Fund a project to bring clean energy and grid services to the building
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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) provides $65 million for “connected communities,” expanding projects to bring clean energy and grid services to new buildings.
U.S. households and commercial buildings consume about two-fifths of the country's total energy and three-quarters of its total electricity, and account for the majority of peak electricity demand, which creates high costs. charges for power generation and grid infrastructure. Each of these statistics points to different solutions for reducing the carbon footprint of buildings.
See more: What is solar energy?
Switching your heating system from fossil fuels to electricity can directly cut emissions. Using more efficient materials, equipment and building designs can cut electricity consumption. And managing electricity usage to suit grid needs can help utilities control the most expensive part of decarbonizing their systems – reducing their dependence on energy sources. The amount of fossils can be adjusted.
The $65 million in U.S. Department of Energy funding for “connected communities” projects announced last week focuses on all three of these solutions. It builds on scores of projects across the country that incorporate the use of highly efficient, electrified and distributed energy sources such as rooftop or community solar, batteries storage, thermal energy storage and electric vehicle charging.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette emphasized the need for “proactive” buildings whose energy consumption matches grid demand as he announced the funding at an event in Charlotte, North Carolina hosted by the U.S. Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and utility Duke Energy. “As the sophistication of our homes and workplaces advances, they will have the opportunity to play an even greater role.”
Brouillette visited a high-efficiency, all-electric home built by Meritage Homes that features insulation, thermal storage, battery storage, a highly efficient solar-powered heat pump along with devices that can change energy usage based on commands from the homeowner or utility company. Meritage is among the national homebuilders showcasing these technology combinations.
This is still only a tiny fraction of the more than 1 million homes built in the United States every year. But by collecting data on how to tailor incentives for homebuilders, homebuyers and utilities, such projects are important steps toward expanding these technologies across the world. nationwide, according to Ram Narayanamurthy, technical lead for EPRI's Advanced Energy Communities program, which has undertaken dozens of such projects since 2014.
“In the past, we looked at individual silos – energy efficiency in silos, demand response in a silo, customer solar in a silo – and they have been studied and understood in silos,” says Narayanamurthy. Advanced Energy Communities study “their impact [on] the power system as an integrated whole, rather than as separate parts.”
That will help design complete packages that cut costs, meet homeowner expectations for comfort and convenience, and provide the capacity to accommodate load and grid shifting that companies public service needs. The new funding from DOE will target new use cases such as mixed-use developments and healthcare facilities, and collect and share data for broader uses .
Balancing grid impacts, costs of electrification and self-powered homes
Most of EPRI's first projects were carried out in California, a state with aggressive carbon reduction goals consistent with its mandate that all new homes must use solar energy and achieve “net-zero energy” or using no more energy from the grid than it generates itself each year.
One of EPRI's first projects in Fontana, California, tested these proposals with rooftop solar panels, electric heat pumps and water heaters, and batteries. to shift consumption away from peak hours. “We wanted to see what the future of the grid would look like if every home could power itself,” says Narayanamurthy.
A key finding was that “if you electrify everything, you may have to upgrade the wiring [and] transformer size” and make other costly grid upgrades, he said. . But they have “very deep energy efficiency” – insulating and air-tightening to keep warm and cool while minimizing the amount of energy needed for air conditioning – “leading to huge reductions in high temperatures.” point of electricity consumption, which is driving grid planning.”
Likewise, achieving energy autonomy does not necessarily require adjusting a building's consumption patterns to match peak grid demand. However, running air conditioners and appliances during the middle of the day and then cutting back during peak times can mitigate the “duck curve” supply-demand imbalance that is causing grid management challenges in California and other solar-intensive regions, he said.
Another project in Clovis, Calif. is currently testing these methods to transition to solar power without the use of batteries, further reducing the cost of achieving energy autonomy. That could bring the cost of an energy-autonomous home closer to the cost of a standard home, with the added cost of solar balanced by long-term energy savings.
This is good news for proponents of electrification in states like California, where natural gas bans are being proposed at the state and local levels. A new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute shows that all-electric homes cost less to build and power, and emit less carbon than mixed-fuel homes. This is true in Boston, New York City, Seattle and Austin, Texas, where building codes are encouraging all-electric buildings, as well as in areas without such codes, includes Minneapolis and Columbus, Ohio.
Community sharing in the field of solar power and batteries
EPRI is also looking at the costs and benefits of installing solar, batteries and backup generation equipment on homes or centralizing them on community microgrids, through two projects with public utility partner Southern Company, one in Georgia and one in Alabama.
The first project, Pulte Homes' 46-unit Altus at The Quarter in Atlanta, includes a voice-activated smart home controller along with rooftop solar and indoor batteries. Homebuilders are increasingly adding solar and batteries to new projects, and falling costs are expanding the approach from high-end projects to middle-income audiences. more and multi-family applications.
Signature Homes' second, 62-home Reynolds Landing project in Hoover, Alabama, combines smart and highly efficient appliances with a 1-megawatt microgrid powered by solar, batteries and generator uses natural gas.
According to DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Reynolds Landing uses 44% less energy than comparable all-electric communities by coordinating microgrid operations through a software platform Volttron. It also requires 34% less electricity during winter peak hours – an important factor in the Southeast, where long winter heating needs are unlikely to be met by solar power. and intermittent wind power.
Whether solar power, storage and generation systems are best located in individual homes or in a centralized microgrid depends on many factors. Part of that is “customer perception,” says Narayanamurthy. “People like to see solar panels on their roofs. But builders have struggled with how to add more cost to solar because it would make them less cost-competitive.”
But utility microgrids require systems to share costs and benefits with homeowners who may move in and out of a community. Similar challenges exist for community solar, which can be more cost-effective than rooftop solar, but requires overall investment from a changing portfolio. of the buyers.
At the same time, utilities gain by centralizing solar and battery power, as “this helps them manage power quality [and] operational sequencing,” he said. The methods for harnessing distributed energy resources from individual homes to accomplish similar goals can be complex, although utilities including Vermont's Green Mountain Power are showing it can be done. can be implemented with appropriate regulatory systems.
Duke Energy, a company that has set a goal of being carbon neutral by 2050, will need a range of cost-effective technologies to provide power when renewable sources do not match demand. , Doug Esamann, the company's executive vice president of energy solutions, said during last week's event in North Carolina. “It has to be a combination of many types of technology: not just how we generate energy but also how we distribute and use it.”
According to Greentechmedia.com