Approved Is Not Live: The Gap Between DERMS Pilots and ADMS Platforms

Three distribution-automation stories surfaced in the last several weeks, and none of them describe a finished system. A four-year-old virtual power plant negotiation in Michigan, a tariff-funded DERMS buildout in Georgia, and a subcontracted SCADA-ADMS rollout in the Indian Himalayas each show a different stage of the same transition: utilities trying to turn distribution feeders from passive wires into actively managed, DER-aware networks. The gap between "approved" and "operating" is where most of the real engineering work, and most of the uncertainty, actually sits.

A Pilot Four Years in the Making

Veridian at County Farm, a 170-home all-electric community under construction in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was built around rooftop solar, in-home batteries, geothermal heating and more than 1.3 MW of combined solar capacity, according to Utility Dive. Developer Thrive Collaborative designed the project to "operate as a resilient, self-balancing energy ecosystem," with energy-management technology from sonnen managing the batteries at the household level.

What the project does not yet have, after more than four years of negotiation, is a signed agreement with DTE Electric to treat those batteries as a dispatchable grid asset. Utility Dive reports the virtual power plant pilot remains unfinalized, even as sonnen's chairman and CEO, Blake Richetta, describes the batteries as capable of dispatching stored energy during peak demand, smoothing voltage fluctuations, and helping DTE defer distribution upgrades. A separate Michigan Public report, published September 17, 2026, describes the state commission approving a DTE pilot tied to the community, framed as DTE's first virtual power plant, with DTE studying how participants' batteries perform and dispatching excess electricity to the grid at intervals.

The two accounts are not identical on timing, and that is the point: the hardware and the household energy-management software have been in place for years, while the regulatory and commercial step of turning those batteries into a managed grid resource has moved far more slowly. DTE's broader pilot authority traces to an expedited-review workplan the Michigan Public Service Commission approved in Case No. U-21653, covering five focus areas including DER integration and grid reliability, per T&D World. That workplan exists specifically to shorten the regulatory lag a project like Veridian has run into.

Georgia Power Bakes DERMS Into the Tariff

Georgia Power has taken a different path, embedding a DERMS directly into its approved tariff structure rather than running a single-site pilot. Under a Georgia Public Service Commission stipulation stemming from its latest integrated resource plan, the utility is deploying a DERMS for "visibility, forecasting, control and optimization" of behind-the-meter distributed energy resources, coordinated with real-time grid operations, with spending projected across 2025 to 2028, according to the DER Weekly digest from Utility Community, which cites Georgia Power's own DER Customer Program tariff documentation.

The DERMS is paired with two customer-facing products rather than left as a back-office platform: a Resiliency Asset Service, under which Georgia Power designs, installs and operates a dispatchable resource behind a commercial or industrial customer's meter to meet that customer's own resiliency need, and a Demand Response Credit, where the customer takes a bill credit in exchange for letting Georgia Power dispatch that same asset during system reliability events. That structure makes the DERMS the thing reconciling two purposes for the same hardware, the customer's backup power and the utility's dispatchable capacity, inside one platform. How much system capacity Georgia Power actually realizes will depend on enrollment depth and how often the utility exercises its dispatch rights, a point the digest itself flags as unresolved.

India's Distribution Automation Takes a Different Shape

In Uttarakhand, the automation layer is being built on the wires side first. Sharika Enterprises secured a subcontract to deploy an integrated SCADA-ADMS platform, combining SCADA, distribution management and outage management functions, for Uttarakhand Power Corporation Limited's Ganga Corridor modernization project covering Dehradun, Haridwar and Rishikesh, according to Energetica India. The project runs under the central government's Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme and its "Make in India" push, with Sharika partnering with Brazil's Spin Engenharia on the underlying platform, lead contractor East India Udyog executing the broader scope, and the declared goals being real-time network visibility, faster fault identification and restoration, and better asset utilization.

There is no DERMS layer in this announcement, because the DER penetration that would justify one is not the immediate driver. The driver is that large sections of the network still lack basic SCADA visibility and automated outage management, the prerequisite layer a DERMS would eventually sit on top of. A Ministry of Power statement from August 10, 2026 puts RDSS-sanctioned SCADA/DMS projects at 394 towns nationally, alongside IT/OT systems such as ERP, GIS and unified billing, placing the Ganga Corridor contract inside a much larger, still-unfinished build-out rather than a one-off project.

What It Means for Utilities

Read together, these cases describe distribution automation maturing along separate tracks rather than converging on one. A U.S. utility with high DER penetration is finding that owning DERMS software is the easier half of the problem; negotiating who controls a customer-sited battery, and on what commercial terms, is the half that stalls for years even with willing partners. A utility further along the same path answers that commercial question up front, writing dispatch rights and compensation into a PSC-approved tariff before full deployment, so the DERMS has a defined job the day it goes live. A DISCOM building out SCADA-ADMS from a lower base is right to sequence basic feeder-level automation ahead of any DER-coordination layer, since there is little point optimizing distributed resources on a network that cannot yet see or isolate its own faults.

The practical lesson for capital and regulatory planning is sequencing: a DERMS without resolved commercial terms for the assets it coordinates can sit unfinalized for years regardless of how capable the technology is, while an ADMS without a DERMS remains a legitimate, often more urgent investment where feeder-level automation is still the gap. Neither path is more advanced than the other; they solve different bottlenecks.

Key takeaways

• DTE Electric's Veridian at County Farm virtual power plant pilot has been in negotiation for more than four years and remains unfinalized even though the homes, batteries and sonnen energy-management software have been operating for some time.
• Georgia Power is deploying a DERMS under a PSC-approved tariff stipulation, with spending projected across 2025–2028, paired with a Resiliency Asset Service and a Demand Response Credit that define how the coordinated assets get compensated.
• Uttarakhand Power Corporation Limited's Ganga Corridor project is building an integrated SCADA-ADMS platform under India's RDSS scheme, prioritizing basic feeder visibility and outage management ahead of any DER-coordination layer.
• Resolving commercial and regulatory terms for distributed assets can take longer than building or installing the DERMS software itself.
• Sequencing matters: a DERMS needs a defined commercial purpose to avoid stalling, while an ADMS can be a sound investment on its own where feeder-level visibility is still the primary gap.

Sources

• Ann Arbor electric community: Veridian, Thrive Collaborative, sonnen
• DTE works with net-zero Ann Arbor housing development to capture locally produced electricity
• DTE Electric Plan Approved to Expedite Innovation for Distributed Energy Resources, Grid Reliability
• DER Weekly Digest — Week Ending October 2, 2026
• Sharika Enterprises secures ADMS contract for UPCL's Ganga Corridor power modernisation project
• MoP issued press release on Discoms Digitalisation