By Linda Stevens, Chief Strategy Officer, OATI
Over the past few years, distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS) has been the talk of the utility industry. Investor-owned utilities have invested in DERMS pilots and full-scale deployments to capture the reliability and economic value of the both front of the meter and behind the meter distributed energy resources (DERs) and demand response (DR) assets coming on the power grid, including solar, wind, smart thermostats, and battery energy storage assets.
But the growth of DERs, and an increasingly diverse power grid, are not challenges exclusive to IOUs. Generation and transmission cooperatives (G&Ts), along with their member distribution rural electric cooperatives, also face these dynamics, in addition to the complexity of collaborating and coordinating with their varying member utility companies. That’s why an increasing number of G&T cooperatives are turning to a DERMS solution designed for flexibility.
Cooperative DERMS: A growing trend
Out of the ~60 G&Ts serving rural communities in the U.S., 11 have adopted OATI DERMS, a number that expands to more than 220 rural electric cooperatives when including their member cooperatives, and that’s no coincidence.
OATI DERMS features the industry’s only true multi-tenant architecture catering to multi-company entities, native to the platform, allowing G&Ts to fully orchestrate centralized demand management programs in harmony with their distribution cooperatives, while being able to offer each their own secure and private slot of a shared software layer for their own DR/DER operations.
Moreover, G&T DERMS naturally require more interfaces that any other utility type simply because of their reach into their member cooperatives related infrastructure, e.g. AMI, CIS, MDM, etc. For example, one G&T utilizing OATI’s DERMS required the integration of more than 50 interfaces, which OATI’s in-house systems integration team implemented.
OATI’s robust in-house integration practice builds and maintains these critical interfaces, and provides integration health dashboards to quickly provide DERMS operators with real-time operational status of all integrations.
Another growing trend in rural America is the addition of large, grid-connected battery energy storage sites and microgrids for grid resiliency. OATI is helping G&Ts with a number of these sites with poignant local site control that seamlessly integrates with OATI DERMS, enabling visibility and control of assets by the G&T for broader grid benefit purposes when the assets are not being used locally. North Carolina Electric Cooperatives, for example, utilizes OATI DERMS and OATI GridMind®, an advanced microgrid and asset controller, to orchestrate multiple microgrid sites along with behind-the-meter and front-of-the-meter DERs.
Starting small with cooperative DERMS projects
While G&Ts may face a similar set of challenges as larger IOUs, financial constraints and member collaboration often require a more pragmatic approach to solving them. So, starting small with a single use case, proving it out, and adding more assets and programs over time helps with budgeting cycles, member buy-in, and stakeholder confidence.
The modularity of OATI DERMS, and a commitment to customer service and flexibility, meets G&Ts at their own stage of the DERMS journey. Hoosier Energy, for example, will initially deploy OATI’s DERMS to manage around 1,500 smart thermostats across the territories served by its member distribution co-ops. This program is anticipated to grow, and in the future, their use cases, asset types, and program may expand as well.
As a result, OATI now provides its DERMS solution to more G&Ts and their member distribution cooperatives than any other provider. The list now includes G&T’s such as East Kentucky Power Cooperative (16 co-ops), North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation (26 co-ops), PowerSouth Energy Cooperative (10 co-ops), Dairyland Power Cooperative (25 co-ops), East River Electric Power Cooperative (25 co-ops), Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association (39 co-ops), Southern Illinois Power Cooperative (7 member distribution cooperatives and a municipal utility), and Hoosier Energy (17 cooperatives).
Most recently, Georgia System Operations Corporation (GSOC) began its DERMS journey with an OATI DERMS platform. GSOC manages and monitors the electric generation and transmission for 38 of Georgia’s electric membership corporations, covering two-thirds of the state of Georgia and delivering affordable power for more than 4 million Georgians — every day, every hour.