April 30, 2014 Public Meeting: 

Physical Characterization of Smart and Grid-Connected 

Commercial and Residential Buildings End-Use Equipment and Appliances

Summary of Public Comment in the 

Discussion Periods Following Presentations

Presentation: DOE Vision and Objectives, Joe Hagerman, DOE/Building Technologies Office

Public Comment

Question (Q): What is the end result? A consensus on definitions and how you would do things to be 

used by standard organizations like AHRI or CEA? Are you looking at doing any rulemaking in DOE?

Answer (A): We don’t have the authority to apply grid services within our current rulemaking, but this is 

the same process we use for appliance standards development. That process is public and transparent..

Comment (C): It sounds like you’re taking best practices out of the rulemaking process even though this 

isn’t a rulemaking process, so think about how formal the process is. There isn’t much opportunity for 

indirect dialogue, open discussion and transparency. It would be better to include people in the whole 

process. 

A: There is more flexibility to give interim feedback through this process because there is no legal 

standard that’s going to be issued. It will be more iterative with stakeholders.

C: Along with interconnectedness, there are a lot of people here that are working on the same issues. 

What comes out of this group influences where those other conversations go (outside of DOE).

Q: This 100 MW example with ISO, there may be technology in the future that will help us accomplish 

this objective, but there are many layers of complexity. How is this effort going to be leveraged with the 

existing connected appliance effort with Energy Star? How will this fit in with those new specifications?

A: There is no straightforward answer right now. We are talking with EPA about this physical 

characterization work so they are aware of our effort in characterization. We don’t foresee this being 

adopted by Energy Star.

C: Building managers don’t care what they can do for the grid. Need to look at operations issues, and

there needs to be a link between what business process is supported by each of these things. Building 

operators are not here at this meeting, and they should be.

A: Today we are going to discuss values to different pools of potential users and we need to be clear on 

the values to building managers and operators. You can help enocurage the participation of building 

owners in this effort. We also believe that buildings can provide grid service benefits, which we’ve 

shown with some research projects, such as one involvingRooftop Unit Air Conditioners .

Presentation:Terminology and Definitions, Scott Whalen, PNNL

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How can these terms be better defined? What other terms are important to define?

Public Comments

C: “Smart” and “connected” seem like they overlap to a large degree, not sure the differentiation helps. 

Requirements in the smart and connected devices were essentially the same.

C: Need to get rid of the term “smart”. Use signal or demand responsive instead. 

C: It needs to be a customer friendly name so they see the value of it. Grid-connected might be hard for 

them to see the value in it. Customers make the ultimate decision. 

C: Don’t want the term smart to be used, as opposed to dumb. The grid or loads are dumb, in the sense 

of being mute. They are not communicating what they know about themselves.

C: Need clarity of technical definitions in this room.

C: The systems piece is lost from the focus on devices. The connected definition only used the word 

“receive”, are we considering “transmit” as well? Physical characterization – the systems are dependent 

on lots of changes so when we are defining physical characterization need to think about continuous 

characterization, not a snapshot in time. 

C: There are three things being conflated here in these definitions that are going to lead to confusion 

later. A technical definition would help. They are: 

1) Characterization of stand-alone autonomous devices 

2) Characterization of services provided – such as telling your current set point.

3) Communication – authentication and identification. From a device perspective there is a 

communication link that comes in. The authentication and identification of who is making the 

request seems to be tied to the definition of grid-connected or not grid-connected.

C: No issue with the word smart, that doesn’t always mean grid connected. As a building owner, I want 

to keep my daily energy below a daily threshold. Don’t care what grid thinks as long as I stay below 

budget. A different word would need to carry all the same meanings. 

C: The word smart is overused and worth dropping. Smart meters would not meet the defintion used 

here. If a device can provide services whose value is fully reflected in the meter and you don’t need a

direct connection between the device and the grid, do you need that? 

C: This effort is about defining characterizations for whatever your application is. The issue we are trying 

to tackle is getting definitions around what a piece of equipment would do. Focus on speed of response, 

what protocol devices can communicate over, etc. 

C: Add some nuance and urge us to step back from the discussion of what a device is. Don’t apply a 

degree of homogeneity that isn’t there for both small devices and 30 ton rooftop units. Think about 

clusters of applications and their capabilities and strategies and how we would approach them. 

C: Definition of word “device” – when using more abstract terms like systems, it becomes harder to map 

that to a physical substantiation or deployment. When you refer to services, you need to further 

differentiate into functions versus commodities, don’t call those the same thing. 

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Comment: It would be helpful to define what’s not covered by the term device. Analogous to what is 

not a covered product.

C: Back to grid-connected conversation – we are walking by the key attribute. Smart means self-aware 

about energy use over time, at the device level. Each device (or system) , needs to be self-aware of its 

energy use over time and needs a basis for negotiation. C: What is the definition of a building; the 

systems, subsystems, population in the building? There is concern about emphasizing connectivity. If 

everything is connected, do we have enough intelligence to do things that we want to do? Buildings are 

operated under satisfactory conditions, but if we are pushing the envelope, do we have the models, 

algorithms etc. to make those decisions?

C: We are trying to make the definitions useful and clear, as well as define what the practical 

applications are, but we need to separate those. Definitions need to be permissive enough to clarify 

how we would use things, but we don’t yet understand all the potential applications at this point.

C: In real life we need to separate definitions of devices and systems. RTUs would work through Building 

Automation Systems, not directly. With user input and a BAS, you don’t need to leave out building level 

control systems.

Presentation: End-User and Grid Services, Sean McDonald, Facilitator

C: With regard to the End-User Services slide, these examples are at very different levels. Operations 

and maintenance can cover a whole range of things. These are more categories than services. Grid 

services lines up with wholesale market products. It’s missing timing and avoiding demand thresholds. 

C: That is a really good point. We can take the grid (wholesale, transmission, distribution) and make it all 

integrated. Need to clarify those opportunities.

C: There is a false dichotomy here between “grid” and “building” services. What’s grid and what’s 

buildings? It may be more useful to differentiate between traditional and new grid services.

C: When you look at how you partition these services, from a pragmatic point of view you need to look 

at attributes you’d use to characterize the services – they will help define categories. 

Q: If anything, we want to tie grid services closer to loads. How do we make those services available 

even at lowest levels?

Q: If a building has dynamic pricing and a device may change its behavior to reflect that, does that count 

as a grid service if that is the only interaction? 

A: I would argue yes. 

Q: Since we only talk about end user, we need to define the provider to make it complete. Who is the 

provider and who is the end user? Define both sides.

C: The only success so far is OpenADR in terms of the digital world, and we’re at a very academic and 

technical level right now. There is nothing wrong with the list (slide 12) but it begs us to dig into detail 

that could crush us in the future. Power and energy over time are the two attributes that govern grid 

stability. It gets back to what you can actually build and how you can incentivize a customer. 

Recommend focusing on fewer things, to start, on slide 12. 

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C: Following up on services and end users comment, we get a lot of mileage in software by talking about 

service oriented architecture. The key is that the role you’re taking in an interaction is bound by your 

role in the transaction. By focusing on provider, you avoid a lot of confusion. 

C: The grid services on slide 12 can be provided by OpenADR.

C: Somebody is providing a service, defined many ways, but we want to allow disintermediation because 

we shouldn’t care who is providing the service. If one “end” of the system talks directly to the other 

end, that is very efficient.

C: There is some interest in not having disintermediation, but from a standards POV you should provide 

capability for either. Not everybody is indifferent to disintermediation. 

Presentation: Physical Characterization Framework, Rob Pratt (PNNL) and Ben Kroposki (NREL)

What should a physical characterization framework contain? What device actions should be 

characterized?

Public Comments

C: You characterized what it wasn’t (appliance/efficiency testing) so I’m confused on the time domain of 

the characterization. Need to separate loads by size – big and small. Are you asking for characterizations 

(by size or aggregate of load)? For large loads you need something that is real time responsive. For the 

mass market smaller devices, recommending going through the testing process 

C: I think the use of the term “devices” is constraining our thinking. “Devices” range in size from 100 

watts to a 100 kW chiller system. Need to separate these into useful buckets first.

C: Model need not distinguish between sizes of loads if done right. Can be simplified into “yes/no” 

provision of service. Complexity is a challenge – a lot of this is fractal in nature, the closer you look, the 

more complicated it gets. Looking at some aspects in terms of the dynamic response of what you might 

think of as low level responses. Focus on simple components or the transactive surface of systems. The 

large aggregators for demand response can’t do this for all the devices in their system. Probability 

distributions are extraordinarily useful. 

C: Keep the focus simple to make this useful, otherwise we’ll go down the slippery slope of developing a 

universal taxonomy. Look at the energy services interface.

C: If presumption is that we’re trying to characterize performance of devices in order to transact 

services, then we need to do the characterization within the context of the services. 

C: If we develop the conceptual model appropriately then we can define substantiations. What type of 

device it is might be less important than what service it represents. 

C: There is value in us building our components. Trying to say we’re all going to deliver the same service 

makes differentiation much harder. What does the smart grid need? What characteristic? 

C: Bring conversation to defining the physical characteristics based on services they need to provide. 

Need to characterize the devices, the systems that they’re operating in, and the systems in the physical 

environment. All those systems have sets of requirements. 

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C: We have no interest in controlling customers, but in general when it comes to DR, there are two types 

(direct load control and regulation services) and manufacturers need to keep in mind that it doesn’t 

make sense to build products that meet all grid services. Direct load control type generally uses 

proprietary signals. But OpenADR type of signal is a good option. With those technologies you need to 

give customer capability for how to respond to those types of signals. 

C: Back to mass market, what types of actions are performed? Are we worried about energy or real time 

power control? The types of responses that we need to get out of mass market devices is a request to 

use more power or less power. 

C: Yes, one could do that but do we want to? We can stop innovation by detailing the types of things 

they must be monitoring all the time. 

C: Hearing about devices reacting to a signal coming in, but they need to report out what they are 

capable of doing, even if just energy consumption – even more important to export information. 

C: That depends on the service it’s trying to provide. The more energy people use, the more money to 

process forecasting data. Don’t necessarily have to know how each resource (such as a toaster) is 

responding. 

C: Load serving entity might not care, but others do care. : It is a load within a system. You’re not going 

to change the way the toaster behaves, but there are systems within the facility that want to 

understand how that works. 

C: There is an entire class of rate-based pricing actions that don’t have any need to communicate back to 

the grid to be available. It may be beyond the scope of this, but don’t exclude an entire class (pricing 

based responses).

C: Some items are discretionary and some are necessary. Our primary purpose (for a refrigerator) is 

food safety. 

C: There are devices now that can incorporate things like pre-programmed time of use rates. How many 

data points you need depends on goals (use versus power), but want to emphasize how important 

getting the data sets coming out of devices are. 

C: We are talking about things that are never going to happen, such as communicating toasters and 

microwaves. Third party integrators will focus on bigger energy users when they come to commercial 

buildings – that’s where we should focus. How can we make that more practical?

Presentation: Device Testing at the Energy Systems Integration Facility, Ben Kroposki, NREL

Public Comments

None.

Presentation: Value, Benefits & Metrics, Sriram Somasundaram, PNNL 

Q: We are missing a point here about flexibility. To what degree does the use of these smart devices 

result in flexible loads that enable variable generation clean energy to actually delivery CO2 benefits?

C: Surprised not to see “reliability” as a key metric. It is more important than the number of devices. 

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Q: With regard to slide 24, “National Benefits”,, how would you determine customer acceptance of a 

device or a system? Trying to make that determination may stifle innovation. I bought it, doesn’t mean I 

accept it. 

C: CO2 benefits are not necessarily double counting because DR avoids peak plant usage so can enable 

CO2 reductions.

C: The whole issue around “smartness” raises red flags about costs, including who pays for the 

smartness, and whether we’re actually saving energy. When we talk about benefits we need to be 

talking about “net benefits”.

- Be sure we’re characterizing benefits, but also costs and “energy penalty” of some of the “smart 

appliances”.

- Another concern is from an energy efficiency perspective, what are the impacts on annual energy 

consumption on a household, business, device (any level)?

- Energy Star smart fridge is less efficient than one that is not smart. Troubling – how do we wrestle 

with those costs?

- There is an energy cost for devices to be connected, but we want to drive down consumption. There 

has been a lot of work to keep things disconnected when not in use, so as we drive up value, what 

are we doing to overall energy consumption?

Q: Are the metrics for DOE? For Manufacturers? 

A: They are for both. And for all participants.

C: Focus on metrics used to be how we measure success or progress. What’s the focus now? The metrics 

that you’re looking for are how you show progress in the future. Going forward, to help manufacturers, 

instead of dollars and CO2, you need to focus on something concrete like kWh. What percent of load of 

nominal baseline can be shifted an hour, 12 hours or 5-10 minutes?

Q: Question about feasibility of coming up with meaningful benefit numbers. For energy benefits we’re 

talking about utility grid. When you add connectivity to devices, it will principally be for functional and 

convenience purposes. Those functional benefits may drive changes in behavior of device. 

C: Total value is something that is a natural thing to put up there but it may not be quite as valuable as 

the subtotals or things like grid reliability. I disagree philosophically with Energy star because the math 

doesn’t work to break even. Being able to integrate loads via DR has a large systems-wide CO2 benefit –

reliability and additional renewables are enabled. Other performance metrics are important but don’t 

translate well with dollars.

C: The problem of reductionism is a critical one in terms of value. When you add up a lot of efficient 

things you often get an inefficient system. 

C: Consumers are the ones that need to make those choices. It’s a systems deployment issue. There are 

economic factors or interactions. People put energy conservation way down low on their list. 

C: On consumer acceptance, look at long term acceptance rates instead of points in time. 

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C: On CO2, it’s always been hard to quantify for grid management benefits. On consumer acceptance, 

things are purchased for convenience and comfort, not grid benefits. Good statistical field evaluations 

are needed to understand the benefits in terms of DR.

C: We like these metrics, care a lot about consumer benefits and achieving national efficiency and 

environmental benefits. Reliability is a key constraint. On CO2 we’ve spent time with an ISO to 

understand CO2 benefits of grid connected water heaters. Intermediate flexibility as a national metric. 

How will this influence future policy making for things like Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS). Over 

next 5, 10, 20 years decisions will be made on RPS, mix of generation, etc., and additional flexibility is 

one consideration.

C: It’s time to evaluate what we mean by energy efficiency – you will have to make tradeoffs between 

responsive devices and classic energy efficiency. We’ve focused traditionally on devices, and now we 

need to take a systems perspective. DR can provide good systems benefits in the service of CO2 

mitigation and sustainability.

Additional Public Comment Period: Open comment on pre-lunch topics

Value, Benefits and Metrics

C: What matters to the grid is if they can shift load in a reasonable amount of time or change demand in 

the current moment. Metrics around that determine success. 

C: Customers are not concerned with national grid unless you show a cost reduction. 

C: For manufacturers, what matters is how the customer benefits. Functionality is key. Just reporting 

data to the grid is not of value.

C: Figure out what big contributors to the load are, especially when you need to adjust things. 

C: Big picture issue is we are basically looking at standards for the future, the Cadillac level, two-way, 

real time communication between device and grid. Not the only kind of DR that is useful, also need

standards for one-way communication. Legacy systems (such as pager-based direct load control) have 

immense value. 

C: What are the limits of physical characterization?

C: Assume when we say load we’re talking about electric load. With a higher degree of load use and 

distribution, the ability to monitor or detect energy consumption might be valuable.

C: Who is the audience for this?

C: Who is the beneficiary? Need to look at home owner viewpoint. Is energy savings a possibility? 

Conservation Voltage Reduction (CVR) is one reason Dominion put on smart meters in Virginia. What are 

the CVR benefits home owners can get without spending a lot of money?

Physical Characterization Framework

C: The notion that someone not in a business connection with the facility understands the business 

enough to control some of their things is crazy. Application has to be useful for occupant, manager,

owner. Other things we want to accomplish need to be mediated through barrier.

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C: The discussion of controlling things that are life safety issues is disturbing. Codes and regulations 

understanding are prerequisite to being able to touch these systems. You can’t assume that laws will be 

obeyed. 

C: Need to define capabilities that devices might have and be specific about latencies, protocols used, 

etc. 

C: The characterization not only contains the notion of what can be achieved through the service, but 

also its availability at a certain time, which limits what can be done at a particular time. 

C: Would it be productive to take a straw-man example of one or two devices and say “this is what we’re 

looking for these devices to do”?

C: The dimensionality of this problem is very large, given that you have characteristics that are 

somewhat static, plus time of day, etc. 

End-User and Grid Services

C: Might help whole process to separate end user from grid services. Create a framework that is friendly 

for manufacturers but doesn’t interfere at all with their interactions with end users.

C: End-use versus grid services is a false dichotomy. Some devices can serve multiple challenges.

Terminology and Definitions

- “energy self-aware nodes” instead of “grid-connected devices”

- “energy aware” instead of “energy self-aware”

- “devices” should be “nodes”

- “smart” devices today don’t have much to do with implementation

Q: Shouldn’t the communication be two way?

A: Assumed that was covered by interactions with external devices.

C: Power distribution and functional context are two very different things. 

C: The benefit of talking back is the customer/end-user. We can get a lot of benefit without feedback to 

the grid. 

C: DOE can help by having smart manufacturers to report ID like a car VIN number; would be a good 

way to answer these questions.

C: Equipment should be capable of communicating two ways especially for part-load performance. With 

traditional DR, sending a signal back would be nice to get a response – then you know which 

transponders are working. 

C: With regard to devices broadcasting a specific identifier, like a VIN number, that might be fine for 

building internal systems, but the utility wouldn’t want that much information and detail – only want 

capabilities, and whether or not device responded. 

Services

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C: The services may vary, but it’s really where the request is coming from and who is making the 

request. If the services aren’t valued by the person buying the device then they won’t be bought. 

Actions

C: More focus on device actions, the more security risks and privacy violations there are. Actions 

increase the complexity to the operator because they have to know more devices and they assume 

more risk. Actions are a massive violation of security, reliability and privacy. 

C: Seems like it might be difficult to draw a difference between a service and an action – same thing for 

smart and connected device. Inclined to merge them and then have characteristics defined. 

C: These are not command and control actions driven externally – unwarranted assumption. 

Physical characterization 

C: Electrical power or load characterization instead of physical, or rather a “service characterization”.

Services correctly go beyond energy to include maintenance, O&M and others. Physical is the wrong 

term because that could include size and color.

Q: Could it be that what we’re actually looking at characterizing are surface sets?

C: Part of the sales pitch is that the purchaser gets information about the state of the device that is 

valuable in addition to energy information. Therefore, don’t want to limit it too much or ignore that 

value proposition. 

Key Stakeholders that DOE should engage

- EPA (working on standards for connected devices) 

- NIBS committee

- Facilities Maintenance and Operations Committee, National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) 

- Consortium for Energy Efficiency

o Manufacturers of HVAC and White Goods - 100 manufacturers that are represented by 

trade groups but we need direct feedback

- Response: Manufactuers are in this room – Johnson Controls, Ingersoll Rand, Honeywell, Carrier, 

Rheem, Emerson, Mitsubishi.

o You don’t need their input, what you need is their buy-in

- Consulting industry (no industry organization but they pick what goes in the buildings)

- Facility management companies that provide energy services

-

- Homebuilders

Reports, analyses, case studies that DOE should review and consider

- Public R&D agenda that helps with grid operations, etc. 

o Bpa.gov/ti for EE and transmission/transmission operations roadmaps

Other topics that DOE should consider related to smart and grid-connected appliances and equipment

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- As much openness as possible. There is a lot to discuss and a lot of people are supportive of this 

concept. Don’t adhere to a strict process drawn from the regulatory realm. 

- There is a business model problem. All costs sit with manufacturers and most entities in grid 

industries serve regional markets – there needs to be something in it for the manufacturers. 

- When thinking about the complexities, we might benefit from a consensus-based standards 

approach. That would provide clarity about what might be required.

- Who is driving this work? Who is the benefactor? We want to understand who is driving this – is it 

DOE, regulation, others?

- They’ve been working on this in Europe for many years. The novel approach that has worked is an 

interplay between thermal and electrical energy, working with ISO organization in Europe 

- To help identify gaps, a DOE developed compendium summarizing completed research in this area 

would be very valuable to all of us. A grid could be the utility grid or a microgrid. Definition of grid 

is changing so need to specify what is meant. 

- Haven’t discussed potential business model – what about the middle man, the service side. From 

the personal viewpoint of the residential owner, could this movement drive to develop new 

business model of people that serve as integrator. 

- Need to understand that there is currently “fuzziness” around this business model. Different 

business models might merge as this industry matures. 

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