Important terms and abbreviations

The following terms are important for understanding the information in this document.

Demand Response (DR)
Changes in electric use by demand-side resources from their normal consumption patterns in response to changes in the price of electricity, or to incentive payments designed to induce lower electricity use at times of high wholesale market prices or when system reliability is jeopardized.
Demand Response Automation Server (DRAS)
The OpenADR-compliant demand response server that is owned by Akuacom.
ISO
Independent system operator.
RTO
Regional transmission organization.
Duration of Event
The length of an Emergency or Economic Demand Response Event, in hours.
Economic Demand Response Event
An event in which the demand response program sponsor directs response to an economic market opportunity, rather than for reliability or because of an emergency in the energy delivery system.
Emergency Event
An abnormal system condition (for example, system constraints and local capacity constraints) that requires automatic or immediate manual action to prevent or limit the failure of transmission facilities or generation supply that could adversely affect the reliability of the Bulk Electric System.
Emergency Demand Response Event
The period of time during which participants in a Demand Response Program must reduce load. The Emergency Demand Response Event is announced by the program sponsor in response to an Emergency Event declared by it or by another entity such as a utility or RTO/ISO. Demand Response Program sponsors, utilities and RTO/ISOs typically declare these emergency events.
Program
The demand response arrangements between retail or wholesale entities and their retail or wholesale customers. Examples of these arrangements include: critical peak pricing, critical peak pricing with load control, direct load control, interruptible load, load as a capacity resource, regulation, non-spinning reserves, spinning reserves, demand bidding and buy-back, time of use pricing, real-time pricing, system peak response transmission tariff, peak time rebate, and emergency demand response.
Participant
An organization that buys and sells under the rules and guidelines of a demand response program.
REST
Representational State Transfer - an architectural style used in web based communication.