OpenADR 3.0 2024 Hackathon: A Resounding Success! By Frank Sandoval, Principal, Palarito Technologies, LLC
This month, Pacific Gas and Electric hosted the OpenADR 3.0 Hackathon. Participants from pioneering companies, all worked successfully together to advance interoperability and resilient energy solutions. These companies included: PG&E, Tanenergy, LBL, Universal Devices, GridTracker, Buena Vista Learning, Quilt EPRI, Priicer/EKM Metering, Clark Communications, Kaluza, GridX, Evoke, the OpenADR Alliance and individual Nathan Ota.
This type of event offers significant benefits to participating members as well as to the quality of the Alliance certification program. Member companies can ensure that their products comply with the specification and interoperate with competitors’ products, as well as providing ongoing confidence of the readiness of their implementations.
OpenADR 3.0 provides simplicity at a time when technology is becoming more complex, making energy management easier and future-proofing energy systems. It offers a new alternative using modern web service designs that are easier to use than older message style exchange formats, while also providing added functionality.
As part of the event there were a number of use cases that were focused on including:
- Simple Resource Control: From light bulbs to cement factories, we're exploring seamless demand response.
- Multi-Site Energy Pricing: Innovating pricing models to optimize costs across multiple locations.
- Capacity Demand Management: Meeting large-scale energy needs with advanced capacity planning to mitigate grid congestion.
During the two-days participants broke into three different teams to develop their use case definitions, create events and reports, as well as implement Business Logic layer and VEN client code. Each team had the opportunity to present working demos of their use cases.
Key takeaways from the event emphasized the ease of use of the protocol. Teams all expressed no major issues writing BL and VEN clients to exchange events and reports with a VTN. Flexibility allowed teams to utilize the protocol to express a variety of business objectives. In addition, teams used a variety of software tools to quickly develop demos such as:
- Generative AI to produce code and tests
- Jupyter Notebooks to express logic and documentation
- Front-end packages to rapidly add web UIs
This hackathon isn’t just a challenge—it’s collaboration with brilliant minds shaping the future of energy! Together, we continue to set the stage for a smarter, more responsive energy future.