Untangling Distributed Energy Resource Management: A Taxonomy for DERMS

Distributed energy resource (DER) owners and utilities are increasingly able to thoughtfully control the output or consumption of DERs for various applications, such as market participation, energy bill reduction, or distribution grid management. In recent years, developers have started to offer a software platform to manage these DER assets, called a distributed energy resource management system (DERMS). There have been numerous approaches toward DERMS in the past two decades or so, but it’s necessary to understand these different approaches and critically evaluate them. We propose a taxonomy for various DERMS approaches, and apply this taxonomy to example developers to identify characteristic models. We also identify breakaway trends for new DERMS varieties and how we expect platforms to evolve and converge.