The traditional systems used for DER deployment and operation have historically led to inefficient processes, bad communication, bottlenecks and mismanaged assets, which ultimately hurts the effectiveness of DERs and all businesses involved. 

Here at Ecosuite we are interested in the future, not the past. We have been rapidly delivering solutions and working with partners to create tools that eliminate friction and make traditional approaches outdated. 

Ecosuite is a SaaS solution that brings forward these tools, including many that are open source, making them both commercially available and easy to leverage.  It’s a solution that busts data silos, banishes incompatibilities and amplifies collaboration.

This week, we’re exploring what has led us here and why we believe it is so important for the health of the DER ecosystem.  We will also explore the work we are doing to progress this further, forging a larger and stronger network of DER ecosystem partnerships to allow everyone to continue moving forward.

The Impetus for a Revised Vision

Although our vision for frictionless DER on the expanding grid had been present and foundational in much of our software development work for a long time, an important moment occurred for us in 2018.  Until this point in time, we knew that we had open source infrastructure that elegantly generified energy devices and that this was an advantage in many ways. We also knew that industry at a higher level, had begun to standardize on OpenADR as a solution to abstract the details of grid services via demand response programs. Hence at the level of the distribution system operator, where OpenADR could be used as an abstraction layer, no one really cared if there was an easier way to group, monitor and control individual heterogeneous DER devices.

Then along came the Plug and Play DER challenge with its focus on exploring and defining the concept of an Energy Services Interface (ESI).  This DoE funded Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium (GMLC) initiative was asking for demonstrations of what looked to us to be a request for OpenADR. But clearly, DOE must know about OpenADR and hence something more was afoot.   Consequently it was likely this request was seeking a deeper dive, exploring more nuanced facets within the concept of grid services.  This was something we knew we wanted to be part of, we also knew we had the tools and capabilities to deliver.

Ultimately we were one of three winning finalists of the SEPA Plug and Play DER Challenge.  During the 2019 North America Smart Energy Week show, our team demonstrated a prototype Energy Services Interface (ESI) working with a bidirectional Stabiliti 30C Power Control System combined with energy storage and PV. Ultimately this ESI structure painted energy management not as a network of pieces of equipment, but rather as a continuous stream of energy services, utilizing a service-oriented approach independent of the many different heterogeneous devices that might be providing the service.

Coming from an open source world, our software was already able to interface – concurrently – to many different pieces of equipment. The chief goal of our open platform, and the tools used, was interoperability.  Too many “devices” and pieces of gear were using proprietary software, all basically doing the same thing but in incompatible ways.  C&I portfolio managers were confronted with “information silos” – rigid structures holding up progress and innovation because let’s be honest – nobody out there had a homogeneous set of assets. So, our team had been on a mission, a mission that we call “silo busting”.

This mission ultimately was driven by the prioritization of a series of what if’s. We had the knowledge that solving them could open doors to truly accelerating DER deployment via the frictionless transaction of finances, data, and documentation.

• What if we had a DER management system where it didn’t matter what inverters you used?  
• What if it didn’t matter what year a piece of equipment was built, as long as it still physically functioned?
• What if a customer could easily grow their existing solar system, using new and different hardware?
• What if a customer wanted to keep their existing commercial solar system, but complement it with a bank of EV chargers? Or a battery storage system? Or make money from a demand response program?

Within Ecosuite, all you have to do to answer your What If’s is to… configure the relevant software service.

This is the difference between Ecosuite’s product and the products of many of our competitors – we understand and embrace the fact that Energy Services come in many different shapes and sizes, and that they will continue to be invented and modified.  Foundationally though, electrical energy is always the same, regardless of the device producing or consuming it, or the direction it’s flowing in.  It’s all defined generically by electrical engineering and laws of physics and that is the high level layer that software products and user experiences should be built around (i.e. watt-hours, watts, volts, amperes etc).

While it does indeed matter what inverter produced that energy, those aspects are going to change and permutate with industry trends. When we talk about energy services, that is inherently an expandable, extensible set; the world is not static – there will be new services needed! There will be new service providers entering the market. Therefore DER actors need software tools that can anticipate those changes and accommodate the latest technology and business models.

Looking Forward

However, beneath all of these grand visions, we remain rooted in our experience as pragmatic DER developers and software engineers working to solve a technical challenge. Instead of commiserating over inefficiencies and bottlenecks and condemning ourselves to the same fate as many others in the industry, we’ve decided to take action.

How do we achieve and embody the vision we’ve aspired to? We’ve established, and are continuing to build out our network of ecosystem partners. Partners who are aligned with our vision, and all of whom contribute significantly to both the progression of our industry, and to the continuous creation and growth of the solutions we’re offering to our customers.

In part 2 of this series titled “No Silos, No Friction”, we’re going to dive even further into these key partnerships, shining a light on their proficiencies, the unique value they bring to asset managers, developers O&M providers, financiers, grid operators, and data scientists, and how together the ecosystem can continue to break down silos and accelerate distributed energy.