Utilities throughout the country are looking for ways to unlock the value of Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) in a timely and effective manner to support the clean energy transition of the future. This session will outline National Grid’s agile approach to delivering its DERMS solution and how its customers are at the center of it. 

Samer Arafa will detail how and why National Grid chose to treat its DERMS delivery as a set of use cases, each with a unique delivery timeline. To avoid complicated scoping phases that typically slow these sorts of deployments, the company started several demonstration pilots to test complicated DERMS use cases such as flexible interconnections, focusing on solving essential and urgent customer needs first. Using Agile product development principles, the company's DERMS platform continues to evolve with each product having multiple iterations along the journey. 

By continuously monitoring and assessing changes in market conditions, policies, and growth trends, DERMS can be integrated more efficiently. Additionally, users can start offering new products and services to customers more quickly, deliver on improved DER customer satisfaction, realize broad system benefits for all customers, and increase reliability and power quality. 

This session will outline the lessons from taking on such a strategy, explain why it will become essential in the future for utilities to adopt similar methods, and discuss some of the challenges faced during the process.