Transactive energy uses markets to schedule the delivery of services over time. Each service is supplied by a node on a grid (or microgrid). Distributed energy resources and distributed energy resource aggregates can be such nodes. So can an entity that solely consumes power; consuming power at the right time is a market service just as power supply.
This post begins a series of ruminations based on conversations last spring that started in the OpenADR Alliance, and continued off-line with David Holmberg (NIST), Michel Kohanim (Universal Devices), and Gale Horst (EPRI). As usual, while people offer me wisdom, my mistakes are my own.
With the national Transactive Energy Conference coming up next week Portland, I am putting a series of posts together on the subject
Transactive Energy integration is based on Services
Transactive energy uses markets to schedule the delivery of services over time. Each service is supplied by a node on a grid (or microgrid). Distributed energy resources and distributed energy resource aggregates can be such nodes. So can an entity that solely consumes power; consuming power at the right time is a market service just as power supply.
- All conversations with nodes on the grid should be conversations with black boxes. How those nodes choose to organize themselves internally is no affair of the larger entity. It’s a black box.
- The purpose of each node / black box is to support the purposes of its owners / occupants / inhabitants, and not to support the things outside the black box.
- Substantially all interactions with the black box can be transactive resource negotiations, i.e., transactive energy.
- A node is its own operating environment. It may make sense for some nodes to organize some or part of their internal operations using transactive energy / transactive agents. A node box may choose to use an internal market to manage some or all of its energy use / generation / storage (/ pre-consumption (temporal shifting) / conversion / recycling)
- If a “device” inside a node box operates through market interactions, those interactions are with the internal market, not the external one. There is no direct market interaction with things / markets / prices external to the black box. (see point 1)
- Economic signals or availability from outside the node might influence the market, if any, inside the black box, but only as the market interface on the box relays that information. This may include markups / smoothing / discounts or any other means or mechanism that the owner of the black box chooses to use (or that the maker of the black box chooses to use so that the owner of the node will choose that black box).
And most important
- Entities outside the black box should not use the possible existence of an economic entity inside the box as an excuse to penetrate the veil of the black box