Are Utilities Ready for Smart Buildings?
One of today’s highly promising innovations in energy operations is grid-interactive efficient buildings. Referred to as GEBs, these structures are connected to the grid and draw on distributed energy sources. Among other benefits, GEBs offer hold the potential to lower property operations costs.
But are utilities keeping up? A new study from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy tackles that question.
The roots of today’s GEBs go back to the 1970s, said Dan York, an ACEEE senior fellow and co-author of the report along with Chris Perry, research manager for the organization’s buildings program and Hannah Bastian, an ACEEE researcher. A utility needing to shed load could send a remote signal to cycle off a building’s air conditioning equipment, he said. “In exchange for cycling it off, the customer would get a bill credit, but the interruption would be so small the customer wouldn’t notice,” York noted.
Today’s smart technologies take this concept considerably further. Solar energy, electric vehicles and battery storage combine to create a far more dynamic connection with utilities, at a time when power providers are seeking more flexible loads.
This represents an evolution away from the conventional one-way system where utilities send power to customers to a new paradigm where the grid operator anticipates and manages loads. That operator can leverage breakthroughs in connectivity to send signals to buildings, and the buildings can respond by, among other actions, cycling off loads like high-demand lighting and air conditioning. Cycle off the A/C for five minutes, and it won’t be noticed, York said. But when the same step is repeated across thousands of units, it can lower peak demand system-wide, he added.
Even in the past 25 years, the grid has become much more complicated to operate. “It’s really about shifting time of uses to reduce costs,” York said. “Building owners are also finding some less quantifiable benefits from technologies that allow fine tuning for improved comfort in indoor working environments.”
The chief barrier to making this all work is interoperability, said Chris Perry, research manager on ACEEE’s buildings program and a co-author of the report, along with Hannah Bastian, an ACEEE researcher. “Ability to communicate back and forth between buildings, the grid and aggregators is all pretty nascent,” he said.
