Salt River Project (SRP) DR program has over 67,000 devices providing 82 MW of load flexibility, and sometimes much more. During a single event in the summer of 2022, the program delivered 133 MW of first-hour load shift, ensuring grid resilience when it was needed most. The reliability and scale of this resource has led operators and resource planners to view DR as part of the resource stack and a key component of SRP’s decarbonization goals.

Multi-family, business, and limited- and moderate-income households historically have not been included in DR programs, however, SRP calculated that this important and untapped customer segment represents approximately 200,000-300,000 households and 28,000 businesses, making it clear that investing in these communities would deliver benefits to both SRP and its customers.

SRP developed marketing campaigns and a program design to overcome barriers that have prevented these segments from engaging in demand response. Barriers addressed include the complexity of installations in multifamily buildings, plus financial and awareness challenges among traditionally marginalized communities.

In the year ahead, SRP plans to continue to grow DR Program participation within multi-family, SMB, and historically marginalized communities. The utility anticipates exceeding 85,000 devices enrolled and 150 MW load shed potential by the end of 2023.

Gaining Maryland Public Service Commission approval in March of 2022, the SMECO FlexTemp Pilot moved quickly to stand up a flexible load management program directly associated with the management of smart thermostats, during both the cooling and heating seasons. The approach taken for the program was presented during PLMA's Spring 2022 Conference and was titled “Revenue and Emission Benefits of Managing Thermostats on a Sub-hourly Basis”.

The FlexTemp Pilot builds on SMECO’s innovative approach to utilizing smart thermostats, dating back to 2015, as one of the first utilities to provide incentives to customers for the installation of smart thermostats.

The FlexTemp Pilot achieved considerable success in 2022 and proves it's possible to manage behind-the-meter assets as grid resources, and that devices can also support decarbonization goals and plans. Additional impacts include:

• The ability to group cohort members and schedule dispatches on a day-ahead basis.
• Development of procedures to group cohort members and schedule dispatches on a real-time basis
• Learning customer behavior, which allows for seasonality of customer cohorting.
• Optimization of members enrolled to dispatch events to achieve firm service levels.
• Optimization of members enrolled to dispatch events to achieve guaranteed load drop.
• Events called based on optimization of energy savings
• Events called based on optimization of capacity savings
• Events called based on optimization of GHG emission reduction
• Ability to dispatch on a real-time basis instead of day ahead basis
• Members enrolled = 250+ with the expectation of exceeding 1,000+ by May 2023.
• Reduced member opt-out rate in comparison with traditional DR programs (~1.5% as compared to ~25%)
• kW/member saved on average per event: 1 kW

Time-of-use (TOU) and other innovative rate designs are critical to managing an increasingly complex grid, achieving decarbonization goals, and integrating DERs. To achieve meaningful results, more energy customers need to adopt them. Southern California Edison (SCE) wanted to get its customers on new rates in a way that ensured a positive experience and delivered impact to the business. The utility's transition began with an opt-in pilot in July 2016 and a default pilot of 400k customers in 2018. The full TOU rollout started in Oct 2020 and ran through June 2022, with over 1.9M customers defaulted. 

SCE knew that managing a program of this scale would require an analytics-driven approach and a focus on putting customers first. The result of its approach was strong engagement and an added benefit: significant peak load reduction in August 2022, making it equivalent to the third largest program in SCE's DR line up. 

During the summer of 2022, SCE used its innovative Rate Coach Program, powered by Oracle’s "Opower Behavioral Load Shaping" solution, to send specialized weekly communications to approximately 800,000 customers to help mitigate the effects of a record-breaking heat wave. 

U.S. climate goals for economy-wide net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 require rapid decarbonization of the light-duty vehicle fleet and plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) are poised to become the preferred technology for achieving this end. Considerable investments in public and private EV charging infrastructure will be needed to support widespread adoption, however, guidance is still lacking on when, where, and what types of chargers will be needed.

In this Load Management Dialogue, researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) discuss findings from a recent quantitative assessment of the charging network requirements needed to support 50% of light-duty EV sales by 2030. This study produced multiple detailed network growth trajectories at the national, state, and local levels that can serve as a guidepost for future planning.

In addition, an overview of NREL’s publicly accessible EV infrastructure tools and data sets, designed to support planning and decision-making for EV infrastructure stakeholders, will also be provided.

Consumers Energy exceeded its 1,000 EV enrollment target for the PowerMIDrive Program by 33% in 2022, demonstrating the EV load management program can scale to its next target of 10,000 vehicles and far beyond. 

Join us to learn about this successful program that started in 2019 with networked chargers, then telematics hardware, and ultimately experienced a massive boost in enrollments with the addition of a "Bring Your Own Charger" (BYOC) component. The BYOC component was powered by AMI data analytics and program partner Sagewell, and offers more equitable access by enabling any EV and any level 2 charger to enroll into PowerMIDrive which shifts 98% of EV load to off-peak hours without active load management.

Every-day peak reduction is crucial in Michigan where the distribution grid is sized for relatively small AC load, and where a 7 kW EV charger can overload a transformer every summer and winter evening. The PowerMIDrive program makes room for faster beneficial electrification and decarbonization by reducing the need to upgrade the distribution system, and in January 2023, was approved by the Michigan Public Services Commission to become a permanent offering.

Heat pump water heaters ("HPWH") are significantly more efficient than electric resistance water heaters (“ERWH”), and they’re the future!

From IRA funding and electrification initiatives to simply figuring out how to address the customer experience, we forecast a dramatic increase in HPWH deployments during the next decade. While these water heaters are more efficient than gas and traditional ERWH (2-3x according to DOE), they’re still the thermal batteries that we’ve grown to know and love. And they will still represent a material share of home energy consumption.

The Shifted Energy team and Hawai'i Energy worked together to address two questions:
1) Can we actually get HPWHs into LMI communities? and
2) Could HPWHs serve as a similar controllable load asset in every home?

Join us to find out more about this opportunity, and how it can be realized in Hawai'i and beyond. 

The U.S. electric power industry is in a transformational era. With the potential to save up to $18 billion in power system costs and 80 million tons of carbon emissions annually, grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs) are critical to achieve a modern, carbon-free energy system.

As part of the accelerating industry focus on carbon-reduction targets and strategies, utilities are increasingly embracing innovative demand-side resources and programs, including leveraging energy efficiency (EE), demand flexibility (DF), demand response (DR) and distributed energy resources (DERs) in the residential and commercial sectors to develop GEBs, which can be used as a resource. 

This presentation will highlight SEPA’s Accelerating Coordinated Utility Programs for Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings: Practitioners’ Perspectives study, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This work examines the current state of coordinated energy efficiency, demand flexibility, and demand response utility programs that support GEBs, and how programs are transitioning to integrate energy conservation and active management of electricity in buildings for the direct or indirect provision of grid services. By gathering insights from utilities, program administrators, technology solution providers, and regulators about energy program business models and regulatory frameworks, the study provides: 

• Practitioner perspectives on challenges to and potential solution strategies for the building energy program transition
• Identifies challenges of deploying effective coordinated energy efficiency, demand flexibility, and demand response utility programs
• Provides solution strategies to support all stakeholders looking to unlock a GEBs future

Wood Mackenzie has estimated the U.S. could have up to 380GW of DERs connected to the grid as soon as 2025, which represents tens of millions of new DERs. There's also the question of the impact that the biggest DERs of all might have: the surge in electric vehicles. PLMA has invited two industry experts to help us explore these questions, as well as other changes and opportunities they have on their radars for the year ahead. Join us to learn more about: 

• policy and regulatory changes that do/don’t accommodate DR/DERs
• FERC 2222
• how the utilities’ role will continue to evolve
• the continued promise of decarbonization
• developments in the wholesale markets and SEEM, and 
• the ongoing impacts of the war in Ukraine.

Speakers:
Peter Kelly-Detwiler, Northbridge Energy Partners
Ethan Howland, Utility Dive
Rich Barone, Get Smart, LLC (moderator)

Join us for a "fireside chat" with Kim Harriman, SVP, State Government Affairs and Corporate Communications at Avangrid, a sustainable energy company and PLMA member. Kim's extensive background in the development of energy policy from both a governmental and vendor perspective has provided her with a unique point of view on the ways in which all parties can work together effectively to advance the energy transition. With her deep legal and technical expertise, and her public and private sector work experiences, Kim will discuss valuable lessons around career changing, working inside complex technological environments, and her efforts to build effective, collaborative teams.

Speakers:
Kim Harriman, Avangrid
Sangeeta Ranade, Alphastruxure (moderator)

Opinion Dynamics and Extensible Energy partnered with PG&E to complete an analysis of the charging patterns of 71,000 PG&E Electric Vehicle (EV) owners and a survey of 3,000 PG&E EV owners. By integrating research findings from the customer and grid perspectives, we will share insights on common customer segments of PG&E EV chargers along with survey results that explain differences in charging patterns.

This will include sharing novel insights about EV owners’ perceptions of benefits, concerns, and overall attitudes towards allowing their utility to manage their charging. As EVs gain traction as a load management resource, insights from this study will provide practitioners with key takeaways for designing managed charging programs in ways that meet customer and grid needs from the region with the highest EV adoption in the country.

This Dialogue will also include a discussion of where the industry needs to grow to support the scaling of EVs as a grid resource.