The following principles have been used to help guide the development of CSIP. From a communications perspective
1. All smart inverters require communications to achieve their full value as distributed energy resources.
2. Establish a complete profile – To achieve complete interoperability a complete profile is required including a data model, messaging model, communication protocol and security. Without a complete profile specification it would be impossible to achieve communications interoperability without additional systems integration activities.
3. Leverage existing standards and models from both engineering (e.g., IEEE 1547) and communications (e.g., IEEE 2030.5) standards – The development of a new, stand-alone
standard would create additional burden on all parties and only serve to raise costs of both development and maintenance.
4. Assume that future revisions will be necessary – The use of DERs will continue to evolve and utilities and other DER stakeholders anticipate the emergence of additional use cases to the near future (5 years). But, attempting to anticipate all future use cases will add complexity to the specification without commensurate value. As such, extensibility of the specification through future revisions is required.
5. Eliminate optionality and keep to a single base specification – Optionality in the specification can serve to hinder interoperability when parties chose to implement.
6. Create a minimal specification – A simple interface serves to lower costs and improve quality.
7. Strictly focus on utility to DER owner/operators and aggregators. All other communications are out of scope from the perspective of CSIP.
8. Strictly focus on inverter management, such as monitoring, setting group changes and basic on/off functions, rather than explicit real-time control.
9. Implementation of the interface infers no proprietary advantage to any party – Smart Inverter communications between the utility and 3rd parties provides a critical, but non-differentiating service. As such, the costs to all parties should be minimized to drive proliferation of DER in California.
10. Provide alternate models of implementation around a single common standard to provide customer choice, 3rd party business models and utility needs.