What is demand response?

Demand response, or automated demand response (ADR) involves utility companies responding to increased demand on the electricity distribution grid by requesting that consumers reduce load, as opposed to the traditional approach of engaging additional power stations to increase supply.

This can be more cost effective for the utility, more environmentally friendly, and an advantage to the consumer because they are typically paid for making this capacity available, in the same way a traditional power station would be.

What are the benefits?

Demand response has the potential to revolutionise electricity distribution by adding an intelligent link between the supply side (electricity generation) and the demand side (electricity consumption).

This can dramatically reduce the environmental impact associated with electricity generation, making it possible for greater adoption of renewable energy sources which are naturally intermittent. EpiSensor’s systems provide electrical data and remote control capability to power some of the world’s leading demand response solutions.

Key Product Features

• Deploy quickly, easily and at low cost
• 3G/4G communications for data back-haul
• Monitor and control a wide range of assets (0.1kW to 100MW)
• Run multiple programs on the same infrastructure (DR, FFR, etc.)
• Best-in-class accuracy and reliability
• Monitor pulse or analogue or Modbus outputs from meters, SCADA and BMS
• Interrupt-based data export for immediate notification of load shedding
• Full bi-directional control to remote sites using latest IoT platforms and technologies
• Enterprise class security from sensor to server
• Scale to thousands of sites easily
• More >>

Four reasons to work with EpiSensor on your Demand Response solution

Being able to deploy a reliable monitoring and control system more quickly and easily, with less disruption to your customers operations can increase competitive advantage.

EpiSensor’s systems provide an industrial-grade sensor data in open formats, sent securely and reliably back to your public or private cloud, but with the ease of installation and simplicity of a consumer-grade system.

Accuracy

It’s important to be able to trust the data that’s being produced in any demand response solution, especially as the data is often fed back directly to the electricity distribution grid and used to calculate payments to customers.

All EpiSensor electricity meters are individually factory calibrated to Class 1 accuracy and can monitor very large electrical loads in excess of 3000A per phase. We pair each meter with a set of CT’s or Rogowski Coils at time of manufacture, and calibrate the electronics using laboratory grade equipment.

Scalability

With EpiSensor Industrial IoT Platform, many ‘nodes’ or meters can be joined to each Industrial IoT Gateway, many Gateways can be deployed on each site, and many sites can report data back to a central server in real-time. EpiSensor Gateways are designed to work over low bandwidth / high latency cellular connections, and can push data to any server in efficient open formats like JSON and CSV, over efficient transport mechanisms like MQTT or HTTPS. You can easily scale solutions to 1000’s of sites, spread across multiple countries, all reporting data in real-time back to your own IT infrastructure.

Security

Security for a demand response system is paramount. We implement enterprise class security from ‘sensor to server’. Our ZigBee Pro wireless sensor network uses AES 128-bit encrypted communications, operating in the international license-free 2.4GHz ISM band. The key to a secure IoT architecture is simplicity: no EpiSensor software is required on the server-side, and data flows directly to your cloud infrastructure, not via EpiSensor servers. Each Industrial IoT Gateway can be configured with unique server access certificates, and will only send data when a secure connection to the server can be verified.

Ease of Installation

EpiSensor’s system has an enterprise-class feature set, but we have worked for many years to make the system as easy to install and maintain as possible. Our IoT platform can be commissioned by non-specialised personnel, without the need for specialised experience with traditional automation system technologies. All aspects of the system can be configured from an easy-to-use web interface on the Industrial IoT Gateway, or remotely via an API.