Transactive Energy Conference 2014

The GridWise® Architecture Council (GWAC) and Smart Grid Northwest with support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Portland General Electric and others convened The Second International Conference and Workshop on Transactive Energy on December 10-11 in Portland, Oregon, at the World Trade Center.

The meeting drew over 170 participants, including representatives of government, regulators, utilities, vendor organizations and academia. More than 30 presenters and panelists will provide attendees a wide range of ideas and perspectives on transactive energy systems.

Highlights of this year’s program included:

• Keynote speakers for this year’s conference included:
  • Dr. Carl Pechman of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis
  • Carl Imhoff from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
  • Aryeh Fishman of the Edison Electric Institute
  • Carl Zichella of the Natural Resources Defense Council
• GWAC-led foundational plenary session on continuing developments in transactive energy
• Plenary panel on regulatory, legislative and policy considerations for transactive energy
• A plenary panel on transactive energy overseas featuring panelists who describe the challenges facing electric power system modernization in their countries and discuss the potential role of transactive energy systems in addressing those challenges.
• 19 paper submissions by industry experts that will form the basis for lively discussions across four key topic areas:
  • Business and policy barriers
  • Customer engagement
  • Moving from demand response to transactive energy systems
  • Cyber-physical, security and risk management challenges

One of the main goals of the conference was to uncover first simple steps the power sector can take to move toward greater grid and power supply efficiencies. Key questions covered in workshop sessions included:

• How will passive customers transition to being actively engaged, what tools are necessary and what is the value proposition?
• What are the key business and policy barriers to transactive energy and what are the benefits to various stakeholders?
• What are the operational and business requirements to enable a shift from traditional demand response to continuous participation in a transactive fashion?
• How to address some of the technical and cyber-security risks in implementing a transactive energy system?

The complete proceedings (PDF 1,446KB) are available for download including the individual presentations.

These proceedings start with a summary of opening remarks and some background material on the topic of transactive energy and the previous GWAC workshops on this subject. The conference program is then presented with short summaries of each session and links to the presentations. The main body of the proceedings concludes with a framework progress summary, basically an overall recap of the conference, and discussion of next steps. Three appendices are included. Appendix A provides links to the read ahead and other reference materials for the conference and workshops. Appendix B has the agenda for the meeting. Appendix C has profiles for each of the conference or workshop speakers.

Proceedings containing the conference’s papers, presentations and outcomes are being developed and will be posted on this webpage. Those interested in downloading presentation sooner can visit the conference website and go to the session of interest (e.g., “Paper Session 1”) and you will find the presentations on the right-hand side of the page at the bottom of the list of links.