2 Guiding Principles

We have used the existing principles from CSIP relevant to their use in Australia:

1. All smart distributed energy resources require communications to achieve their full value as distributed energy resources. [CSIP 1]

2. Leverage existing standards and models from both engineering (e.g., AS/NZS 4777.2) 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. [CSIP 3]

3. Assume that future revisions will be necessary – The use of DER will continue to evolve and utilities and other DER stakeholders anticipate the emergence of additional use cases in both the immediate future and longer term . 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. [CSIP 4]

4. Create a minimal specification – A simple interface serves to lower costs and improve quality. [CSIP 6]

In addition to the considerations common to CSIP and the Australian context, the following principles have also been determined:

5. Focus on core, common use cases with significant immediate uptake that will create the greatest value across the Australian electricity sector.

6. Take a pragmatic approach to any implementation that requires additional data flows not explicitly covered within the guide.

The guide should describe a set of principles for implementing additional functionality. This will allow the communication interface to be extended under a framework that it is consistent with the approaches detailed in the guide, in turn providing a pathway that allows additional use cases to be incorporated in future versions of the guide once a need for standardisation has been established.

7. Where possible, the CSIP-AUS should align as closely as possible with existing implementations (e.g. CSIP), and be explicit about where changes or additions have been made.

8. The functionality described within this guide shall not, where possible, overlap with functionality that is covered by existing standards (e.g. AS/NZS 4777).

This guide will clearly differentiate between functionality that is covered within existing standards or regulations and that which is enabled through this guide.

This guide is to be read in conjunction with, and references, both CSIP and the IEEE 2030.5-2018 standard. This guide includes changes, clarifications or additions required to meet use cases identified in the Australian context. Over time, the version of CSIP and 2030.5 referenced in this guide will change, and it is expected that features of the profile described in this document may change to reflect this.

Where possible, backwards compatibility will be maintained; however in cases where this is in conflict with changes in CSIP or 2030.5, this will be clearly identified within the document.

For the remainder of this document, these will be referred to by the abbreviations listed.

The guide has been developed with the intention to be applied to residential and small commercial and industrial resources. While it is intended that this profile may be applied to the growing number of small-scale customers, the guide is not prescriptive in determining size limits. Australian networks have implemented (or are implementing) subsets of the described functionality on both connected and isolated networks, and in some instances are considering adoption for commercial (up to 1500 kW) generators5.

This guide covers the technical implementation of standards-based protocols to transmit information between two or more parties. In doing so, it specifically excludes (or only references where necessary) a number of considerations that should be determined in conjunction with the implementation of this guide:

The technical implementation of data collection and communication processes discussed in this guide does not confer any contractual requirements or mandates for this data to be collected and disseminated to any organisation. Commercial arrangements or policy mandates should be considered separately to this guide. Any contractual arrangements between organisations (commercial or otherwise) is outside the scope of this guide.

For the purposes of this guide, the collection, communication and storage of information is assumed to comply with all legislation and national privacy principles (including user consent and data privacy) relevant to these processes. The guide makes no determination as to the appropriate handling and use of this data - it is incumbent on the organisations involved to ensure their compliance.

Cybersecurity is a critical aspect of the implementation of secure protocols for communication between DER, aggregators and DNSPs. Similarly to CSIP and SEP2, this document does cover some aspects of a cybersecurity implementation, but this is not to be treated as a comprehensive guide to a complete cybersecurity implementation. In this guide, cybersecurity is referenced only in the context of the implementation of secure protocols within the applicable standards, between the parties specified.

Other communication links (for example, between an aggregator and a device) are not covered in this guide.

Australia’s Distributed Energy Integration Program, a collaboration of market and industry stakeholder peak bodies, along with the Commonwealth Government is considering how best to advance minimum levels of cyber security capability across the DER ecosystem.

Until this work is progressed and finalised it is expected that parties involved in the DER ecosystem will determine and implement cyber security practices across all their devices, communication interfaces and systems, where such requirements are not stipulated in this guide.

A test procedure will be developed and made available to assist in the development and testing of compliant server and client implementations. These resources do not replace commercial testing and compliance suites, but are intended to assist in the development of systems in adherence with this guide.

Systems communicating using the SEP2 protocol are expected to comply with the standard to the extent possible given the required functionality for a particular use case. Certification is not required for organisations to use and implement against this guide. Certification approaches and requirements will be defined by a suitable certification body in the future.

The validation of the physical response of devices to any signal from the utility server is not considered in this version of the guide. The testing and conformance of devices will be developed in a subsequent version, potentially by reference to standards that deliver such requirements. In the interim, DNSPs may provide alternate requirements to validate the physical device response prior to, or during their operation on the network.

Notes on interpreting this document

From this point forward, this document is to be read as a companion piece to the Common Smart Inverter Profile, with differences in application described in this document. The following sections follow the numbering convention of CSIP, and highlight only deviations with CSIP. Omitted sections are assumed to be in accordance with CSIP.

Any example references to other engineering standards are to be read as references to Australian equivalents (particularly AS/NZS 4777.2 2015 for inverter response). Any references to itself (CSIP) are to be treated as references to the Australian version (CSIP-AUS). For clarity, deviations from CSIP are shown in bold.

Reference	Abbreviation
IEEE Std 2030.5:2018 (Revision of IEEE Std 2030.5-2013)	SEP2
Common Smart Inverter Profile v2.003-02-2018	CSIP
AS/NZS 4777.2:2020	AS/NZS 4777
AS/NZS 4755 (all parts)	AS/NZS 4755