Advancing dynamic energy management

The California Load Flexibility Research and Development Hub (CalFlexHub) brings together a multidisciplinary team of experts from numerous sectors—including industry, utilities, academia, manufacturers, and non-profits—to identify, evaluate, develop, fund, and demonstrate promising pre-commercial energy efficiency and distributed energy resource technologies that are flexible, interoperable, and grid-integrated.

Goals

Advance the capability of buildings to provide a flexible energy load for the State of California
Identify, evaluate, develop, and demonstrate pre-commercial, load-flexible technologies
Standardize the signals used to communicate dynamic price and GHG information to these technologies
Achieve California’s Renewable Generation and Decarbonization Goals

Program Objectives

The CalFlexHub team seeks to achieve ambitious objectives:

Identify, develop, evaluate, demonstrate and deploy cost-effective, scalable, building load-flexible (LF) technologies that are consistent with building energy efficiency, appliance, and load management standards.
Create a portfolio of LF RDD&D technology projects across various building types and sizes including single-family-residential, multi-family, commercial buildings and integrated campuses.
Deploy LF technologies to demonstrate the ability for 99% of the state’s customers to receive the load management standards price and marginal GHG signals.
Deploy key technologies for disadvantaged and low-income communities to overcome financial and health burdens.
Identify ways to improve usability of technology solutions to increase ratepayer benefits.
Evaluate and demonstrate key technologies for disadvantaged and low-income communities to overcome financial and health burdens and develop plans to build capacity through innovation and targeted deployment of those technologies.
Leverage additional public and private funding to accelerate deployment of flexible technologies and strategies to the market.
Research and create a database of key performance metrics for 20–50 technology and strategy pathways and generate these metrics for 2025, 2030, and 2040.
Develop and deploy the CalFlexHub Solutions Center website and a clearinghouse to disseminate information, technology reports, and case studies to report on “what works,” sharing California and national R&D.