UL Solutions and MESA Standards Alliance Launch Service to Help Standardize Distributed Energy Resources

Northbrook, Illinois – Feb. 14, 2023 – UL Solutions, a global leader in applied safety science, and the Modular Energy System Architecture (MESA) Standards Alliance, a leader in standardizing communications between utility systems and distributed energy resources (DER), announced an alliance to provide testing and certification of the MESA-DER profile. This profile is proposed to be incorporated into the IEEE P1815.2 standard, Standard Profile for Communications with Distributed Energy Resources, using IEEE 1815, Standard for Electric Power Systems Communications – Distributed Network Protocol (DNP3). Utilities in the U.S. commonly utilize DNP3, a set of communications protocols used between components in process automation systems, for their supervisory control and data acquisition system (SCADA). The MESA-DER profile organizes DER data in a standard structure to allow many types of distributed energy installations to be easily integrated and understood by utility SCADA systems. Electric utilities or aggregators can utilize MESA-DER to significantly lower their integration and implementation costs for large energy storage systems, microgrids, solar inverter power plants and other grid-scale DER.