Under a national (U.S.) smart grid effort, NEMA (National Electrical Manufacturers Association) and ASHRAE are jointly developing a standard that would provide a common basis for electrical energy consumers to describe, manage and communicate electrical energy consumptions and forecasts.

“NEMA and the members of their smart grid and high-performance buildings
councils see the creation of this standard as a strategic element in
driving development of a nation-wide smart electrical grid while
increasing energy efficiency, occupant productivity and
cost-effectiveness in safe secure buildings,” said Jim Lewis, manager,
High Performance Buildings, NEMA.

ASHRAE/NEMA 201P, “Facility Smart Grid Information Model”, will define
an object-oriented information model to enable appliances and control
systems in homes, buildings and industrial facilities to manage
electrical loads and generation sources in response to communication
with a smart electrical grid, and to communicate information about those
electrical loads to utility and other electrical service providers.

“Smart grids lead to smart meters lead to smart systems,” said ASRHAE
president Lynn G. Bellenger, P.Eng. “As the smart grid adjusts to suit
load distribution and maintain power quality and reliability, one of the
steps will be to communicate with building metering systems which, in
turn, will communicate with building systems and equipment. This ties
into demand-response control to reduce peak demand. One day in the
future, we likely will have real-time pricing with dramatic differences
in power costs dependent upon the time of day or grid load.”

The standard is part of ASHRAE’s supporting efforts for the Smart Grid
Interoperability Panel, a public-private partnership initiated by the
National Institute of Standards and Technology to speed development of
interoperability and cyber security standards for a nationwide smart
electric power grid.

A kickoff meeting to begin work on the proposed standard is taking place August 30-31 at ASHRAE headquarters in Atlanta, Ga.

The proposed standard will coordinate with work by the North American
Energy Standards Board to develop a basic energy usage data model
standard and create a facilities data model that provides additional
energy usage data elements for commercial and industrial buildings. This
includes lighting, heating, HVAC&R and other electrical loads.

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