The growth of and reliance on renewable energy necessitate a multi-pronged approach to achieve grid reliability and economics. As they represent a notable portion of U.S. energy consumption, commercial buildings must play an active role in this effort. Conserving energy and responding to grid conditions through demand flexibility can be achieved through the integration of major building systems. Integration of plug and process loads with lighting and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems maximizes the effectiveness of integrated building energy management. In this research, we demonstrate the integration of smart outlets into a building automation system. We cover the installation process as well as the architecture required for smart outlets to communicate data to the building automation system and to receive commands back. After recording power measurements for one week as a baseline, we configured the building automation system to turn the smart outlets "on" and "off" according to a set schedule. This resulted in energy savings of 66% during 1 week on 25 plug loads. This work demonstrates that grid-interactive efficient buildings are achievable through building system integration.

Energy Resources Connect (DERConnect) is a National Science Foundation user facility to facilitate testing of distributed communication and controls algorithms at scale. DERConnect caters to industry and academic users in the electric power sector. DERConnect will provide testing capabilities of 1,000s of real DERs and millions of simulated DERs. DERConnect is designed to test intelligence on the grid edge by configuring the DERs in any communication architecture such as peer-to-peer, hierarchical, and centralized. DERConnect also enables cybersecurity test, social science tests, and advanced building controls. DERConnect will open to the research community in 2025. This paper describes DERConnect use cases and instructs potential future users of when and how to engage.

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