Today the Battery Innovation Center (BIC), located in Indiana announced that it has formed a strategic partnership with the MESA Standards Alliance and intends to be an interoperability and testing center that supports the open standards efforts of the alliance. This announcement comes at a great time for the industry. As distributed energy resources and the technology to manage and integrate them proliferate on the grid, there is a growing need for physical locations where the industry and its customers can meet up, plug things together and ensure they work as designed. In fact, the need for this kind of resource was an explicit theme at Greentech Media’s recent Grid Edge Live conference down in San Diego.
BIC seems well positioned to move in this direction. It’s geographically well located in the center of the country so no one has to change too many time zones to get there. Its location next to the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane where the Navy tests all of its advanced battery systems means it benefits from a community that is steeped in advanced energy storage technology. The facility boasts a number of specialized capabilities including an 8MW net metered connection to the local electric grid and a host of testing equipment. It is also supported by established industry players such as Duke Energy and Underwriters Laboratories.
This is also well timed on the MESA side. The Alliance is eighteen months into its work and approaching its first anniversary as a formal, industry-driven organization. The technical working groups have been busy pushing ahead its two main standards definition efforts: MESA-Device which is a joint effort with SunSpec and specifies the software interfaces between components inside of an energy storage system and MESA-ESS which is based on DNP3 and specifies how an ESS talks to a SCADA, DMS or other grid control system. MESA-Device’s first draft specification is already available for public review and comment so it will not likely be long before MESA participants will be looking for a place to have a “plugfest” and verify that their products interoperate with other MESA compliant products.
Finally, the fact that the BIC is not owned and operated by any one industry supplier gives it more credibility and value as a place to host integration of different technologies. We look forward to working with the folks at the BIC and hope there will be more centers like them around the country and world over time.
The post Interoperability Done Right: First MESA Test Center appeared first on 1Energy Systems.