By Sasan Mokhtari, President & CEO, OATI
DERMS is the hottest tool for electric utilities, but the buzz has produced a murky market fraught with failed deployments, bloated costs and prolonged timelines. There’s a better way.
For all the energy industry has experienced with technology-hype bubbles, it seems to fall into a familiar trap: a new tool promises to revolutionize power grid operations, automate archaic workflows and, ultimately, provide savings for utilities and their customers.
In fly energy startups and household names alike, chasing a pay day from large utilities with splashy product brochures and promises of two-year development timelines. Sometimes that method pays off, at least for the vendor, despite rudimentary knowledge of power systems.
One of the worst kept secrets among utility executives concerns the bubble next in line to pop. Over the past few years, utilities around the world have poured millions into distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS) to meet the demands of the energy transition, many at the urging of their regulators. Since optics are key to any executives survival, the blue chips gobble up most of the demand, leaving what’s left for the hot upstarts in Silicon Valley.
But DERMS isn’t a solution a software developer can quickly spin up, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. Simply put: DERMS is complicated maybe the most complicated tool a utility will ever implement. It requires constant tinkering to master, as well as customers willing to ride along for that journey. As development timelines grow, so does the pressure to hook a whale, raising costs and pricing cash-strained utilities out of the latest technology wave.
DERMS is a murky market littered with half-baked solutions and stranded projects. Brave utilities have started to sound the alarm, though the majority will steer clear of any potential shrapnel. One investor-owned utility failed to successfully implement three (yes, three) different DERMS solutions before turning to OATI.
While OATI is often a utility’s first choice, its also no stranger to picking up the pieces from another vendors failed deployment of DERMS. So, what has gone so wrong with DERMS, and what can you do about it?
Developing a DERMS that works
Theodore Roosevelt once wrote that: Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty. He certainly wasn’t referring to software development, but you get the point.
Building a DERMS that works requires effort, pain, difficulty. It involves thousands of tentacles, interoperability with existing systems, vast diversity in energy resources far more than just interfacing with a thermostat, the core feature of most purported solutions today.
OATI delivered the first generation of OATI webSmartEnergy DERMS to Evergy more than 15 years ago. That’s 15 years of trial and error and customer growth. One of the main reasons countless DERMS deployments fail today is because no publicly-traded or venture-backed firm can justify a development timeline that could apply for a drivers license in five U.S. states. Instead, energy conglomerates acquire a startups tech, draft a press release and launch a new product under the banner of their trusted brand. Rinse and repeat.
But those startups lacked one key element to DERMS development, which is far more detrimental than hasty timelines. They chased an opportunity a clear market need without any foundational knowledge of power systems and what they require to maintain safety, security and reliability. Every stage of OATIs evolution over the past 30 years has been marked by a customer need, dedicating the worlds leading engineering talent to a problem and developing a solution. That’s why OATI solutions only run on an in-house cloud network; why the platform was developed with modularity from the start, allowing utilities to expand from virtual power plants to grid operations as needs change; and why multi-company functionality comes standard.
OATI builds DERMS that works because we get the grid. No investors breathing down our necks. Our goal has, and always will be, to exceed customer expectations by providing reliable and affordable tools purpose-built for power systems.
Grid Transformation: The story of Dairyland Power
The transformation to a smart utility begins and ends with visibility: situational awareness is paramount for maintaining power system reliability and providing high-quality customer service.
Dairyland Power Cooperative adopted OATI webSmartEnergy DERMS to enable broad system flexibility and wholesale market participation. Additionally, Dairyland Power used webSmartEnergy DERMS in conjunction with OATIs IoTSCADA Gateway to achieve dispatch capability of a battery energy storage system, allowing the battery energy storage system to be managed for new strategic objectives and access previously inaccessible value streams.
See more stories of Grid Transformation and how to start your journey here.