49^th PLMA Conference Full Wednesday Agenda

Co-Chair Chris Ashley EnergyHub

Co-Chair Tom Breare Kraken

Embracing A Greener Future Through Batteries, DR, and Competitive Procurement
In 2018, NY State issued an order establishing ambitious energy storage development goals. Con Edison responded with a 2020 battery DR program. Since its inception, 8+MW of batteries have enrolled, with more expected. The utility has also developed battery auto-enrolling software, calling the batteries through an API protocol, analyzing their performance, and paying customer incentives. Learn all about this program’s incentives, results, and customer engagement.

Gerrianna Cohen Con Edison

Parth Viswanathan EY

Co-Chair Leigh Winterbottom ICF

Co-Chair Troy Eichenberger Tennessee Valley Authority

Closing the Feedback Loop from DR Impacts to Effective Marketing
Now in its fifth year, PGE’s Peak Time Rebates Program provides a reliable load resource, fueled by partnering with enrollee customers to shift energy use during summer and winter peak events. The cornerstone of this successful program is identifying ideal customers to target via program-specific micro-segmentation based on E Source’s DR analytics. Learn how PGE uses these microsegments to market to high performing customers, monitor enrollee composition, and evaluate results.

Lisa Timmerman Portland General Electric

Will Gifford E Source

Sponsored by OATI

Co-Chair Allison Hamilton National Rural Electric Cooperative Association

Co-Chair Michael Brown Berkshire Hathaway, NV Energy

Providing Statewide Resilience: Beyond Extreme Events
California’s Demand-side Grid Support program enables utilities and third parties to support grid stability with flexible resources, helping mitigate the impacts of extreme events and emergencies. Approved through 2027, this program has enrolled over 300 MW of capacity and continues to evolve, providing flexible options to fuel growth and grid stability. Learn about recent results, updates to program design, plus observations and lessons learned from both administrator and provider perspectives.

Beth Reid Olivine Inc.

Devon Schmidt Olivine Inc.

Charlie Buck Sacramento Municipal Utility District

Chair Derek Kirchner TRC Companies

ICE 2.0: Quantifying the Cost of Climate-Driven Power Interruptions
Climate change has caused an increase in extreme weather events, resulting in more frequent power outages. The economic burden of these interruptions, estimated at over $150 billion annually in the U.S., represents a significant and increasingly relevant cost of climate change. Utilities and policymakers must understand the magnitude of interruption costs and which customers are most impacted by outages. To allow stakeholders to estimate these costs, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Resource Innovations (RI) are collaborating on a nationwide study to modernize the Interruption Cost Estimate (ICE) Calculator.

Kristina LaCommare Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Ridge Peterson Resource Innovations

BTM Energy Storage Expected Performance During Heat Dome Events
California’s 2022 heat dome event created life-threatening conditions and grid constraints. BTM storage helped enhance customer resilience and peak demand relief during the event, as California has 1,000+ MW of BTM residential storage power installed. Unknown is the percentage of that capacity already being dispatched versus the incremental capacity available from these systems in an emergency. Learn how storage incentivized through the Self-Generation Incentive Program performed during the heat dome and how non-program storage is used.

Brian McAuley Verdant Associates

Abigail Nguyen Pacific Gas and Electric Company

Improving Customer Choice, Reducing Bills, and Shifting Loads Via Time Varying Rates
Using smart meters, PSEG Long Island deployed four voluntary TOU rates with different peak windows, rate structures, and prices. They enrolled 12,000 customers in year one, with an outsized share of sites charging electric vehicles. Learn about the rates customers elected, the TOU customer characteristics, load shifting results, whether structural benefiters delivered demand reductions, and whether participation and load and bill impacts differ from sites with and without electric vehicles.

Josh Bode Demand Side Analytics

Tim Larsen, Ph.D. Demand Side Analytics

Sponsored by OATI

Supporting Grid Resilience in Puerto Rico with LUMA
Puerto Rico’s utility LUMA designed an EV program to collect data insights about local customer charging patterns while encouraging beneficial charging habits through monthly on-bill credits. Learn about the challenges of delivering electricity to EV drivers on an island grid system with significant and growing solar and storage assets. LUMA and WeaveGrid are working to use these assets to their fullest capacity and also expect a future where EVs serve as grid assets.

Larissa Paredes Muse LUMA Puerto Rico

Brad Davids WeaveGrid

Learnings From the Northwest on Equitable DR Program Design
Seattle City Light (SCL) has long worked to eliminate racial disparities and achieve equity through the city’s Race and Social Justice Initiative. In its first DR pilot, TempWise, SCL strived to understand and address participation barriers. Launching TempWise, SCL plus ICF and Kambo worked with community-based organizations to glean critical insights on language, housing type, and income barriers to DR participation. Learn about their findings and the marketing strategies they developed as a result.

Emma Johnson Seattle City Light

Steph Hsiung ICF

Load Shaping with Batteries: A California 2023 Summer Reliability VPP
During CPUC’s 2023 Summer Reliability Proceeding, PG&E partnered with Sunrun on its Peak Power Rewards (PPR) program, the U.S.’ largest residential VPP. The program quickly achieved its maximum enrollment of 8,500 Sunrun customers and consistently provided an average of 27 MW during a two-hour net evening peak for 90+ consecutive days, frequently supplying the grid with 30+ MW. Learn about this large-scale VPP, the program design, plus a strategic vision to scale VPP deployment nationwide.

Mark Salavitch Pacific Gas & Electric Company

Yang Yu Sunrun Inc.

Evergy’s Transition to Time Based Rates, Powered by Oracle
In December 2022, Missouri’s PSC ordered Evergy to convert all residential customers to mandatory TOU rates by December 2023, build a customer awareness + education plan by June, and start conversions by October. Evergy worked with Oracle Opower to motivate 30% of customers to pre-enroll in a TOU, then exceeded expectations with 90+% customer awareness of the new rate options and mandatory change. Learn how Evergy set a new national standard for time-based plan implementations.

Courtney Prewitt Evergy

Melissa Leymon Opower

Sponsored by OATI

Connected Communities: Frameworks for Utility Interaction and Coordinated Control
Connected communities are groups of grid-interactive efficient buildings that work together to address grid challenges and building needs. Learn about DOE’s Connected Communities program and 10 large, complex projects in which diverse stakeholders are deploying cutting-edge approaches to enable DERs, community- and grid-scale benefits. We’ll also explore the different architectures needed for utility interaction with community-scale coordinated controls, and how coordination architectures vary by stakeholder, and by the utility’s and the bulk power grid’s needs.

Lazlo Paul Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

EV Load Shapes: The Crystal Ball of Utility Programs and Planning
Utilities, regulators, governments, and the public are concerned about grid reliability with the advent of EVs. Join us to learn about actual U.S. EV load shapes; variability in charging between EV models across both days and months; driving pattern differences by model, battery size, and charging speed; managed vs. unmanaged charging; temperature and weather impacts on charging, battery drawdown, and driving habits; and how load shapes inform distribution operations, DR targeting, and forecasting.

Bill LeBlanc LeBlanc Energy Innovation

Co-Chair Joel Schofield Threshold

Co-Chair Jeff Ihnen Michaels Energy

Assessing Customer Experience and Business Models around Price-to-Device Communication and Control Pathways
California has identified dynamic retail price response as a key strategy for grid reliability and decarbonization. The CEC-funded $16M CalFlexHub program demonstrates many price-responsive flexible load technology solutions for buildings and EV charging. These include four unique communication-and-control pathways that incorporate the roles of DER device manufacturers, third-party aggregators, and others. Learn about the underlying business models and how they impact customer cost, user experience, and continuity of the solutions, based on SCE’s field demonstration projects.

Jingjing Liu Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Denver Hinds Sacramento Municipal Utility District

Co-Chair Shreyas Vangala West Monroe Partners

Co-Chair Jon Hilowitz Orange and Rockland Utilities

Yes, Smart Thermostats Can Do More Than DR!
Smart thermostats offer a whole new game! PG&E and Uplight studied automated thermostat responses during everyday TOU rate hours, in addition to running DR events. Tracking benefits closely, their demand-side analytics compared smart thermostat device data with the SmartMeter data from PG&E customers in order to pinpoint the tangible values. Learn about the three-year customers results from those who elected TOU automated response, and see the noticeable differences across thermostat manufacturers.

Wendy Brummer Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E)

Josh Bode Demand Side Analytics

Chris Lefaivre Uplight, Inc.

Co-Chair Corey Wheat Copeland

Co-Chair Brad Davids WeaveGrid

11:00 -11:30 am | Overcoming Winter DR Challenges: Results from Seattle’s BYOT Pilot
In addition to winter peaks growth in the Northwest, technology interactions, customer experiences, and a lack of shared utility experiences also present challenges. Learn about a direct load control pilot in Seattle that includes smart thermostats for electric furnaces, heat pump systems, and line-voltage thermostats. It explored a range of different dispatch strategies, including events with pre-conditioning and variable thresholds, and delivers best practice insights for winter season DR, plus takeaways around heat type and equipment.

Emma Johnson Seattle City Light

Scott Reeves Cadeo

11:30 am -12:00 pm | Addressing the Rapid Rise in Winter Peak Demand
This session will highlight the underappreciated importance of planning for winter peaks, and will identify options that are available to utilities and regulators to manage that new risk cost-effectively and reliably.  The session will begin with a discussion of the emerging challenge, which will be followed by examples of utility and regulatory initiatives underway to address the challenge.  For example, in Colorado, Xcel Energy has identified a need to develop the winter capability of their DR portfolio.  In the Midwest, resource planning has begun to account for winter peaks due to gas curtailments.  Lessons learned from winter peaking utilities (e.g., in the Northwest) and gas utilities implementing demand response programs will be discussed as well.

Ryan Hledik The Brattle Group

Co-Chair Debyani Ghosh Guidehouse

Co-Chair Melissa Leymon Oracle

11:00 -11:30 am | Enterprise DRMS to Reduce Technical Debt and Increase Program Automation
In late 2021, SDGE undertook a revamp of its demand management capabilities to simplify solutions and eliminate manual processes by centralizing all DR program management into one software solution that supported the complete DR program lifecycle, including calculating baselines with same day adjustments and the corresponding payments and penalties, full CAISO integration, and support for third-party aggregators. Learn about SDGE’s legacy DR environment, its current one, and the lessons learned in this transition.

Kathryn Smith San Diego Gas & Electric

11:30 am -12:00 pm | Engagement Platform—Voice Automation and Smartphone App for Load Management
PG&E’s Customer Engagement Platform demonstration project leveraged residential voice-assistant technology (i.e., Amazon’s Alexa smart speaker) as well as mobile telephone app functionality to engage with and educate residential customers on energy usage, PSPS, bill forecasts, and time-of-use (TOU) rates. Pilot objectives included: deployment and refining of the Energy Expert Alexa smart speaker skills and mobile phone application; understanding the effectiveness of the platform to provide information to residential customers; and providing notifications of events of immediate impact to their safety and lives. The evaluation focused on studying participant energy usage changes following usage-related notifications and understanding customer perceptions, interactions, and feedback on usability and features. Participants generally reported that the information they received from the pilot was accurate, useable, and easy to understand. Customers who received High Price notifications exhibited hourly peak-period load reductions that ranged from 3% to 5% that were incremental to impacts attributable to their TOU rate.

Albert Chiu Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E)

Orly Hasidim Universal Devices

Eric Bell, PhD Apex Analytics