The activation of power system services from small DER is a key to building electrical power systems with a high penetrations of renewable generation. Reliable, real-time and low-cost communication to a large number of DER units is required for controlling these resources, but difficult to achieve. This paper presents an alternative to traditional closed-loop control which has the potential to relax the real-time requirements on the communication link between supervisory controller and DER unit. Examples are given, and experimental results are provided as a proof-of-concept.