This blog post is the first in a new series of stories that will document the U.S. Department of Energy’s Connected Communities project over the next five years, including the advancements and lessons learned of its 10 demonstration projects, which are scattered across thousands of buildings around the country. Follow the newsfeed on BTO’s home page and subscribe for updates to catch them all!
Attendees tour a model KB Home and its bidirectional vehicle-to-grid charging system.
In Menifee, California, on Monday, May 22, 2023, SunPower and KB Home “switched-on” one of the nation’s most advanced communities of grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs). This construction step, however small it may seem, could be its most important one to improve the reliability and resiliency of not just the community’s power needs but that of the nation’s largest and most delicate machine: the electricity grid. At Monday’s event, Acting Assistant Secretary Alejandro Moreno of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) was joined by EERE’s Building Technologies Office’s (BTO) Deputy Director Ram Narayanamurthy to tour homes and celebrate the moment with Menifee’s mayor, project partner executives, reporters, and special guests from across the buildings industry.
“Residents of this self-sufficient community are among the country’s first to enjoy the benefits of true community-scale power resiliency – a place where power outages pass by almost unnoticed with just a brief flicker of the lights,” Moreno said. “This neighborhood exemplifies much of what we’re trying to accomplish in EERE to advance the clean energy economy and transform the building sector to meet our national climate goals.”
California is already strongly affected by climate change, which impacts the safety and reliability of its energy system on multiple fronts. Due to frequent wildfires and congestion on the grid’s transmission and distribution infrastructure, California residents face energy instabilities (e.g. brownouts) and loss of service (e.g. Public Safety Power Shutoff) throughout the year. Through this project and others in the Connected Communities portfolio, DOE and its partners plan to test and demonstrate – with real-world examples – the ability of GEBs to decarbonize the buildings sector cost-effectively with renewable energy, energy efficiency, and demand response in collectively harmonized ways. This “connectedness” optimizes energy use in single and groups of buildings simultaneously, bringing more reliable power and numerous other benefits to people and the grid alike.
This Connected Community’s 219 homes, which today are in various stages of construction, will be spread across two adjacent neighborhoods, Durango and Oak Shade, within Menifee’s Shadow Mountain master plan. The homebuilder, and one of the project’s main partners, KB Home, followed their “reduce before produce” approach to home design and construction: first create energy-efficient homes and then ready them for onsite power generation. And that’s what they did in Menifee. In the “reduce” step, KB Home built all-electric homes with high-efficiency building technologies, including Rheem’s ProTerra® Hybrid Electric Heat Pump Water Heater and Carrier’s High-Efficiency Two-Stage Heat Pump for heating and cooling; ENERGY STAR®-rated appliances and components; and spray foam insulation. This made the Durango and Oak Shade homes about 40% more energy-efficient than a typical California home, which qualifies them to achieve DOE’s Zero Energy Ready Home (ZERH) certification, a trusted third-party verification program that sets the federal government's highest standards for energy and environmental performance in newly built homes.
Schneider Electric shows off their Square D™ Energy Center Smart Panel.
In the second, “produce” step, KB Home added services and technologies from SunPower, the project’s sponsor, including their Equinox® Home Solar System and SunVault™ Storage System to ensure every home’s energy system supports the microgrid’s operations. In these communities, though, KB Home is going beyond their usual two steps to take a third one. Project partners worked with KB Home to wire Durango and Oak Shade homes together across a “nested microgrid.” Schneider Electric’s Square D™ Energy Center Smart Panel was added to integrate these distributed energy resources and control them all simultaneously, a novel capability that’s essential for resiliency. This arrangement also includes bidirectional electric vehicle (EV) chargers with Vehicle to Home (V2H) technology from Kia and Wallbox. These two-way chargers allow car batteries to store renewable energy and send it back to the home to support the home’s operational reliability in multiple ways made possible through usage of car batteries. Altogether, these features allow the Durango and Oak Shade homes to stay on the larger grid during regular operations and to de-couple, or “island,” themselves from it when conditions are unstable and operate solely on their own. Each home can separate from the grid, forming a “nanogrid.” In addition, with the use of a community energy storage battery, the communities can disconnect from the grid and form a microgrid to which homes join to access the community storage.
“We are excited to partner with industry and academic leaders to bring these advanced technologies and energy solutions to our homeowners,” said Dan Bridleman, senior vice-president of sustainability, technology and strategic sourcing for KB Home. “With support from the U.S. Department of Energy, we will be able to continue to explore how these energy-smart connected communities can help protect the environment, deliver a more resilient and resourceful power grid and reduce the overall cost of long-term homeownership.” Moreno added, “We in DOE have spent the last 40 years working on individual clean-energy technology, to get them to be cost-effective, but we’re now at the point where the hardest part is understanding how all these technologies work [together].”
Acting Assistant Secretary of EERE Alejandro Moreno (center) looks on as a happy new homeowner (right) meets Southern California Edison Director of Building and Transportation Electrification Chanel Parson.
Project partner University of California -- Irvine Advanced Power and Energy Program is supporting the controller design, managing coordination with the utility, modeling the microgrid including hardware-in-the-loop testing, and leading the V2H demonstration. Southern California Edison operates the local electric grid, and as a project partner, they provided technical assistance to design and engineer the microgrid. They are also working with DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to ensure their grid-microgrid interconnection is cybersecure. DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is the national coordinator for Connected Communities, is also providing measurement and verification technical assistance in addition to synthesizing and sharing insights with other project partners and buildings sector stakeholders to replicate and scale innovations.
If all goes according to plan, these communities should keep residents comfortable and insulated from disruptions while giving Southern California Edison a new “pressure valve” to stem periods of high demand and secure grid services like frequency, phase, and voltage regulation. These benefits will consequently reduce energy costs for everyone beyond the Durango and Oak Shade communities in Southern California Edison’s service territory. At scale, building-level services could help utilities avoid capital expenditures on expensive grid upgrades and refrain from turning on “peaker” power plants that are often the dirtiest to run and costliest to maintain. Back at home, homeowners can expect to pay hundreds of dollars less on their utility bills, an added benefit for houses built and priced for first-time homebuyers.
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For general information on this Connected Community and others in the cohort, follow this blog series in BTO’s newsfeed on BTO’s home page. DOE’s Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings initiative, which funds Connected Communities, also has a dedicated website with fact sheets on GEB concepts, strategic policy reports, and a place to subscribe for email updates from the initiative. Berkeley Lab, which is the national coordinator of Connected Communities, also maintains a website with a growing library of research reports, case studies, and other technical information for stakeholders in the buildings and utility industries.
