Pair-Settled Grid Services Without Aggregator

Dispatch Mechanism

A pair-settled grid-service transaction proceeds in four signed steps. First, the utility (or peer counterparty) publishes a service request naming the service type (frequency regulation, demand response, peak shaving, voltage support, or reactive-power provision), the dispatch window, the quantity requested, the price terms, and a settlement-method identifier referencing the credentialed admissibility profile's grid-commitment surface specification. The request is signed by the requesting party. Second, the building electrical system, having evaluated the request against its current state of charge, current commitments to the building's own loads, and the bounds of its grid-commitment surface, signs a commitment that names the same service, window, quantity, and price, and references the building's credentialed identity. Third, during the dispatch window, the building electrical system executes the committed service: it modulates load, injects or absorbs energy, or modulates power factor in accordance with the commitment, while metering equipment records the executed quantity at the point of common coupling. Fourth, after the window closes, the building electrical system signs a settlement record naming the requested service, the executed quantity (as measured by the metering equipment), the price, and a digest of the metered telemetry; the utility countersigns. Settlement clears bilaterally against the prearranged price terms.

There is no aggregator in any of the four steps. There is no centralized clearinghouse that takes custody of either the commitment or the executed energy. The signed records, request, commitment, executed telemetry digest, and settlement, compose with the building's grid-commitment surface to produce an audit-grade attestation that the service was requested, committed, executed, and paid for, with each event timestamped and signed by the responsible party.

Operating Parameters

A commercial building constructed with substrate-mode storage at meaningful loading represents on the order of 50 to 500 kilowatt-hours of usable capacity at the building scale, with continuous power capability typically in the range of 25 to 250 kilowatts and short-duration peak capability up to two times the continuous rating. These figures place a single building above the minimum-bid thresholds of several wholesale capacity and ancillary-service products in U.S. markets, and well above the minimum thresholds of state-administered demand-response programs. The architecture is not limited to buildings of these sizes; smaller buildings may participate when local programs admit smaller bid sizes, and larger buildings (campuses, industrial facilities) may participate at correspondingly larger scales.

Dispatch latency is bounded by the signature-verification time of the request and commitment messages (typically under one millisecond on commodity hardware) plus the response time of the building electrical system itself. For frequency regulation, response times under four seconds are achievable; for demand response and peak shaving, response times under thirty seconds are typical. Settlement intervals follow the request specification: real-time markets settle in five-minute or fifteen-minute intervals; capacity products settle on hourly or daily windows; peak-shaving programs may settle monthly. The architecture imposes no protocol-level constraint on the settlement interval beyond the requirement that the metered telemetry digest cover the executed window.

Metering integrity is maintained by tamper-evident metering at the point of common coupling, signed by the meter's embedded credential and bound to the building identity through the credentialed admissibility profile. The signed telemetry digest carried in the settlement record admits the counterparty to verify, against the metered record, that the executed quantity matches the committed quantity within agreed tolerance.

Alternative Embodiments

The architecture admits embodiments in which the counterparty is the local distribution utility executing a tariff-defined demand-response program; in which the counterparty is a wholesale-market entity (an independent system operator or regional transmission organization) accepting bilateral bids from qualified distributed resources under a program analogous to FERC Order 2222 but without an intervening aggregator; in which the counterparty is a peer building or peer industrial facility executing a peer-to-peer energy exchange under a regional regulatory authorization; and in which the counterparty is a community-energy entity (a municipal utility, a cooperative, or a community-choice aggregator) executing a community-scale balancing program. In each embodiment the four signed steps are unchanged; only the identity and accreditation of the counterparty differ.

Embodiments differ in the price-discovery mechanism. In tariff-defined embodiments the price is fixed by published tariff. In bilateral-negotiated embodiments the price is set by a prior framework agreement between the building and the counterparty, with the per-event request specifying only quantity and window. In auction embodiments the building submits a bid into a counterparty-operated bilateral auction in which the counterparty selects winning bids and the four-step protocol executes against the winning price. The architecture is price-discovery-agnostic so long as the request and commitment carry consistent price terms.

Embodiments also differ in the granularity of the grid-commitment surface. A coarse-grained surface records aggregate building dispatchable capacity. A fine-grained surface records per-element capacity, admitting partial-building dispatch in which only a subset of substrate-mode-storage elements participates in a given service while the remainder serves the building's own loads.

Composition With Governed-Marketplace Primitive

The pair-settled grid-services architecture composes with the governed-marketplace primitive disclosed elsewhere in the parent provisional, which provides a bilateral-settlement architecture for governed transactions in which the parties and the rules of engagement are credentialed but the matching, execution, and settlement are bilateral rather than centrally cleared. Under that composition, the request-publication step uses the marketplace's governed broadcast channel; the commitment step uses the marketplace's signed-commitment format; and the settlement step uses the marketplace's bilateral-settlement record format. The grid-commitment surface of the building's credentialed admissibility profile carries the credentials required to participate in the marketplace, including the regulatory accreditations of the building (interconnection agreement, demand-response program enrollment) and the technical accreditations of its metering equipment.

The composition admits the building to participate simultaneously in multiple governed marketplaces, for example, a utility-administered demand-response marketplace, a regional ancillary-services marketplace, and a peer-to-peer community-energy marketplace, without integrating with multiple aggregator platforms. Each marketplace verifies the relevant surface on the building's profile; the building's electrical system arbitrates among simultaneously-admissible commitments according to its own scheduling logic.

Distinction Over Prior Art

PJM, ERCOT, NYISO, ISO-NE, MISO, CAISO and similar U.S. wholesale capacity and ancillary-services markets clear centrally: bids are submitted to the market operator, the operator runs a security-constrained economic dispatch or capacity auction, and settlement clears against the operator's published prices. Distributed resources participate only through aggregators that meet minimum-bid thresholds and offer-curve requirements. The pair-settled architecture disclosed here is distinct in that there is no central clearing operator; settlement is bilateral between the building and the counterparty, and the minimum-bid threshold is set by bilateral agreement rather than by a centralized market rule.

Aggregator-mediated distributed-energy-resource management systems (DERMS), products from Enel X, AutoGrid, Tesla Autobidder, Virtual Peaker, and similar vendors, bundle many small resources into a single market-facing entity, typically under a contract that assigns the aggregator commercial control over dispatch and that captures the operational data through the aggregator's platform. The architecture disclosed here is distinct in that the building electrical system, not an aggregator, signs the commitment and settles bilaterally; no platform-operator capture occurs and no aggregator margin is extracted.

FERC Order 2222 (issued 2020, with implementation ongoing across U.S. RTOs/ISOs) opens wholesale markets to distributed energy resource aggregations, but it remains aggregator-bound: the order admits aggregations to participate, not individual building-scale resources. The architecture disclosed here is distinct in that a single building-scale resource of sufficient capacity participates directly without aggregation, addressing the gap left by Order 2222 for individual buildings whose capacity exceeds program minimum-bid thresholds.

Disclosure Scope

This disclosure is intended to support claims directed to: a method of executing grid services between a building electrical system and a utility or peer counterparty by means of a four-step signed protocol comprising request, commitment, execution with metered telemetry, and bilateral settlement, in which no aggregator participates and in which the commitment and settlement records compose with a credentialed admissibility profile's grid-commitment surface; a system implementing the method, comprising a building electrical system with substrate-mode storage, tamper-evident metering at the point of common coupling, and a credentialed admissibility profile carrying a grid-commitment surface; embodiments in which the counterparty is a distribution utility, a wholesale-market entity, a peer building, or a community-energy entity; and composition embodiments in which the protocol executes within a governed marketplace's bilateral-settlement architecture. The scope contemplates frequency regulation, demand response, peak shaving, voltage support, and reactive-power provision as service types, and is not limited to a particular signature algorithm, settlement interval, or price-discovery mechanism.