Historically, progress occurs when many entities communicate, share information, and together create something that no one individual could do alone.  Moving beyond people to machines and systems, interoperability is the capability of systems or devices to provide and receive services and information between each other, and to use the services and information exchanged to operate effectively together in predictable ways without significant user intervention.

This paper introduces a new context for addressing reliability and resilience objectives using transactive energy systems (TESs). TESs use a combination of market-like economic and control techniques to improve grid efficiency and reliability. The GridWise® Architecture Council (GWAC) believes that both elements—efficiency and reliability—must be considered for practical development and application of TESs [1], [2]. While TESs have been developed for efficient economic operations, the application of TESs toward reliability and resilience objectives has not been so straightforward.

Smart buildings and the smart grid have many mutual advantages for improving their direct interaction through greater interoperability. As buildings and their subsystems become smarter, more network-aware, and better able to adapt in real time, opportunities to provide substantial benefit to smart grid operators multiply. This convergence, through the deployment of transactive energy systems, has great potential to help the grid balance generation with load, optimize generation, and defer infrastructure investment through peak load shaving.

This paper serves as an introduction to Grid Architecture, core concepts, and key techniques. There are additional concepts and techniques that are commonly used, like layered decomposition, logical energy networks, platform concept, etc. that are outside the scope of this introductory white paper. The motivation behind using an architecture-based approach and the role of Grid Architecture in industry transformation are explained in greater detail in the “Grid Architecture Primer” published by Smart Electric Power Alliance’s Grid Architecture Working Group.

Having a vision that others agree to support and work toward is highly desirable but hard to achieve. We seem to lack a common and shared understanding of the vision—or worse, multiple visions (vivid mental images or documented statements) with varying areas of focus and details: 

• some appear to be similar but have differing underlying goals and characteristics, or 

• some reflect differing viewpoints as to effects on various stakeholders.