Decarbonizing the Grids with Demand Response
By Karina Hershberg, PE
For most of human history, work and activity has been shaped by the sun. During the day, humans could farm, socialize, and build. At sunset, activity had to slow down, and shelter found. Energy was only used when energy was available, during daylight hours. We were leading Net Zero Carbon lives before it was cool.
By first harnessing biofuels and then fossil fuels, life got to expand beyond the confines of sunrise and sunset. Fossil fuels were an amazing portable form of super dense energy that transformed humanity’s path through history and paved the way to our modern lifestyle. Unfortunately, these fuels also have led us to the abyss of the climate crisis in which we currently find ourselves. The question now is whether we can reconcile the negative aspects of our relationship with energy while preserving the positive.
Enter the concept of grid-interactive flexible loads. It doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easy as “solar” or “wind,” which is perhaps why it hasn’t received the same amount of attention in discussions of sustainability. Yet, a closer look at the plans for energy decarbonization shows flexible loads are just as important to the success of this planet-saving solution as its more famous renewable energy cousins.
The concept of flexible load is called by many names — demand response, peak shaving, grid-interactive efficient buildings, distributed energy resources, and the list goes on. But despite a cornucopia of buzzwords, these terms all describe the same vision of utilizing buildings and their systems to help grids.
Net Zero … What?
Grid-interactivity and flexible loads are in response to the limitations of onsite solar generation and even the aspirations of net zero energy. Net zero energy has been an important goal for the building sector to target, but it technically is not the same as truly being in sync with available energy resources. In many ways, it is a math problem you do at the end of the year to reconcile your annual usage with your annual generation, whereas total decarbonization means your load is served by renewable sources every minute of every hour of every day. So, while net zero energy is a critical step in the right direction, 24/7 emissions-free energy is ultimately where we need to land. If done correctly, it will be a return to a zero-carbon lifestyle, one aligned with the energy flows of nature, while still supporting the advances of modern society.
Images courtesy of PAE
DIY Grid-Interactivity
One of the key solutions for returning to a system in balance with renewable resources is to reimagine buildings and homes as dynamic partners in these larger utility systems instead of simply passive users of the energy services. This more dynamic relationship is where grid-interactive, flexible loads come back into the picture.
Demand response programs come in all shapes and sizes, but to an average homeowner such as myself, they can look as simple as a text message like the one I received on June 22, 2020. It was the inaugural residential “Peak Time Rebate Event” for my utility, Portland General Electrical (PGE). My text message invited me to reduce my household electricity use the following day from 5pm–8pm. In exchange, I would receive an incentive based on my decreased usage.
Source: Portland General Electric
As an electrical engineer at PAE with a passion and expertise for sustainability design and the future of energy, I was excited to participate in this program for the first time. Finally, a chance to make my home my own research project! Living in an older house without air-conditioning, my family was already in the habit of passive cooling techniques for the hot summer days- shades on the windows, avoid opening doors during the hottest parts of the day, and generally try not to add heat to the house. When the time came, 5 PM on June 23, we went around the house trimming our electric loads. It was as straightforward as shutting off lights, avoiding appliance cycles like laundry and dishes, and making simple no-cook egg salad sandwiches for dinner, which the kids reported was the best dinner they had ever had. My children’s questionable culinary preferences aside, it was a nice evening with relatively little impact to our typical routine.
The next day when my phone pinged with a text from PGE, I was excited to see the results of my efforts, but that excitement turned to confusion when I opened the message. I had saved just $.75 — reducing energy consumption from my typical 2.02 kWh to an unremarkable 1.27 kWh. I was deflated. In the coming days, I compared notes with fellow energy geek colleagues and discovered we all had a similar experience — little measurable individual impact from our supposedly critical behavior change. What was going on?
Power of the Collective
It turned out the key to our seeming failure was the scale of our view. When observed through the lens of an individual, the impact to behavior and usage was minimal. But as a collective, the story suddenly changed. After talking with experts at PGE, I learned that the voluntary collective reduction of households in PGE service areas reduced energy demand by 11 MW per event hour compared to expected demands. It put us right on the cusp of eliminating the need for a peak-time natural gas engine, one of the highest emission sources for electricity generation. This impressive system-level impact was created by a humble group of early program adopters with an average savings of just 0.12 kWh per participating household.
This is, in fact, exactly what load flexibility is trying to achieve. Collective actions made up of small individual changes are a key element of grid decarbonization and translate into system-wide emissions savings. In the most extreme cases, these small collective actions can potentially even avoid the more catastrophic situation of grid outages as recently seen around the country. The reason is that to support higher than usual energy demands, typically because of an extreme weather event, utilities have to activate their most carbon-intensive quick-response plants, so-called “peaker plants.” By strategically organizing collective action to reduce demands on the grid during these peak times, we are collectively able to have a greater emissions sum impact than might appear from its energy parts.
Image: An emissions heat map of the northern California electric grid. Decreasing electricity usage during peak emissions time with load flexibility techniques has an increased benefit in terms of emissions reductions than the same usage decrease during low emissions times.
Image by PAE using data from WattTime
“AND” Not “OR”
This brings us to what is perhaps my favorite aspect of load flexibility. When discussing sustainability, we often run into conversations about responsibility and blame. We compare and contrast the agency individuals have in their daily lives with corporations and industries who closely influence consumer options. Within the community of people who recognize the need for decarbonization and care passionately about the broad adoption of sustainable practices, even we can fall into the trap of asking the wrong question: “Should the burden be on individuals to change their habits?,” OR “Should corporations and industries be held responsible for systemic change?” In asking the question in this way we are using the wrong conjunction (and perspective for a solution). In reality, individuals need to make conscious efforts to change AND corporations and industries need to change. Demand response programs are an intriguing example of these paired truths. Changes by the individual directly support changes in the system, and vice versa.
Decarbonization of the electricity sector is one of the most critical system changes needed to reach U.S. climate targets and participation in local demand response programs is one of the more powerful tools we have as individuals to support that transition. Conveniently, it is also one of the easiest. Program registration is usually through your local utility with no cost and perhaps even a small incentive. My local utility, PGE, has several incentives from peak rebate times to smart thermostat programs. Although equipment like smart thermostats and home batteries can make participation easier and increase the benefits, low tech options like light switches and no cook meals work just fine, too.
Images courtesy of PAE
A New Energy Relationship
After a full year of participating in the PGE residential demand response program, my family has dialed in our electrical load reduction strategies. Perhaps more importantly, it has changed my mindset about how and when my home is using energy. As a certified energy geek, I’ve spent more hours than I can count poring over utility emissions profiles and pondering how buildings can more wisely tap into the flow of electrons. By better understanding where and how our electricity comes from, we can better design our buildings and optimize our usage patterns. Embracing the perspective that the solutions are an “and,” and not an “or,” will also allow us to reach an optimized grid-interactive state. But whether you chose the automated solutions or a more manual approach to embark on this path, take it from my kids – make sure to include egg salad sandwiches.
Join me for a webinar with Electrify Now and Portland Sustainable Building Week on grid interactivity on October 13.
Karina Hershberg is passionate about sustainable development and has 15 years of experience in electrical engineering. She brings a unique perspective to her dual roles in analysis and engineering at PAE. Through data-driven analytics and innovative electrical design, Karina helps projects implement regenerative and resilient solutions. She leads the development of microgrid design, emissions analysis, and campus-scale solutions for the firm.
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Hyundai Motors is recalling 145,235 EVs and other “electrified” vehicles in the US, citing concerns about a loss of driving power, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Friday.
The NHTSA announced this morning that the recall affects selected IONIQ 5 and IONIQ 6 EVs, as well as certain luxury Genesis models, including the GV60, GV70, and G80 electrified variants, from the 2022-2025 model years, Reuters reported.
It looks like the issue stems from “the integrated charging control units in these vehicles, which may become damaged and fail to charge the 12-volt battery. This malfunction could lead to a complete loss of drive power, posing safety risks for drivers,” the NHTSA stated.
If you’re an owner of one of these Hyundai models dating 2022-2025, stay tuned. Hyundai has not yet provided a timeline as to when affected vehicles will be repaired.
To make that happen, the company’s dealers will inspect and replace the charging unit and its fuse if necessary, NHTSA said. Free of charge, of course.
Importantly, no crashes, injuries, fatalities, or fires due to this issue have been reported in the US, Hyundai reported.
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Tesla announced that ‘Actually Smart Summon,’ its autonomous driving feature that enables moving its vehicles without anyone inside over short distances, is now being launched in Europe and the Middle East.
The automaker’s Full Self-Driving suite of features has been limited in those markets due to regulations and Tesla’s focus on making them work in North America first.
Actually Smart Summon is the vision-only version of Tesla’s “smart summon” feature, which was released years ago on Tesla vehicles with ultrasonic sensors.
When Tesla transitioned away from ultrasonic sensors, Smart Summon was one of the missing features that Tesla had yet to adapt to the vision-only (cameras and neural nets) system.
CEO Elon Musk said that it would be coming in 2022, but it finally came only a few months ago, in 2024.
However, that’s only in North America where Tesla focuses its Full Self-Driving (FSD) development, the feature package that includes Actually Smart Summon, also referred to as ‘ASS’.
Most of Tesla’s other markets, including Europe, don’t have the same capabilities under the Full Self-Driving package. That’s partly due to regulations, but Tesla also focuses on making the features work on North American roads first.
Now, Tesla has announced that its Actually Smart Summon feature is launching in Europe and the Middle East:
The feature can only be used on private roads, like parking lots and driveways. Most people have used it to bring their vehicles parked in a large parking lot to them as they exit a store or restaurant. However, the vehicle moves quite slowly under the feature and the owner needs to keep an eye on it at all time and be ready to cancel the summon as Tesla doesn’t take any responsibility for accidents caused by using Actually Smart Summon., like all other FSD features.
Therefore, most people I know who have the feature, myself included, tried once or try to see or impress some friends who have never seen a car move without anyone inside and then stopped using it.
The feature’s main useful use-case is for people with extremely tight parking spots. It enables them to exit the vehicle before it is in its final parking spot and then move the car in and out remotely.
However, that has been the case for years with the regular Smart Summon, as you generally don’t need the vehicle to handle complex parking lots. You mostly need it to move a few feet forward or backward.
But a recent update has broken this feature for some people. We recently reported on a very unfortunate situation that resulted in a Tesla owner having to get out of his car through his trunk.
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US Automakers are planning to ask Mr. Trump to retain President Biden’s EPA exhaust rules, in the face of signs that Mr. Trump might try to reverse them. If the rules are reversed, it would cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of deaths per year.
Interestingly, this is the opposite of what big auto did the last time a reality TV show came to the White House – signaling that they have perhaps learned their lesson this time ’round.
First, some history.
In the middle of the 20th century, the effects of human activity on the atmosphere became readily apparent. Certain cities – with Los Angeles among the forefront – were choked by smog, and it was soon found out that vehicle pollution was the primary reason for this smog.
Since Los Angeles was one of the most smog-choked cities, California led the way on clean air regulation, creating the California Air Resources Board in 1967 (under then-Governor Ronald Reagan).
The federal government gave California special dispensation to set stricter regulations than the rest of the country, in recognition that it had a unique smog problem in its primary metropolis. California has retained this dispensation, in the form of a “waiver,” since then. And other states can follow California’s rules, but only if they copy all of the rules exactly.
Thus, there have been two separate sets of clean air regulation in this country since then – the federal rules, and then the “CARB states” which follow California’s rules.
In 2012 that finally changed, when President Obama’s EPA negotiated with California to finally harmonize these standards and also implement higher fuel efficiency nationwide. This would have been a huge boon for both industry and consumers, saving money and giving regulatory certainty to the auto industry.
But then, in 2016, the candidate who got the 2nd most votes in the presidential election was headed for the White House. And automakers responded by immediately lobbying to torpedo these standards, even before inauguration.
Now, you might think that asking a profoundly ignorant individual, who ended up staffing the EPA with bought-and-sold science deniers (huh, that would never happen again would it?), to change rules which had already been set through years of negotiation and lobbying was not a great idea. And you’d be right.
Not long after automakers had the dumb idea to ask an idiot to fix something that wasn’t broken, that idiot went and broke things further, fracturing the agreement between California and the federal government and ensuring less regulatory certainty for automakers.
After realizing their blunder (which they could have avoided by, y’know, thinking at all about it beforehand), big auto relented and asked the government to please not implement the rollbacks automakers had asked for. Some companies even forged their own agreement with California.
But it was too late, and we are now back in the era of disparate regulatory regimes – something which John Bozzella, head of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (formerly called Global Automakers), keeps complaining about these days, despite having lobbied for exactly this in the first place.
The US EPA and California are still not fully harmonized, but both released recent new standards which do have somewhat similar targets. If a manufacturer builds towards one set of rules, they’ll probably not be too far off from meeting the other.
So in the end, we did get better emissions regulations and California has continued to push forward with clean air regulations, thus signaling a failure on the part of Mr. Trump to cause the long term harm to Americans that he and his oil industry solicitors so desperately seem to desire.
The most recent EPA standards, finalized in March (after being softened at the auto industry’s request), do not mandate any particular powertrain, but rather require steep emissions cuts – and EVs are the easiest way to achieve lower emissions.
Notably, Tesla lobbied in favor of making this last set of standards stronger, and they also lobbied against ruining the Obama/CA standards in 2016 – being one of very few automakers who were on the correct side of that discussion.
Despite that the President Biden EPA’s rules do not mandate any particular powertrain, Mr. Trump, in his usual ignorance, has said that he will end the nonexistent EV mandate. And now that he has received more votes than his opponent for the first time (after three tries, and despite committing treason in 2021 for which there is a clear legal remedy), it looks like the upcoming EPA might be directed to end these emissions cuts and fuel/health cost savings for Americans.
But in this instance, it sounds like the automakers might actually do the right thing for once, and ask the government not to do any rollbacks, and instead let them continue on with the plans without disruption from a convicted felon who seems determined to cede a US EV manufacturing boom back to China.
Detroit’s Big Three automakers – GM, Ford and Stellantis – are all reportedly trying to figure out how to ensure that these rules stay in place. The mentality is that constantly changing regulations are not beneficial for companies – particularly in the auto realm, where models take on the order of 7 years to plan and execute. Long-term planning is important for the hundreds of billions in manufacturing investment that EVs have attracted in the US during Biden’s EV push.
These attitudes are notable, given that this is not what automakers did in 2016/2017. That time, they compulsively pushed for fewer regulations, and now they are asking for regulations to remain in place.
It’s further notable that Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose company lobbied strongly in favor of emissions cuts and makes more use of the federal EV tax credit than any other company, is now allied with the very entity that’s looking to harm EVs. It seems that we have entered opposite world.
So it remains to be seen where we will go from here – on the one hand, doctors, nurses, scientists, environmental groups, many businesses, people who recognize that they have lungs which they would like to continue using, and so on, generally support the strongest regulation possible. Now, automakers have been added to the pile asking for strong regulations.
On the other hand, a former reality TV host – tagged along with by the CEO of the company that has sold more electric cars than any other – seem determined to kill electric cars, despite the harm that would cause to Americans’ pocketbooks and health insurance premiums. And that famously vindictive character may be even more spurred towards this harmful course of action after failing in his efforts the first time.
Who ya got?
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