SB1341-12-RP-0101 Green Button Initiative

In collaboration with other federal agencies including the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is supporting the Green Button Initiative, which has as its goal to provide electricity customers with ready access to their energy usage information in a consumer-friendly and computer-friendly format via a "Green Button" on their electric utility's or energy service provider's website. The concept of a Green Button-inspired by successes in getting Americans their own health care data, but developed in collaboration with the energy industry in a consensus process and adopted voluntarily-builds on policy objectives in the Administration's Blueprint For a Secure Energy Future and Policy Framework for the 21st Century Grid to ensure that consumers have timely access to their information that can help them better manage their energy use and take advantage of opportunities to help reduce their costs. The Green Button initiative will help promote innovation by supporting greater availability of energy usage information and facilitating web developers and other third party providers to create products and services to help customers to evaluate and better manage their energy use. The Green Button is based on standards for Energy Usage Information (EUI) that includes NAESB REQ18/WEQ19 and NAESB REQ21 (Energy Service Provider Interface (ESPI)), with additional information available through the NIST collaboration website http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-sggrid/bin/view/SmartGrid/GreenButtonInitiative and http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-sggrid/bin/view/SmartGrid/GreenButtonESPIEvolution and through sources such as www.greenbuttondata.org. Voluntary adoption of a consensus standard by utilities across the country allows utilities and their customers to benefit from the national-scale effort of software developers and other entrepreneurs to build and leverage a sufficiently large market to support the creation of innovative applications in an energy usage information ecosystem. A solicitation will be issued that involves technical work that expands this effort to foster wider implementation of the Green Button and underlying standards within the US and International community, including end users, equipment manufacturers, utilities, standards development organizations, and testing and certification facilities. The technical work would include activities such as coordinating and participating in relevant standards work (NAESB REQ18/WEQ19, NAESB REQ21, UCAIug OpenADE, Zigbee Alliance SEP2, ASHRAE 201P and IEC 61968/61970), augmenting the Green Button "development kit" to include modifications and new extensions to schemas coming out of standards development efforts, preparing technical presentations for outreach to other government agencies, providing technical support to new interested participants, providing technical support and outreach to Green Button implementations and implementation evaluations, evaluating information models with respect to the Green Button effort, and web development, maintenance and support for a Green Button webpage. A labor hour contract will be awarded for this requirement. The period of performance will be for a period of one year. The NAICS code for this requirement is 541511 with a small business size standard of $25.0 million. Contracting by Negotiation shall be utilized under the authority of FAR Part 15. This requirement is 100% set-aside for small business. The competitive Request for Proposal (RFP), amendments, and all questions and answers related to this procurement shall be made available via the Internet at HTTP://WWW.FEDBIZOPPS.GOV under RFP number SB1341-12-RP-0101. Potential offerors shall be responsible for obtaining this solicitation and related Amendments, if any, from www.fbo.gov after the solicitation has been posted. It is, and will continue to be, the responsibility of each potential Offeror to monitor www.fbo.gov for any amendments or other information related to the solicitation. The Government will not maintain a mailing list. Any communications regarding this acquisition must be made in writing and forwarded via email to contact@example.gov, and shall identify the solicitation number, company name, company address, as well as point of contact email address and phone number. Offerors must be actively registered in the Central Contractor Registration website at www.ccr.gov, in order to be eligible to receive a contract under this acquisition. NIST anticipates posting the solicitation approximately 15 days after the date of publication of this notice.