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OpenADR Alliance Announced; Will Work to Accelerate Adoption of OpenADR as Smart Grid Standard

October 27, 2010

The OpenADR Alliance has been formed to accelerate the adoption of the Open ADR communications specification as a standard for the smart grid. Supported by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Honeywell, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Southern California Edison, the Alliance is inviting other interested stakeholders to join them. The OpenADR communications specification originated at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and was funded by the California Energy Commission's Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program. Further development is taking place through the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Smart Grid-standards effort, along with organizations including: the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS),the Utilities Communications Architecture International User's Group (UCAIug), and the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB).

An excerpt of the OpenADR press release and website link follows:

"Leading Smart Grid industry organizations today announced the formation of the OpenADR Alliance, a nonprofit corporation created to foster the development, adoption and compliance of a Smart Grid standard known as Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR). Smart Grid standards for Automated Demand Response (Auto-DR) will ultimately lower the cost, improve the reliability and accelerate the speed of Auto-DR and Smart Grid implementations across the U.S.
"A critical component of the national Smart Grid initiative, Auto-DR encourages businesses and homeowners to reduce their electricity consumption at critical "peak demand" times, or in response to changes in market price, by automating message delivery from the utility directly to the customer. OpenADR standardizes a message format used for Auto-DR so that dynamic price and reliability signals can be delivered in a uniform and interoperable data model among utilities, Independent System Operator (ISOs) and customer's energy management and control systems."
...
"The OpenADR Alliance is open to all interested stakeholders sharing a common interest in facilitating and accelerating the use and adoption of the OpenADR standard for price- and reliability-based demand response."

Download the press release.