In preparation for standards it aims to release, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association is planning to identify a set of building products next month that would benefit from improved product-to-product and product-to-building interoperability, according to executives from the association.
“We’re active in helping to develop technical solutions [for] removing barriers to interoperability,” Todd Sims, NEMA’s senior director of regulatory and industry affairs for the built environment, told Facilities Dive. “So, we’re developing standards, guidance and best practices to ensure these connected systems can all talk and be responsive to” one another.
NEMA’s been working for some time on improving the interoperability of building and infrastructure products. In 2024, it released a power export standard that enables electric vehicles to not only charge when plugged into a charging station but also discharge unused energy to return capacity to the grid.
“Everything is connected now,” Sims said. “The building itself needs to be able to connect and respond to EV charging, battery storage or the grid to receive demand-response signals to shift or shave load.”
The number and range of connected building and infrastructure products is extensive, so by identifying a first set of products, the organization is signaling which ones it believes would most benefit from interoperability standardization.
“We didn’t want to try to boil the ocean,” said Sims, “so we wrapped our arms around the size and scope of the problem.”
The plan is to release a first set of products for which the standards would be designed in mid-November, he said.
Then in 2027, NEMA will release interoperability standards based on this first set of products. “We have second- and third-order projects that we’ll pursue” later, he said.
“All of these systems have communication protocols,” Sims said. “Some of them are proprietary. Some of them are incompatible. We want to do what we can on the backend to flatten that so that both the building in and of itself is interoperable [with what’s within it] but it’s also interoperable with external forces, like the grid and EVs.”
In an industrial context, the standards could enable manufacturers with on-site power generation to participate in demand-response programs by automating the capacity at which their equipment operates based in part on electricity rates.
“Each individual industrial facility uses electricity differently at different times and in different ways,” Zack Valdez, NEMA senior director of regulatory and industry affairs for smart manufacturing and industrial policy, told Facilities Dive. “How do we identify … where you can adjust electricity consumption? If I can make 100 pencils, am I OK making 80 pencils [when rates are highest] or can I use controllable equipment when the peak demand is high and make 50 pencils?”
The key to adjusting equipment operations in that way is the connected, automated controls that manage the communications between the equipment, the building and the utility. “We have to connect and automate all of that together,” Valdez said, and then “enroll them in programs that allow them to dispatch and respond based on the metering that’s happening [and make sure] they’re compensated for their participation in these programs.”
The interoperability standards NEMA is working on can help lay the foundation for those kinds of automated operations by enabling the devices to talk to one another with as few hurdles as possible, Sims said. “The ability for these products and these systems … to talk to each other and be responsive” is key, he said.
