DERMS

Distributed Energy Resource Management System

What Is A Distributed Energy Resources Management System (DERMS)?

A distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) is a software platform used to manage distributed energy resources (DER). This might include rooftop solar paired with home and commercial behind-the-meter batteries, or a fleet of electric vehicles to deliver critical grid stability and services, and balance demand.

Evergen’s DERMS platform allows Network Operators and Energy Retailers to manage a fleet of DER in real time, big and small, to support grid operations and manage market exposure through an easy-to-use software platform.

Single pane visibility over a fleet of batteries with multiple user access

Aggregate, monitor, dispatch and control hundreds or thousands of DER with cloud based technology

Configurable dashboards, with the ability to drill down on each individual DER, including site level system state, power, voltage and frequency telemetry

Readiness for orchestration without the need to access customers’ premises and install any additional hardware

Used across customer, utility and market applications

Evergen DERMS provides single pane visibility over a fleet of batteries, with some of the top features being:

Weather sensitive generation forecasts

Forecast demand

Model asset limitations

Asset monitoring

Scheduling dispatch events

Settlement reporting

Household and load metrics

Site-level telemetry

(including voltage, power factor, frequency)

How DERMS works?

Evergen provides a fully fledged web-based central control portal for viewing all information about your fleet and scheduling controls.
Evergen also provides API-based programmatic access to DERMS information, for users who wish to conduct their own bespoke analyses, or feed data directly to in-house dashboards, data warehouses and reporting systems.

How can we harness DER to enhance grid operations?

When orchestrated as a fleet of devices in a VPP, DER can deliver a number of benefits to the grid, which include:

  • Absorbing excess solar generation to lessen the burden on low-voltage networks, especially on ‘minimum demand’ days when it is both sunny (high generation) but mild weather (low load).
  • Load shifting to lessen the impact of peak demand on the grid
  • Injecting and absorbing reactive power to assist in managing voltage in local areas of the grind
  • Providing contingency frequency control ancillary services (FCAS) to support the grid through periods to instability

How are DERMS and Virtual Power Plants platforms different?

Evergen’s DERMS platform provides a single-pane view for users to view the status of a fleet of DER, including aggregated fleet performance in addition to viewing individual DER within the fleet. When used for monitoring, forecasting, alerting and analysis in this way, DERMS provides crucial visibility to a variety of DERMS users, not all of whom are interested in VPP functionality. For example, system suppliers and installers could use DERMs to supercharge customer service, because it provides a single place to track how each customer’s system is performing.

A VPP is the active use of a fleet of DER in aggregate to achieve a particular goal. For example, a VPP could be used to perform arbitrage against wholesale market prices. DERMS provides a manual, ‘hands-on’ means for a VPP operator, such as an electricity retailer, network operator or market ancillary services provider, to perform active VPP operations.

Evergen also offers a range of automated VPP capabilities that are not driven by users of DERMS, but are provided as a service by Evergen to VPP operators after consultation. Automated capabilities include:

  • Automated optimisation of individual DER, with a wide range of a customisable parameters
  • Automated arbitrage against dynamic spot prices
  • Automatically-triggered dispatch of the VPP when spot price crosses a configurable threshold
  • Automatic contingency FCAS bidding, re-bidding and enablement

VPP operators can use DERMS to view the outcomes of these automated operations.