Global Minima

10Power CEO Sandra Kwak joins Global Minima to talk about how she uses data in her effort to improve energy access in underserved communities across the world. Topics covered include the falling prices of storage, how solar can help provide clean water, and her work with the Foundation for Climate Restoration.

Mia Oppelstrup is really into electric cars. Lucky for her, she works at EV charging station company Volta. In this episode, we delve into trends in EV usage, how Volta decides how many stations to put in and when to add more, and why EV stations are a sound investment for retail centers looking to drive consumer traffic.

Lindsay Baker’s passion centers at the intersection of humans and their work environments. As the former VP and Head of Sustainability at We Work and current board member of The Clean Fight, SPUR and Measurabl, she has a lot of thoughts on how workspaces can be both more sustainable and more livable. In this episode, we ask Lindsay about her recent blog on upskilling building managers on efficiency tools, static versus dynamic sustainability ratings for buildings, her work with The Clean Fight, embodied energy in buildings, how the COVID-19 crisis might be the thing that pushes building owners to execute efficiency improvements, and her latest Sci Fi reads.

Matt Golden:

My official title is CEO of recurve. My unofficial title is energy efficiency agitator. I'm been at this quite awhile and what sounds like cynicism is actually positivity wrapped in the belief that we just need to evolve this entire industry. So started out actually as a contractor doing energy efficiency and actual buildings and at a fairly large scale, you know, we had over a hundred people retrofitted four or 5,000 buildings and mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, mostly residential and learned a bunch of things about utility programs and energy efficiency that has informed kind of, or up to that company was called recurve recurve 1.0 so learn that in deemed savings models where customers get rebates in advance and the industry doesn't have any accountability to outcomes, it becomes a race to the bottom.

And the more the poor work quality you do, the more money you make. And so learned as a company doing building science, you know, an HVAC and shell and renewables all integrated with engineers and the whole nine that are subcontractors doing crap work. We're actually making better margins than we were. And so this is an existential problem in our industry where there's a complete misalignment of incentives and the utility programs that show up to give rebates to customers actually increase the cost of customer to the, to the marketplace and against them. This reverse signal where the cheaper you can actually deploy your stuff on the front end, the more money you make. So that was one aspect. And the other thing we learned is that everybody talks about energy efficiency and being the first fuel and this great resource, but it does not behave like one and it's definitely not valued like one.

So how do we actually extract, you know, if we believe there's all this pent up resource in buildings, how do we come up with a way to pay for it, which has to be either drastically different rate structures, you know, real time rates and they're going to be three or four X what people are used to paying or the alternative, which is direction where we had an is how do you value what we now call demand flexibility, which is like energy efficiencies. New friend. It's a much more, I'll talk more about that, but a, a much more inclusive terminology. But how do we value the flexibility we're creating and all these buildings as an actual grid resource, not just a bunch of white papers or you know, sign on letters. But how do we actually integrate flexibility into the resource mix and get its full true value so that it'll accelerate?

Can we create, define grid flexibility a little bit more and dive into charitable job introducing myself? Yeah, we can go back to that. Let me, let me, let me ask you, so, so fast forward to the, to, to the my a new gig and what we're talking about today, which was recurve 2.0, which is a totally separate company actually. But the name sticks because it actually makes a lot more sense in this new iteration, you know, was an attempt to actually build a scalable building, retrofitting and doing energy efficiency in buildings and discovered that all the cards are stacked against us. Iteration 2.0 recurve is attacking those problems and it's attacking them. Really kind of the two ways I described. First of all moving towards market-based approaches, but even in current, you know, traditional cost-effectiveness based programs, how do we use data to align incentives properly to target the right customers to do all sorts of things that yield better results at a lower price.

And then secondarily, now that we have AMI and this thing called the duck curve I was actually just doing some math this year and last year, 2019 or like five or six years ahead of the traditional duck curve, 4,300 megawatt hours worse than we thought. So how do we look at flexibility behind the meter? And I will describe what that means in a moment relative to this new problem and value as such. Because when you know, when and where it's happening, which is what we get with AMI data, it's worth a whole heck of a lot more than saving a kilowatt hour because it matters and when and where it's occurring. And in fact the game has changed. And I think before we even started, I led in by saying efficiency is dead and that's true. Kilowatt hours can in many, many parts of this country right now not save any carbon and actually cost ratepayers money. So we are at a point where reducing consumption is not always a net good. So it's time to pivot.

Jason S. Trager, Ph.D.:

It's like a good t-shirt slogan, "efficiency is dead."

Matt Golden:

But if you get it followed up by long live efficiency just now flexibility, long live demand flexibility.

Jason S. Trager, Ph.D.:

Okay. All right. So we've made tee shirts. All right, go on.

Matt Golden:

'Cause It cause cause the imporant part is the traditional approach is dead, but it's actually more valuable than ever and all we have to do is pivot.

Jason S. Trager, Ph.D.:

And, and so how does, how do these now differ from kind of traditional ancillary services such as efficiency, right? How, how has this grid flexibility pivot, gone happen?

Matt Golden:

So the primary kind of pivot for efficiency is recognizing that with AMI data, where it exists we can measure when we are impacting demand and we know where it's located. And those are kind of the primary ingredients for an actual resource, right? Carbon, P & D capacity, energy, all of all of these major grid and climate values are totally locational and temporarily constraint, right? So that's the first big pivot is that we can measure it. And when we talk about demand flexibility, it is inherently on a time and locational basis. But it's just a more inclusive term. So many of the things that we think of as energy efficiency, also do demand response and you know, a storage, you know, a, a smart thermostat can predictably load, shape every day, right? But can also be dispatched. Same with a storage system in the garage or an EV by the way.

And then there's other things like insulation, right? There's nothing, there is no such thing as a flat impact, a load shape. It really doesn't exist. Everything creates a shape change. It's just a function of measuring it, right? So it's valuing the fact that insulating an attic in a building with a heat pump will reduce demand at seven in the morning on a winter time in the winter. And because we're now creating a winter peaking grid, and that's incredibly valuable against the avoided cost of winter time, renewables and storage versus an average KWH savings or versus commercial lighting, which peaks at 3:00 PM savings, right? Which is exactly when our over jetting solar and has very little to no value. So it's a much more inclusive approach. And it says we actually don't care what, well, first of all, the premise is that the grid actually goes to the meter.

That's where the forecast comes from, the meter. So, and then behind the meter is my house or, or a building. I happen to live in a house. I happen to own it. I know that everything in my house is mine. If I choose to operate in such a way that it helps PG&E, that's my choice. They're not going to reach in and touch it. It's not part of their grid. It's my toaster oven. Right. My wires, my end uses. So the core premise says that the grid extends to the meter and then there's all the stuff behind the meter. So demand flexibility is looking at whatever it is you did behind the meter, whether it's insulation in the attic, IOT on the wall, storage in the garage, Evie being charged at the right times, a behavior campaign, whatever that is. How does it express as flexibility at the meter?

That's change in demand. And then the real only question there is, is at that point it can be, it's kind of the unified field theory of flexibility. We don't care what it is, we just care what, how it manifests on the question. The only remaining question then, and this is something else that we can actually measure, is what is, what are you responding to? A longterm predictable signal. For example, with PG&E they're paying one X 19 hours a day and then five times as much during the summer peak ramp period for example. But then they do and they'll pay that, you know, every weekday in the summer or you know, years in these contracts. It's longterm predictable. There also can be events. And so can you break and we can, and we break the can we break what the response is? Is it a longterm capacity, energy efficiency type of a signal or is it responsive to a more real time market event?

And that's just a function of who, how you get paid. There's drastically fewer events on the grid, but they're much more valuable. And it's important to have this kind of harmony because right now if you're in a demand response program, you have a distinct and specific incentive not to do energy efficiency at all because it actually reduces or affects your baseline in such a way to reduce your dr payments. So we can create a harmonized signal. So this is really just a macro strategy that says buildings are complicated, customers are complicated, business models are extremely complicated. We're going to create competitive markets that can engage customers and sell them and install and deploy a whole host of solutions that will have benefits that accrue to the customer, which they're going to pay for like lower bills and comfort, but also have benefits that accrued to the T and

In this episode we cover:

- How Dr. Peters got into environmental psychology
- What kind of data was available when she began, and how it was collected
- What drives commercial and industrial energy customers’ interest in efficiency measures.
- Why customers sometimes signal interest but don’t follow through.
- How data utilization has evolved in the utility space
- How data played a part in California’s new M&V guidelines.

Full Transcription

The thinker, author, and all around advocate for Integrative Design joins us from his blizzard-proof tropical paradise in Colorado. From his latest paper: Recalibrating Climate Expectations to how design software wastes energy by limiting the angles pipes can be connected in buildings, Amory dishes the data on efficiency.

Mary Ann Piette is a Senior Scientist and Division Director at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her work focuses on energy-using technologies and buildings as well as grid integration. Additionally, she runs the Demand Response Research Center, whose goal is to understand “what works,” in the field of Demand Response (DR). Mary Ann relieves the days of capturing data on 3x5 cards stored in a records room and reflects on how streaming services and automated control are revolutionizing the way DR is capturing and analyzing data--and how the technology is still accelerating.

Dr. Dan Kammen, Distinguished Professor of Energy in the Energy Resources Group at UC Berkeley and Former Science Envoy to the State Department is the guest in the premier episode of Global Minima: the podcast at the intersection of bits, watts, and dollars. Dan talks about how data collection on air quality has gone from sealed cans shipped to a lab to air quality sensors on smartphones, and how data can tell us a lot about how to achieve environmental sustainability.