A team led by Therese Peffer, associate director of CITRIS Climate and the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE), has received $2 million from the California Energy Commission (CEC) to explore demand response strategies in large commercial buildings, which have shown great potential to balance energy supply and demand.
Large commercial buildings often rely on isolated energy systems that are challenging to integrate. Peffer’s project, titled Super-GX, aims to demonstrate a grid-responsive supervisory control system that scales demand flexibility in these buildings through integrated distributed energy resources (DERs).
The platform will use an advanced open-source solution to coordinate across multiple energy systems — including heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting, plug loads, and electric vehicle charging stations — and buildings. This will allow building managers to easily adjust energy use in response to energy supply and electricity prices, in addition to supporting grid stability during peak demand times. Widespread adoption of the technology has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 18.4 million kilograms over 15 years.
The project team will immediately deploy Super-GX in up to 10 buildings at UC Irvine and Honda America.