A variety of standard communication protocols are used today in the grid for a variety of purposes. The landscape of standard protocols is quickly evolving to meet the needs of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) integration, including demand response, in an interoperable way. This tutorial will provide background on which protocols are used for which applications – both traditionally and for DER, give a high level overview of how the leading standard protocols function and explain how some protocols complement each other or overlap in functionality for certain applications. Both highly adopted and emerging protocols will be covered including IEC 61850, DNP3 (IEEE 1815), IEEE 2030.5, and OpenADR. MESA, SunSpec and standards for data modeling and protocol mapping will be addressed as it relates to DER integration using standard protocols. Security features of standard protocols will also be covered. The challenges of DER communications will be covered in some depth and include use cases, communications requirements and evaluation of each protocol against the requirements.