CLTC Researches Residential Energy & Automation (REA) Systems
The CLTC will collaborate with California’s statewide electric emerging technologies program, CalNext on REA systems.
REA systems combine home-energy monitoring features with automated appliance management and control of distributed energy resources (DER) such as electric vehicle (EV) chargers, rooftop solar panels, and stationary battery energy storage (BES).
These new systems have significant potential to advance residential energy efficiency and peak demand reductions. Other benefits include residential load flexibility in the form of complete islanding or single family homes, which can remove significant load from the grid, and discharging of stationary and mobile BES (via bidirectional chargers), which can add capacity back.
[Learn more] about how CLTC works to optimize residential energy and automation systems.
Balancing a Battery-Powered Future With Energy Justice
As a new graduate student embarking on a master’s degree at the UC Davis Energy and Efficiency Institute in 2018, Meg Slattery was struck by how centrally batteries – particularly the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in electric cars – figured into California’s decarbonization strategy.
Western Cooling Efficiency Center Researchers are Presenting Three Papers at This Year’s ASHRAE Conference in Georgia
Sunday, February 5th, Paper Session 3: WCEC’s Emily Fricke will present a paper (co-authored by Vinod Narayanan, Ph.D.) on System-Level Performance Modeling of a Sub-Wet Bulb Evaporative Chiller Coupled to a Microchannel Polymer Heat Exchanger for Residential Cooling Applications.
Monday, February 6th, Paper Session 10: Presenting Author Subhrajit Chakraborty, P.E., of WCEC (co-authored by Mazen Daher, and Theresa Pistochini, P.E.) will discuss the Impacts from Electrification of Space Heating in Residences and Offices: A Comprehensive Study of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Combustion and Leaks across the United States.
Tuesday, February 7th, Paper Session 19: Caton Mande co-authored this paper on Supervisory Multi-Objective Economic Model Predictive Control for Heat Pump Water Heaters for Cost and Carbon Optimization.
New Published Paper by WCEC that Experimentally and Numerically Characterizes the Performance of a Novel Cooling and Heat Recovery System
Authors Subhrajit Chakraborty, David Vernon, Apoorva Jha and Vinod Narayanan analyze the potential of utilizing a novel indirect evaporative cooler (IEC) that can efficiently cool building ventilation air in the hot summer months, and be used as a heat recovery ventilator in winter months. Their laboratory testing of this equipment showed significant energy savings potential, and validated their IEC physics-based model. Ultimately, this will lead to accurate modeling of this energy saving technology over a variety of buildings and climates. [Read More]
