada. With support from the White
House Office of Science and Technology,
the DOE and NIST, a collaboration involv-
ing the Ministry of Energy, utilities and the
private sector is embracing the standard
and the Green Button with substantial
parallels but under the sovereign con-
trol of Canada. Their program is ambi-
tious and aggressive, with Green Button
Download My Data piloting this year and a
shared framework for implementing Green
Button Connect My Data uniformly across
the participants. Their effort eventually
will add another 2 million customers to
the initiative and attract Canadian software
developers.
The success of the Green Button ini-
tiative is credible evidence we are on the
right path.
perspective. In this context, interoperabil-
ity means the ability to recognize the value
of something and how it might be useful
with little or no detailed knowledge—a
shallow interface.
Robert Brown does not have to know
much about his energy data to know that
clicking the Green Button on his utility
website will allow him to share that data
with entities he trusts. Jane Brown does
not have to know much about her energy
data to know Cabin Buddy will use Green
Button data to provide a valuable service.
The third victory for interoperability lies
between the consumer and the data, and
that is why it’s called the Green Button and
not the NAESB REQ 21 Button.
Green Button is growing, but it’s no
longer only about volume; it’s growing in
value, consistency, diversity and across
borders.
San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) was
among the first to implement Green Button
Download My Data, and it is among the
first to implement Green Button Connect
My Data. The difference is primarily auto-
mation but with corresponding increases
in privacy and security protections.
Download is the easiest to implement
and fits nearly every regulatory envi-
ronment that supports Internet access.
Connect is more involved from an infor-
mation technology perspective and might
require updates to regulatory policy but
simplifies access and authorization. In
either case, the value of doing so on
the utility side and the customer side
is increasing. Most utilities already have
dozens of needs to share consumption
data with contracted third parties, as well
as mandated data sharing for regulatory,
efficiency measurement and verification or
academic needs. Converging these feeds
to a single format in the case of Download
or a single data service in the case of
Connect is more efficient and easier to
manage. SDG&E reports high demand
for Connect requests from commercial
accounts and their service provider base,
although the service is still in pilot mode.
Chris King, global chief regulatory officer
of Siemens Smart Grid Solutions, referred
to the eMeter Meter
Data Management
System and said
utilities and ven-
dors can reduce the
number of custom
interfaces they need
to spend time and money on by migrat-
ing to Connect for within-enterprise data
exchange needs. For customers, the appli-
cations that serve commercial and residen-
tial customers continue to grow (although
Cabin Buddy does not exist just yet).
EnerNOC, the demand response com-
pany, recently announced its support of
Green Button data in some measurement
and verification applications.
Having a common standard is great but
does not guarantee that each implementa-
tion of the standard will result in identical
outputs, that is, the domain of a testing
and certification process. Developers have
encountered variations in Green Button
files from different implementing utilities,
which is normal at this point, and the uni-
formity is still light-years ahead of the pre-
cursor alternative, the Comma Separated
Value or CSV format (which served as
the basis for Jane’s actions in scenario
one). To meet the needs of utilities, indus-
try vendors and third-party vendors, the
UCAIug is creating test plans and a certi-
fication program for Download My Data
and Connect My Data, and the Electric
Power Research Institute is supporting
that effort with test case development and
additional tools. With the compounding
benefits of interoperability, this will serve
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