EnerNex is an active member of the OpenAMI Task Force on Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Demand Response (DR), and was instrumental in its creation.  The OpenAMI Task Force is a group of major vendors, utilities, researchers, and consultants from across the electrical metering industry whose goal is to establish an open, standard communications architecture for metering and demand response applications.  EnerNex is a key part of this effort, for three reasons:

• OpenAMI has agreed to use as a starting point the Draft Reference Design for Demand Response developed by EnerNex for the California Energy Commission. 
• The task force has also agreed to incorporate the Use Cases and methodology incorporated in the IntelliGrid Architecture, which EnerNex was heavily involved in developing.  Grant Gilchrist of EnerNex is helping to facilitate this Use Case work.
• Erich Gunther of EnerNex is on the board of directors of the UCA International Users Group and chairs the OpenDR subcommittee under whose auspices the OpenAMI task force has been formed.

OpenAMI has so far established a set of principles for evaluating AMI and DR systems, agreed upon a working set of domains and interfaces, and begun work on gathering requirements from the utility members on the functionality of AMI systems.  .

OpenAMI (www.openami.org) is an energy industry task force that, like the IntelliGrid Portal Project, is attempting to develop a communications reference design for the utility consumer environment. However, there is a difference in scope between the two projects.

A portal might be involved with a variety of utility operations, such as outage detection, customer management, distributed generation, market participation, and even such things as theft detection, entertainment, health monitoring, or security monitoring.

However, OpenAMI focuses on applying open standards to just two of a consumer portal’s possible functions: automatic metering and demand response. The acronym “AMI” refers to “Advanced Metering Infrastructure”. In the thinking of the OpenAMI task force, such an infrastructure might include consumer portals, which can range in physical form from very simple to more complex devices.

The OpenAMI task force was created primarily because several different jurisdictions (including Ontario) have lately begun the process of developing legislation requiring AMI and demand response. In particular, however, the impetus came from the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). The CEC and CPUC announced their intentions to begin drafting legislation starting in 2005, based on previous and current pilot projects and studies done in California since 2000.

The CPUC released a ruling in February 2004 from an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ), requiring utilities to supply the CPUC with proposed business cases by June of 2005, explaining how they would implement AMI. The ALJ ruling listed a number of specific features that the business cases would be required to address. These particularly included the ability to:

• Provide time-of-use (TOU) tariffs and critical peak pricing (CPP) to all consumers, with either fixed or variable notification to the consumer of when a critical peak price would be applie.
• Provide real-time pricing (RTP) for larger (>200kW) consumers.
• Provide all consumers with access to their personal hourly energy usage data at flexible intervals.
• Be "compatible" with such advanced features as outage management, theft detection, forecasting and load control.

This ruling, particularly the portion about applying AMI to all consumers, got the attention of the metering industry. It was clear that to meet such requirements would require a huge expenditure by the utilities – as high as two billion dollars by some estimates. It was also clear (to some, at least) that if these huge California AMI systems were deployed without some type of open communications standards, utilities could find themselves “locked-in” to one particular vendor for a long time, resulting in even higher costs.

Following up on a recommendation made in a CEC PIER consultant report (http://ciee.ucop.edu/dretd/ReferenceDesign.pdf), the OpenAMI task force was created with the purpose of developing such standards – or at least designating existing standards for AMI use. It operates under the auspices of Utility Communications Architecture International (www.ucainternational.org), a users’ group that was originally developed for promoting and testing the IEC 61850 substation communications standard. This was considered a good home for the group because of the tight time frame imposed by the regulatory schedule. Traditional standards bodies such as the IEEE and IEC were perceived to be very slow, and OpenAMI therefore did not want to be considered a standards body. OpenAMI members now include representatives of utilities, vendors, consultants, and regulators from many different jurisdictions.

The first task that OpenAMI addressed was to develop a set of principles on which all AMI systems should be evaluated. These included: shareability, ubiquity, integrity, ease-of-use, cost-effectiveness, standardization, openness, and security. The group voted to adopt a common definition of these principles based on a draft reference design previously developed for the CEC by EnerNex Corporation.

OpenAMI also produced an agreement, again based on the draft reference design, of the major actors in a working AMI system, and what the boundaries of such a system should be. This was an important step toward developing requirements and defining the necessary standardized interfaces between the actors.

However, OpenAMI encountered problems when it next tried to address a request from the CEC to comment on, and provide its interpretation of, the ALJ rulings. The main issues arose from the portions of the ruling stating the need for the AMI system to “be compatible with” and “capable of interfacing with” more advanced billing, demand response and load control features.

Some members interpreted this wording to mean that the AMI system itself should not provide these features, and that the business cases submitted by the California utilities should concentrate on having the AMI system provide the advanced metering tariffs only.

Other members argued that this was not truly AMI, but simply automatic meter reading (AMR), and that if the CPUC accepted business cases based on such an interpretation, California would end up with an infrastructure that was not open, could not expand to provide new features, and would require “forklift upgrades” when new technology was required because utilities would be “locked in” to a particular vendor.

Unable to agree on a definitive statement on the ALJ rulings, the OpenAMI task force decided to try to disconnect itself from the California regulatory process and not make a formal interpretation to the CPUC.

OpenAMI decided to instead continue developing a reference design based on a top-down approach. The group asked its utility members for lists of requirements, which were captured in brainstorming sessions and then organized into possible use case scenarios. As of August 2005, OpenAMI has agreed on a draft set of fifteen use cases, some of which do involve more advanced features like load control, outage management and theft detection. The group will next try to agree on the interfaces and steps in these scenarios, as a prelude to developing a requirements document. This methodology, taken from the IntelliGrid Architecture recommendations, was agreed to by the members early on.

The schedule for OpenAMI is an ambitious one. The final deliverables are intended to be the requirements document, the reference design, an information model, and interoperability guidelines, all by early 2006. However, the group is making progress with its new top-down approach, and there is good reason to expect success.

A bigger concern may be that without a definitive interpretation of the ALJ ruling by OpenAMI, utilities will be free to interpret it however they choose, and the future of AMI in California may suffer.