Please visit the Connected Communities website to keep up to date on these projects and to learn about other valuable resources and events that are supporting the nation's clean energy transition.

Day one included three panel sessions with staff from utilities, an ISO, a program implementer, and the project teams. The first panel, Bulk Power System and GEBs, identified various ways virtual power plants (VPPs) could participate in the bulk power market; it also explored challenges that the aggregator business model faces in becoming economically favorable. The second panel, Distribution Systems and GEBs, explored the role of demand flexibility for distribution planning and how to right-size the distribution system for building and transportation electrification, how to demonstrate reliability value, and what the CC projects are doing to help distribution planning. The third panel, Low and Moderate Income, Multi-Family Retrofits and GEBs, explored the challenges of project financing and implementing coordinated controls, the barriers to efficiency upgrades, and what technologies look promising in this setting.

Also, on Day 1, participants attended a site tour of either the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Public Housing CC site or the NYPA Integrated Smart Operations Center (iSOC) laboratory. The NYCHA site, (pictured above), represents a full electrification retrofit of a 20-story public housing complex with a replacement of the steam radiator system with variable refrigerant flow (VRF) heat pumps on each wing of the building. The district hot water (DHW) system was replaced with a cascade heat pump system to improve heating functionality. Alternatively, some attendees visited the NYPA iSOC and were able to see the impressive monitoring and learn about the predictive analytics forecasting used to prevent equipment failures and significant outages in the NYPA system. 

In February, DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm visited two all-electric neighborhoods in Menifee, California that are part of DOE’s Connected Communities program. The community’s 219 homes are equipped with energy-efficient features, solar photovoltaic (PV), and energy storage and are connected through a community-level microgrid, which allows them to operate independently from the main grid during unstable grid conditions. The Menifee project is one of the ten DOE-funded pilot projects demonstrating how smart, resilient, energy-efficient buildings can help the nation reach its energy and climate goals.

The project also incorporates bidirectional charging for electric vehicles (EVs), one of the latest developments to support clean grid operations and support the microgrid. Bidirectional charging allows the vehicles to be charged for transportation but also allows them to provide power back to residents’ homes, either directly or to charge other onsite batteries. The EV battery can be used to support home loads during grid-connected operation to ensure offsetting import from the grid and thereby reducing costs to the homeowner. The EV battery can also support critical and non-critical loads when the community is islanded and the home is connected to the community microgrid.

The project partners have applied a “reduce before produce” approach to designing, constructing, and connecting the homes. First, in the “reduce” step, project partner KB Home built all-electric homes with high-efficiency building technologies to produce houses about 40% more energy efficient than typical California homes. In the second “produce” step, technologies from partner SunPower were installed, including solar PV and storage systems. The homes are connected in a microgrid and they function as distributed energy resources that can be controlled simultaneously, which provides both resiliency for the community and service to the grid.

[Photo: L to R: Ram Narayanamurthy, DOE Buildings Technologies Office; DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm; Robert McGibney, President & Chief Operating Officer, KB Home; Jacob Atalla, VP, Innovation & Sustainability, KB Home]

Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) is a standard that provides an automated communication infrastructure that allows electricity providers to communicate demand response (DR) signals directly to customers. For over twenty years, OpenADR 2.0 has been the leading protocol globally for automated DR signals.

In November 2023 The OpenADR Alliance released a new version of the OpenADR standard, Version 3.0. It uses modern IT technology (such as REST principles and JSON) which makes it much simpler for IT professionals to implement than previous versions. OpenADR V.3.0 should have much wider applicability than the previous version, 2.0b, which was released over a decade ago.

OpenADR 2.0b provides communication between utilities, as well as between those utilities and their customers’ devices. OpenADR can serve any type of DR needs and programs, including event-based, price-based, and aggregator models. The new OpenADR 3.0 can serve the same sophisticated uses of 2.0b, but its simpler design enables it to be used in many application contexts that 2.0b was not suitable for, such as between devices within a single customer site, including any individual small loads. This makes OpenADR 3.0 well-suited for communicating highly dynamic prices such as those that California is currently working to make available to residential and commercial customers, those that have existed in Illinois for some years, and those that have been implemented in several European countries.

 “The combination of OpenADR 3.0 and highly dynamic prices will enable widespread adoption of demand response, contributing significantly to reducing system and customer costs and integrating more renewable energy on the grid,” said Bruce Nordman, Research Scientist at Berkeley Lab and leader of communications research at the California Load Flexibility Research and Deployment Hub (Cal-FLEXHUB). Bruce was co-editor of OpenADR 3.0 and conducts research on demand flexibility, capacity management, DC power distribution, and other topics.

Existing uses of the OpenADR 2.0b standard may continue as-is. The relationship between the two versions is similar to USB-A vs. USB-C; i.e. new products generally use USB-C, while USB-A products can continue to be used indefinitely.

The new standard was a collaborative effort among many organizations, including Berkeley Lab, which played a central role in its creation, as it did for the original versions of OpenADR. The content of the 3.0 standard is freely available for download from the OpenADR Alliance website. For further information, interested stakeholders can consult the OpenADR Alliance or contact Bruce Nordman of Berkeley Lab (bnordman@lbl.gov).

[Image source: OpenADR Alliance, 2024.]