MESA Standards Alliance – new testing and certification service

UL Solutions is partnering with the Modular Energy System Architecture (MESA) Standards Alliance on testing and certification.

UL Solutions, the Illinois headquartered safety science organisation, will provide testing and certification of the MESA-DER profile on the integration of grid-scale distributed energy resources.

The MESA-DER profile organises distributed resource data in a standard structure to allow different types of distributed energy installations to be easily integrated and understood by utility SCADA systems.

These include large energy storage systems, microgrids, solar inverter power plants and other grid-scale resources.

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“The MESA Standards Alliance has worked toward creating open, non-proprietary specifications and information models that utilities, distributed resource developers and manufacturers alike can use to achieve interoperability for distributed energy,” says Scott Gibson, Energy Storage Programme Manager at Snohomish County Public Utility District and chair of the MESA Board of Directors.

“This milestone represents a significant step toward providing certainty to utilities that their projects can be integrated into their transmission and distribution systems efficiently. I encourage utilities across the country to take steps to ensure that their vendors are MESA-certified.”

The MESA-DER standard is supported by various US power utilities and is set to be incorporated into the IEEE international standards, IEEE P1815.2 Standard Profile for Communications with Distributed Energy Resources.

Utilities in the US commonly use the IEEE 1815 DNP3 distributed network protocol for their SCADA systems.

The new service is expected to help speed up the deployment of different types of renewable energy and energy storage equipment by helping to assure that new distributed energy systems can easily integrate into utility systems.