How to unite and coordinate DERs with DERMS

The inflection point

By Ali Ipakchi, Chief Visionary Officer, OATI, and John Engel, Assoc. VP of Digital Strategy & Strategic Innovation, OATI

Somewhere between your first battery energy storage pilot and your third distributed energy program, operational realities begin to hit. What began as a handful of manageable initiatives becomes a web of tools, vendors and integrations that no longer add up to a strategy. The individual programs still work, but they stall when it comes time to scale.

If your utility has a few edge programs running, maybe a distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) or two already in place, and a growing sense that adding the next DER program means adding the next silo, you’ve reached the point that separates utilities experimenting with DERs from utilities operating them as a coordinated fleet.

The challenge isn’t just operational complexity: modern grid needs have outgrown the traditional demand response model. Today’s DERMS must support peak load management and the full suite of grid reliability services a high-DER system requires: balancing energy, ancillary services, voltage support, feeder-level load management and real-time operational performance. That is why OATI DERMS unites disparate DER programs and integrates with the utility systems already in place.

Organizing a DER patchwork

No one sets out to build a fragmented DER operation, but it’s a common reality for utilities large and small.

Often, fragmentation is the result of the utility’s organizational model: different departments have their own budgets and procurement processes, so each acquires the tool that best fits its own use case at the time. That’s no indictment of the utility or its management. But as DER programs scale, the platforms that manage them must work in lockstep to keep data accurate, operations aligned and revenue maximized.

Fragmentation is a scaling wall

Fragmentation is tolerable at pilot scale. It becomes a wall the moment you try to grow.

The costs rarely show on any single program’s balance sheet, because they live in the seams between departments. Every new resource means another point integration to build and maintain. Telemetry and data standards differ from tool to tool, so nothing aggregates cleanly. The market team can’t bid distributed resources as one coordinated portfolio, which caps what they can earn. And in the control room, operators watch the distributed grid through several dashboards at once, assembling the picture in their heads because no system does it for them.

Individually, these are annoyances. Together, they are the reason DER programs plateau.