Thematic brief — ADMS working group — August 2026

Scope note. This is a thematic brief, not a news digest. The DER Weekly Digest covers the distributed-energy news cycle week by week; this piece steps back to a structural question the weekly does not address, and deliberately draws on work that predates the 180-day news window. Item dates are given inline so you can see exactly how current each one is.

Virtual power plants get discussed as a market and policy story — FERC Order 2222, state VPP mandates, aggregator business models. That framing has produced a lot of programs and comparatively few dispatchable megawatts. The reason is not regulatory and it is not commercial. It is that a VPP only delivers when a distribution operator can see the resource, trust the telemetry, and dispatch it inside the same operational picture used to run the feeder. That is an ADMS problem, and it is the one part of the VPP stack nobody markets.

EPRI’s FLEXIT initiative is the industry’s most serious attempt to fix it. It is worth the ADMS group’s attention precisely because it is not a DER program — it is an integration-layer program.

🔌 What FLEXIT actually is

EPRI launched FLEXIT on 2025-08-29 (T&D World). Note the name is rendered two ways in the wild: trade coverage calls it the Flexible Integrated Technologies Initiative, while EPRI’s own product listing (product ID 3002031278) titles it Flexible Interoperable Technologies Initiative. Same initiative.

The scale is the part that should register:

More than two dozen utility members, representing ~45% of U.S. electricity customers — named participants include Ameren, Arizona Public Service, Baltimore Gas and Electric, Commonwealth Edison, Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, Exelon, LADWP, National Grid, PG&E, Southern Company and Xcel Energy.
More than 40 technology providers, spanning DER manufacturers, aggregators, and DERMS vendors — i.e. the companies on both sides of the interface are in the room together.
Built on open standards — IEEE 2030.5 and OpenADR — rather than a new protocol.

The working group’s scope is narrow and, for once, correctly chosen: harmonize service definitions, communication protocols, and cybersecurity requirements for the utility-to-aggregator interface. EPRI EVP Rob Chapman framed the urgency in terms of volume — DER devices are “expected to quadruple over the next five years,” making standardization “a foundational building block to efficiently scale these resources.”

FLEXIT did not appear from nowhere. It was announced alongside the Kraken-led Mercury initiative on 2024-11-27, with Mercury launching 2024-12-05 (Utility Dive). Mercury set out to do for DER communications what Bluetooth did for wireless; FLEXIT extends past protocol into what the services themselves mean. EPRI CEO Arshad Mansoor put the stakes plainly: “Without interoperability standards, VPPs cannot reach scalability, affordability, and reliability as soon or as efficiently as they will be needed.”

⚙️ Why this lands on the ADMS roadmap, not the DER roadmap

The prevailing architecture view — consistent across GE Vernova, EnergyHub and OATI — is that DERMS extends the ADMS rather than replacing it, sharing data and workflows instead of standing up a parallel control silo. A DERMS that dispatches DER without connecting to the broader distribution operational picture just relocates the coordination problem.

That has a direct procurement consequence. If the utility-to-aggregator interface is standardizing around IEEE 2030.5 and OpenADR service definitions, then the integration surface your ADMS must expose is becoming a specifiable requirement rather than a bespoke integration project per aggregator. Trade analysis of 2026 capital planning describes DERMS moving out of innovation budgets and into the capital plan alongside ADMS expansions, substation automation and AMI — which is exactly when interface standardization stops being academic.

The clearest near-term payoff is flexible interconnection — interconnecting DER as a managed, curtailable resource rather than building the traditional distribution upgrade. EPRI has a standing research line here: Characterizing the Value of Flexible Interconnection Capacity Solutions (FICS), product 3002022432, published June 2021. The mechanism matters for this group: the curtailment is executed through the ADMS/DERMS control path. Flexible interconnection is, in operational terms, an ADMS capability being sold under a DER label — and the capital it defers is distribution capital.

A caution on the numbers you’ll see quoted. Vendor summaries circulate a striking figure — roughly 60% additional hosting capacity for under 0.1% of energy curtailed, on the order of 20 hours a year — attributed to EPRI and NREL. We could not confirm it in EPRI’s own FICS document, which is a five-year-old eight-page summary containing no such figure. Treat it as vendor-reported until you have seen the underlying study. The qualitative case for flexible interconnection stands on its own; it does not need a number nobody in this group has verified.

🚩 Utility-Sector Relevance Flags

⚑ FLEXIT service definitions belong in your next ADMS/DERMS specification
Topic: Interoperability / procurement
Relevance: With 45% of U.S. customers represented by member utilities and 40+ vendors participating, FLEXIT output is likely to become the reference many vendors build to. Writing “conforms to FLEXIT service definitions and IEEE 2030.5” into an RFP is cheap now and expensive to retrofit later.
Action Signal: Engage

⚑ Flexible interconnection is an ADMS business case, not a DER one
Topic: Hosting capacity / capital deferral
Relevance: Curtailment-based interconnection defers distribution upgrades, and it is executed through the ADMS/DERMS control path — so the avoided-upgrade case may justify that investment on its own, independent of any VPP program revenue. The size of the prize is utility-specific and the circulating industry figures are unverified (above), so run it against your own constrained feeders.
Action Signal: Implement — but build the business case from your own hosting-capacity data, not from a vendor’s headline number

⚑ The aggregator interface is a cybersecurity boundary
Topic: Security / NERC CIP
Relevance: FLEXIT explicitly puts cybersecurity requirements in scope for the utility-to-aggregator interface. Anyone treating aggregator integration as a purely commercial arrangement is carrying an unexamined OT exposure into the control room.
Action Signal: Watch

⚑ IEEE 2030.5 version drift
Topic: Standards
Relevance: Version 1.2 is reported to become the mandated version in some jurisdictions from mid-2026. If accurate, conformance claims in vendor materials need a version qualifier, not just the standard number.
Action Signal: Watch — this item is single-sourced to vendor commentary and is not independently confirmed; verify before relying on it.

💬 The question for the group

For those of you carrying an ADMS roadmap right now: is your DER integration surface a specification or a series of one-off integrations? If it is the latter, FLEXIT is the argument for changing that while the standard is still being written rather than after your vendors have committed.

If your utility is one of the FLEXIT member utilities, the group would benefit from hearing what the working group is actually producing — reply to me directly at marc@utility.community and I will fold what I learn into a follow-up.

📌 Sources

EPRI, FLEXIT: Flexible Interoperable Technologies Initiative, product ID 3002031278 — epri.com
“EPRI Launches FLEXIT Initiative to Streamline DER Integration,” T&D World, 2025-08-29
“EPRI, Kraken advance DER interoperability standards to boost virtual power plants,” Utility Dive, 2024-11-27
EPRI, Characterizing the Value of Flexible Interconnection Capacity Solutions (FICS), product 3002022432, 2021-06-23
Architecture framing: GE Vernova (“ADMS vs. DERMS”), EnergyHub (grid-edge DERMS), OATI (DERMS and ADMS), SEPA (“End-to-End DERMS”)