Building distributed energy projects requires access to utility data that too often arrives in a format that’s difficult to decipher, search or manipulate. (See Death by a Million PDFs.)
It’s hard to identify the exact cause of the problem. Some say utilities lack the incentive to help distributed energy companies that they view as competitors; others point to the fact that utilities are experts in energy, not information technology, so they don’t necessarily know how to make customer data accessible.
So finding a universal solution hasn’t been easy. The good news is that some states are making headway.
It’s got to be click, click, click
A big step occurred in April when the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) finished the first phase of its Integrated Energy Data Resource (IEDR) project.
The E Source-driven initiative is designed to remove the problem DER providers face of going utility by utility to gather data. Instead, it creates a centralized repository with searchable information about electrical systems, distributed energy devices, rate plans, and customers. Beta users are now vetting a prototype.
By aggregating and standardizing data, NYSERDA hopes to increase renewable energy in the state, especially in disadvantaged communities. For DER developers, the platform should make siting and permitting projects faster and less expensive, according to E Source, a Boulder-based utility-focused consulting, research, and data science company. Locating ideal project sites could occur in just “a few keystrokes, compared to legacy manual approaches involving phone calls, emails, and thousands of pages of nonsearchable PDF content.”
Because of IEDR, New York is now rapidly surpassing California as the most friendly state when it comes to energy data, according to Michael Murray, president of Mission:data, a national coalition of technology companies that advocate for customer-friendly energy data access policies. (He also points to Texas as high on the list.)
New York’s program is novel, Murray said, in that it encompasses data from both electric and gas utilities, and it creates a central data hub rather than leaving the job to each investor-owned utility, as California does.
He said that the new platform will prove especially valuable as New York accesses $158 million from Home Energy Rebates, an $8.8 billion grant program offered through the federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). This is because the ‘Home’ program is different from many rebate offerings in that it is based on performance. The rebates are granted for proven energy savings, not for buying or installing a particular appliance.
It would be a nightmare, he said, to track this kind of incentive using customer bills formatted as PDFs.
“It’s got to be click, click, click. So this is the solution,” he said. “The money that they’ve spent on the IEDR is going to more than pay for itself, just in administrative efficiency.”
New England taking it a step further
Elsewhere in the Northeast, an even more ambitious data access initiative is underway. While New York is creating a centralized energy data hub across utilities, New England is looking at doing so across states.
“New England is actually on its way to building its own sort of regional multi-state platform, and that would be very novel,” Murray said.
Launched by the New Hampshire Governance Council, which was created by the state public utility commission, the project is applying for federal seed money to create a platform that would cover a swath of the ISO New England footprint.
The $29 million energy data hub would encompass 5.5 million electric meters and millions of gas customers in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, according to a concept paper by Unitil, a utility that serves parts of three New England states.
In citing the need for the automated data hub, Unitil says that DER developers now pay as much as $300,000 annually for screen-scraping programs to extract customer electric data from bill PDFs. Others install monitoring packages that duplicate utility advanced meters driving up costs by $15,000 or more per installation.
“The Hub removes significant barriers in data access experienced by solar developers, DR [demand response] aggregators, contractors, communities, and other third-party service providers. By removing this friction, the platform will inherently drive up clean-energy investment across the territories,” says the concept paper.
The utilities, which also include Eversource and Liberty Utilities, are seeking funding for the platform through the US Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP), another IRA program. They expect to roll out the platform over the next four years.
Green Button: Everything is not fine
As these new programs come into play, efforts are also underway to improve an earlier national attempt to make data access easier. Known as Green Button, the program was launched in 2012 by the federal government to ensure that homes and businesses have secure access to their own energy data in a standard format. About 50 utilities have signed on, according to the Department of Energy.
Unfortunately, the program doesn’t always work well, said Josh Keeling, a senior vice president at UtilityAPI, a California-based software company that is part of the E Source-led team working with NYSERDA on its centralized data hub. Others are Flux Tailor, TRC Companies, and HumanLogic.
Many states wrongly think, ‘We did Green Button when we rolled out AMI, everything’s fine.’ And I can tell you in excruciating detail that it is not fine,” Keeling said. “We see a lot of cases where people claim to be meeting standards that they’re not.”
UtilityAPI, which works with both utilities and independent providers, often finds itself helping customers maneuver Green Button or find an alternative to the program, he said.
Keeling said that the problem isn’t Green Button but how utilities implement it. “There are a lot of ways to do a bad job and still technically meet the letter of the law.”
“We see it happen in reliability and data quality, but also things like user experience,” he said. An authorization process can be so onerous, “it feels like you need to bring in counsel to share data with your HVAC contractor.”
Keeling also sees a lot of semantic confusion in the marketplace over the difference between two Green Button programs: Green Button Download My Data, which allows customers to download their energy usage data in a standardized format, and Green Button Connect My Data, where third-party providers can access user-authorized data.
A virtual power plant provider would use the Connect My Data platform, which Keeling describes as a kind of transfer probe, a standard for the exchange of data between the data custodian, such as a utility or a community choice aggregation, and a third party.
Scoring utility data
Utility implementation of Green Button varies because it is voluntary and no enforcement exists to ensure effectiveness, according to Mission:data’s Murray.
“Some are good, and their documentation makes sense and they’re transparent. And there are others that are horrific,” he said.
Mission:data has two projects underway aimed at improving Green Connect. The first is a map of all the utility participants and the data they provide.
“It will be a good overview of what’s available where,” he said.
The second project looks deeper and produces a scorecard that evaluates the effectiveness of each utility’s use of Green Button Connect.
“I’m trying to get to the real nut of what actually is available and what is just bluster and spin,” Murray said. Mission:data is starting in Canada and, later this year, plans to begin evaluating US utilities.
Meanwhile, everything is becoming more complicated
All of this is happening as the electric power industry grows in complexity with the rise of DERs and corresponding regulations and markets. Dynamic rates, virtual power plants, grid constraints, alternative tariffs, and interruptible or flexible interconnection agreements all increase the need for data, Keeling said.
Add to that FERC Order 2222, which will require utilities and DER providers to share data in a kind of exchange that does not exist today, Keeling said.
Getting the right people together in the room
Despite all of these complexities, the data problem is solvable. And it’s less about fixing technology and more about setting people in the right direction.
For one thing, there is a growing willingness by even “very conservative utilities” to share data, Keeling said, citing a report by Advanced Energy United and Grid Lab. DER companies, too, show a willingness to share; but both parties need it to be done in standardized, not “onesie-twosie” fashion, he said.
Some of that’s happening now within individual states. But that’s piecemeal and slow going. What’s needed, he said, is a national effort to bring the two industries together, a “coalition-of-the-willing,” perhaps through the federal government or national non-profit organizations.
“This is not a technology problem. Everybody has that data and we have the exchange protocols for sharing it. So this is really just a governance and coalition building issue,” he said. “I don’t think it’s as scary as people think. It’s more just getting the right parties at the table.”
That meeting can’t happen soon enough for DER providers who are still wading through PDF data files.
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