Demand side management in electricity grids such as a Smart Grid is becoming a key component of future smart grid that can help reduce peak load and adapt elastic demand to fluctuating generations. In the February 2006 report to the Congress, the Department of Energy (DOE) defined DR as “changes in the electric usage by end-use customers from their normal consumption patterns in response to change in the price of electricity over time, or to incentive payments designed to induce lower electricity use at times of high wholesale market prices or when system reliability is jeopardized” as described in “[1] Assessment of Demand Response and Advanced Metering, FERC report, September, 2007.”
In 2009, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) reported that the peak demand without any demand response is estimated to grow at an annual average growth rate of 1.7%, reaching 810 GW in 2009 and approximately 950 GW by 2019. This report also projected that existing DR programs could offset 4% of U.S. peak demand by year of 2019. Furthermore, if these programs were expanded to cover the entire country and a small number of price-responsive programs were added to mix, the impact would rise to 9% as described in “[2] A National Assessment of Demand Response Potential, FERC report, prepared by The Brattle Group, Freeman, Sullivan & Co and Global Energy Partners, LLC, June, 2009.”
It is advantageous to enable users to configure and monitor distributed loads through a Human Machine Interface (HMI). For security reasons it is desirable to separate the control logic for selectively shedding distributed loads in an electricity network in response to a Demand Response event and the Human Machine Interface (HMI) of distributed controllers. Systems and methods that provide a desirable Human Machine Interface (HMI) of distributed controllers and that are adequately and securely separated from the control logic are believed to currently not exist.
Accordingly, improved and novel methods and systems for Human Machine Interface (HMI) of distributed controllers in an electricity grid are required.