Facility Interface to the Smart Grid

Homes, buildings and industrial facilities together represent nearly 100 % of the load on the electric grid. Beyond load, these facilities comprise a significant amount of electricity generation and thermal storage. These customer-owned load, storage and generation resources must be made responsive to needs of the electric grid in order to enable the Smart Grid. At issue is the best way to accomplish this. What is the proper relationship of the facility, whether home, commercial or industrial, to the grid? Is the facility a ―demand response‖ resource best controlled by the grid operations domain, or is it an autonomous entity that responds to signals from a grid-side service provider? This paper presents some governing principles and a conceptual architecture for a facility to Smart Grid interface based on these principles. Communications across this interface are examined in the context of the standardization work underway as part of the NIST Smart Grid effort priority