Customer-centric Demand Management using Load Aggregation and Data Analytics
A project to demonstrate demand response and load management at scale in the mass market (small commercial and residential) with enhanced customer engagement.
Electric Power Research Institute, Inc.
Recipient
Palo Alto, CA
Recipient Location
13th
Senate District
23rd
Assembly District
$3,889,234
Amount Spent
Completed
Project Status
Project Result
The project showed the current state of control for behind the meter (BTM) DERs from a practitioner's standpoint and technology opportunities. The work also laid out implementation challenges of integrating BTM DERs, both emerging and currently available, to dynamic rate signals. Community-level (aggregation of the homes in the study) results identified that a 'Duck Curve' induced by solar production is evident during the weekdays. This indicates users had not fully adopted the smart technologies into their lifestyles or were not responding well to the indicators of high-price events. Newly-instituted TOU high price periods in the evening coincide with significant increases in customer consumption. In general, the community's load shapes show a distribution of different consumption patterns compared to the code-based energy simulation for the climate zone.The community peaks are large coincident in the 5pm to 9pm timeframe.
The Issue
Load management in buildings has been lagging for decades due to lack of technology that can reliably provide reductions while gaining customer acceptance. As the State moves toward high penetration of customer-sited renewables that increase the management challenges for grid operators, it is imperative that load management for large numbers of small customers become mainstream. The technologies to manage loads are rapidly being developed and deployed, but relying on privately-developed proprietary solutions carries the risk of inconsistent performance as well as customer confusion and dissatisfaction.
Project Innovation
This project demonstrated how a large number of small loads, each impacted by and tuned to individual customer preferences can provide load management for both utilities and the ISO in California. The Recipient worked with an extensive spectrum of leading product providers covering all major distributed energy resources, such as Nest (thermostats), ThinkEco (plug loads), Honda, BMW (auto), EGuana (smart Inverter) and Ice Energy (Thermal Storage). A variety of price signals were tested, including the transactive signal developed by EPRI, Time-of-use, Critical Peak Pricing and Demand response rates.
Project Benefits
This project is using low cost off-the-shelf technologies to develop a platform that can manage customer end-use devices according to their preferences, minimize their energy costs, and adapt to evolving tariff structures. By making the task of automating multiple end-use devices easier, less costly, and less of an imposition on customers, the project has the potential to increase demand response participation, with consequent benefits to the electric grid.
Affordability
Benefits include statewide residential electricity savings of approximately 1040 GWh per year and small commercial savings of 53 GWh per year for a total of 1093 GWh per year, which translates to estimated statewide CO2e reductions of 397,631 metric tons per year. The total annual bill reduction is approximately $8.21M for commercial facilities and $185M for residential buildings.
Reliability
The project has the potential to increase adoption of demand response programs from the current 15 percent to as much as 60 percent. Managing air-conditioning loads, plug loads, and electric vehicles could provide up to 12 GW of capacity that could be shifted to maximize utilization of renewable resources, provide ramping and other ancillary services, and contribute to greater grid flexibility.
Key Project Members
Sunil Chhaya
Subrecipients
Clean Fuel Connection, Inc.
InTech Energy, Inc.
Chai Energy
Greenlots
Olivine Systems
Pedagogy World, Inc.
TBH-Residential System Integration
Match Partners
Electric Power Research Institute, Inc.
InTech Energy, Inc.
Pedagogy World, Inc.
