 Stanford University. Welcome to the session on decarbonizing buildings. I think we got the best room, which means I think we're the most popular topic. And obviously, we have the best people in the audience. So that increases the value of this panel. Really, really glad to have everyone here to talk about buildings. We're going to jump right into it. We have a great set of panelists today, four folks who really address and will go through some of the different aspects of building decarbonization, the use of data and technology. So hopefully, we have time at the end for some audience questions as well. But let's just jump right into it. I'm going to ask each of our panelists to introduce themselves and then dig into a set of a few slides, and then we'll go into a few questions after that. So I will turn it over to Teddy from Energy Solutions to get us kicked off. Hi, so can you all hear me? Yes. Great. Yeah, so I'm Teddy Kish. I'm a senior fellow at Energy Solutions. And I've ever seen a strategy for the Tech Clean California Initiative, which is California's heat pump market transformation program. So we talked a little bit about the California state goals. We have 6 million heat pumps by 2030, carbon-free homes by 2045. And tech is very much about the kick-starting the pathway to get there. So tech at high level is composed of three key pillars. The first is an incentive program and wraparound market support that's really designed to create a statewide market strategy to get projects done now and get basically a business model coming through now to innovate and catalyze that market. The second is a series of pilots and quick-start grants that start to address some of those market development barriers to support soft cost reduction and look at how we achieve scale over time. And then the third pillar is really taking all of those lessons learned and figuring out how we really rigorously analyze the meter data, the installation data to apply this to the entire state. We have 30,000 units deployed already. We're going to scale up more. But we need to think about 14 million homes, the entire state. And so that's really why we have it as a central pillar, is we want to figure out how we can extract as much information from these lessons learned to scale it to a broader solution. So our high-level deployment summaries to date, we have over 1,000 contractors participating. We have over 30,000 units reserved or deployed across single and multifamily. Our target is about 40% of incentives going to low-income households or disadvantaged communities. And in terms of the data collection, we've had over 1,000 downloads of some of our raw data sets. So our goal is really to get that information into the community, not hold it, but really distribute it and share it with as many people as possible so that we can work together. So here's some high-level heat pump project results to date. So I'll touch on a couple of these ones. The first I want to highlight is customer satisfaction. First and foremost, when we want to succeed, you have to have happy customers. And so what's really exciting about some of our evaluation results so far is that we're seeing this close high 80s, low 90s, just preliminary numbers. And we think that's going to improve over time. The other is the change in gas usage. So with these two technologies, HVAC and water heating, we're hitting three quarters of the residential gas usage in a home. And we think we can actually push that higher with heat pump HVAC and heat pump water heating themselves. So we can hopefully get into the 80s with just these two technologies. Another important element is the change in electricity use. You'll notice that there's a 14% increase for both of them. The key thing on heat pump HVAC is you're actually seeing a negative peak reduction over time. Heat pump water heating, there's a slight peak increase right now. And we've seen things like the self-generation center program for water heating. It has load flexibility requirements built in. So we're looking at how we can bring down that we're seeing. But the goal here is drop peak. And then also looking at the total system benefit, it's important to really look at what kind of avoided cost value are we getting in every investment. And again, strategically figure out how we drive that value up for every dollar we spend. Really quickly, here's some of the heat pump retrofit cost drivers that are most statistically significant. And this is over about 15,000 homes. Hi there, just a couple. One is the average age of homes in a census tract. So every 10 years added to the home age, project costs increases. That has big implications about how we think about retrofitting older homes, particularly in low income households and communities, where infrastructure may be older. So we need to think about those cost investments that they're there. Another is the seasonal efficiency ratio, or the efficiency metric for AC. For every efficiency level up, we're seeing an increased cost of sear. So that's really important to think of, OK, when we go for high efficiency solutions, we're going to have increased cost. What we want to see on the metered side is that that value is coming up, and then also looking at deployment options to reduce those costs coming down. And the last really exciting part is the number of tech certified contractors serving each area. The more we have in a region that actually creates downward pressure on cost, and that's really exciting because we all want to see costs come down over time, not just going up. So let's dive into space heating electrification results. So the top chart shows basically the observed and counterfactuals. And then the bottom shows the savings over time. And what you can see here with the electrification is there's a new winter peak that's happening, as you'd expected, because you electrified your heating load. On the summer, we're seeing that slight peak demand reduction, so an 8% reduction, which is exciting. We want to keep pushing that down. So with the savings across this whole board, what you'd want to see is, how can we move all of this up, reduce the issues on the winter peak that we're creating, and really lean into that peak demand reduction we're seeing in the summer? Let's break that down further. So what does that peak demand look like across different quartiles of customers? And now you can actually see that the top quartile of customers, so this is actual savings achieved, is pretty much almost all dominated by the people who have the highest AC usage. The bottom third and fourth quartiles are actually people who maybe didn't cool that much and now are cooling more with their heat pump, or they didn't have cooling before. And so that means, again, people are electrifying because now it's hot in places that you didn't used to need AC. What we want to do from a strategic standpoint is really both target those top coolers because that's the highest return on investment, but then basically look at efficiency solutions that can push all of these up and reduce some of the issues on those people who are getting AC, but really targeting and leaning into those heavy users because that's where the biggest returns are on affordability, bill savings, et cetera. And I think that's it. And we'll talk about some of this later. And then just a quick plug for if you're interested in the data sets, we have over 20,000 heat pump projects on our website. There's downloadable data sets that we want other people to see, download, share, and learn from. Yeah. And I just want to point out the tech program was basically started by a bill passed in 2018 by Senator Stern, who spoke earlier. And that's sort of like foundation for having contractors get excited about this, early incentives, and then collecting data so that we could actually understand bill impacts and grid impacts. It's going to allow us to use that data, which will get a lot more of this year to sort of design the set of standards, and incentives, and rates that we need going forward. So it's sort of like a foundational piece. Definitely if you're a researcher or a business person interested in this data, it is available for free online. We can learn so much from this. And I think as more people access it, we'll learn even more. I will now pass it to Ram from the Department of Energy. Ram, if you'd introduce yourself and make into your slides. R and D, OK? Great. Hey, good morning, everyone. I'm Ram Narayanamurti. I'm the Deputy Director for the Building Technologies Office. And within our office, we work on R and D with building technologies, but also with deployment of residential buildings, commercial buildings, as well as building codes and standards. So it encompasses a whole range of what we do, both research, demonstration, deployment activities. Next slide. Oh, you need to. Oh, sorry. Thank you. So when we think about what we want to achieve with our building stock across the country, we want to get to this goal of net zero carbon buildings by 2050. But we want to do that with the people-centered vision. Because ultimately, buildings are where people live. You work, you study, you shop. So you have to keep people in mind, whether it's around the environment, indoor air quality issues. We have to make sure that we have energy justice in mind as we focus on our low and moderate customers. But also think about community preservation, resilience, and the overall energy and economic security. So it's very encompassing because it's about jobs. It's about energy. It's about affordability. So what's our vision? Our vision is that we want to prioritize equity, prioritize affordability, and prioritize resilience. And the last one is especially important. As we think about going from three sources of fuel to one, it means that we have to have that one source a lot more reliable. It puts a lot greater onus on our electricity grid. As well as how we manage our buildings. So we have to keep that in mind as we think about resilience. Because just last week, I was talking to somebody and they were talking about how in Portland, 60,000 people who have heat pumps didn't have heat for four days when they had the ice storm. So we really have to think about it. Senator Stone talked about it in terms of how we serve the people. And what we want to do is with those things in mind, we want to double building energy efficiency by, increase building energy efficiency by 50% by 2050. It's going to be critical that if we don't invest in efficiency, we're going to have to over invest in a grid. We have to accelerate on-site emissions reductions, whether that's through embodied carbon, whether it's through or whether it's through combustion. We have to transform the grid edge. We have traditionally always looked at the energy grid top down or our planning is top down. What we are seeing as we try to electrify buildings industry and transportation is that the grid edge becomes where all these costs and all these challenges come up. So Teddy, when you go into home and they don't have enough panel capacity, how do you actually do that? And then once you increase the panel size, that triggers the upgrade on the transformers. It just kind of all those things cascade. So we have to think about how we really rethink the grid edge as we get to this net zero carbon vision. Not going to go into all of this, but essentially what we want to do, 2030 get the technologies in place, catalyze the transformation, we have the IRA incentives, we have the infrastructure law incentives, use those incentives to get the train moving. And then in 2030 to 40 really adapt and scale. And then by 2050 we have to complete the transition. I just think about, we have 25 years. 25 years ago, if we do what we did in the last 25 years, we're not going to hit those targets. We are actually looking for a hockey stick. It's a very Silicon Valley term. It's a hockey stick. And we have to figure out how to hit that hockey stick. So just as an example, when we think about heat pumps and heating, on the bottom right is a very interesting graph. It actually shows you where heat pumps are not a new technology. A lot of people think of them as new technologies and not. We have been installing heat pumps for 50 years, except that most of the installations are in the southeast, where electric rates are low. So one of the things that we see is that there is a correspondence. Correlation doesn't mean causation. So I'll caveat that. But there is a correlation between electric rates and heat pump adoption around the country. So you really have to think about how we think of a rates and customer economics, how we think about installation costs. All of those things have to happen to get to a 2050 goal. And ultimately, this is a vision of an integrated energy system. So one of our efforts in this area is what's called Connected Communities, where we are looking at how do you actually integrate not just buildings, but buildings, industry, transportation, energy storage, how do all of this come together so that we can get to that completely integrated energy system, which is required for us to achieve our 2050 goals. And actually, I'll just throw one more slide and pause here. This is going to go pretty fast. But one of the things here is that it did go very fast. So part of what we are doing within Connected Communities is looking at resilience, too. So one example is we have a project in Southern California with SunPower, where they're building all zero energy homes, all electric homes. But looking at why it's in a high wildfire zone. So how do you actually do that? How do you do community microgrids? How do you provide the resilience while you're building these all electric homes? So we are investing in understanding, both in reduction, cost reduction for electrification, improving energy efficiency, and how do you build out a more resilient built environment over the next 30 years? So with that, let me pass it off to Marianne. Great. Thank you. Yeah, I'm advancing it. There it goes. So I'm actually going to stand up so I can, oops, now I have to go back. OK. There we go. Just so I can see my slides a little better. Hello, everybody. I want to thank the folks who organized today's event. The Stanford team and the California Energy Commission. I'm Mary Ann Piat from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. And it's great to follow Ram in his remarks here. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is one of the national labs that collaborate with the Department of Energy. And I'm really excited to talk about buildings. There are basically four main ways that we can decarbonize operational energy. Greater levels of energy efficiency. And Ram talked about that. Because everybody's asking us, how do we build out the electric grid for electrification? And the role of energy efficiency is as important as ever. And so that's a key pillar that Dewey's been investing in and will continue to invest in. Second one is distributed energy resources. So putting PV on your house or some sort of generation and storage is a really important piece of the grid. Third is electrification. Clearly, that's where all that growth is coming from. And then that fourth one is grid integration. So I'm going to talk about all of them in some ways. And I'm going to start with one of the big challenges is retrofits. So people, we know we need to put in better windows and they're expensive. We know we need to put in those heat pumps. Do them together to make that facade better and then downsize the heat pump. We care a lot about the cost of electricity. And there were comments about it earlier this morning. It really makes it hard for people to understand how those prices will change in the future. It's not just the total bill, but it's not just how much energy you use but when you use the energy. And that's very different from where we were a few years ago if we think about the electric grid. What is the value proposition for flexible load? And I'll talk a little about that because we know the duck curve is still a problem. And as we grow out that bottom, so the duck curve you all know, the bottom picture is the IPER forecast from the California Energy Commission about the low growth, the different scenarios for how much we need to build out the grid. The role of flexible load and energy efficiency will help us downsize that build out. And that's critical to give people incentives to have a flexible load. And then the lack of coordinated controls and communication systems, what is it going to look like if we want to communicate with all those devices? So that's a really important piece of one of the challenges that we're thinking about. Now the California Energy Commission has set a 7 gigawatt flexible load target. That's based on some of the work we've been doing in modeling how much flexible load exists in California. These are called the demand response potential studies. We're about to release phase four. We've been working on shape shifting, shedding, and shimmying the load to try to define the grid services that the flexible load can provide. And on the right is a picture of a supply curve of flexible load. Flexible load can be more cost effective than putting in an electric battery. So we want to have enable flexible load. So this shows about you can get about five gigawatt hours of flexible load per day at less than $150 per kilowatt hour. So we compare flexible load and energy storage as kind of a reference. And there's no lifecycle circular economy build out we need for energy storage if you're using flexible load. So we're really concerned about the lithium supply chain and the other costs associated with owning and operating batteries and energy storage systems. Now thermal energy storage is also important. And I'm starting to hear people say, actually to get to net zero for large commercial buildings, we may need TES and electric storage and energy efficiency and that 24-7 clean energy. Today, most of the three gigawatts that we get in demand response is actually manual. Most of the DR is manual. We want automated price response. So the state of California is trying to use electricity pricing to incentivize flexible load. And they're creating something called Midas. And the load serving entities are going to have to publish hourly tariffs that the buildings can automatically respond to. So we're working on those that flexible demand appliances like the pool pumps, but also trying to make sure the heat pump water heaters, the HVAC systems, and the EVs can respond to prices. So we're really interested in making sure we're going to build out that capability. So we need flexible assets. We need standardized communication and integrated control. And we have something called the California Load Flexibility Research and Deployment Hub, where we're doing a portfolio of projects across California. I'll show you the distribution of those projects. But the basic idea is use the electricity in the middle of the day when it's the cleanest and less around dinner time when it's the dirtiest and the most expensive. And that also you see a little bit of a morning peak there. We do think California will become winter peaking. The net load will be winter peaking when we add all those heat pumps. So we're moving to a world where we still need to control and integrate with devices. And that's going to help reduce bills. You could save maybe 10% exactly how you set the prices, whether it's a subscription tariff or critical peak prices or variable peak prices or continuous real-time pricing is a big challenge. And there's a lot of work underway to actually model how much do we get from flexible load and can we increase the elasticity of those loads. This is my second to last slide. This is just a picture of the 30 buildings where we have projects in the field. And we're testing the ability to respond to hourly prices. PG&E is going to put out a pilot with 1,000 homes on RTP because we think about real-time pricing for mostly larger buildings. But we are looking at the role of smart thermostats, heat pump water heaters, EV charging, pool pumps, not just to be able to receive a signal, but what is the information content and can they actually respond to prices. So we can do four hours of automated demand response. Can we do 8760 hours of continuous price response or a greenhouse gas signal? We're also working, so across all sectors. And you can see in the dark blue there, we have a couple of campuses. We'd love to better coordinate with Stanford. We've talked a little about the demand response and price response at the Stanford campus. We're working at UC Merced, using the on-site solar at Merced to charge the thermal energy storage system. So changing the way they interact and control their devices, integrating predictive controls. That's a big term you're gonna hear a little more about, predictive controls. And this is an important portfolio. A third of our sites are in disadvantaged communities. So we wanna make sure of these folks also get to participate with these new tariffs. So this is my final slide. Grid interactive, efficient electrified buildings are key for decarbonization, the technologies you know about, key pumps, but also envelope and controls, integration of EVs, PV and storage. Customer engagement is critical because if people don't want these things, we're not gonna scale up. Open ADR we've been working on is almost, it is 20 years old. So we need to really hurry up, as Rahma's saying. Equity is a huge challenge and the California Load Flexibility Research and Deployment Hub is here to try to help understand how to accelerate this activity. Thanks. Great. Thank you. And just before Jacos, I just wanna acknowledge, there's been a lot of work on this in California developing load management standards. For example, the CEC, Commissioner McAllister is in the audience who's been a leader on that, as well as all the funding that's gone from the CEC and the DOE to start to learn in real time what is actually working and not. So these sorts of results are really helpful to inform our policy going forward. Jacques, take it away. Thanks. So my name is Jacques Deschandard. I'm a researcher in the Energy Science and Engineering Department here at Stanford. And so today I want to talk a bit about some experience we've been running on this campus for the last couple of years and you'll see some echoes to some of what Marianne was just talking about. Before I start, I want to preface this by saying I'm talking about commercial buildings. So not residential buildings, I think buildings like the one we're in right now, large buildings. And even more specific than that, I'm thinking about commercial buildings over 5,000 square feet, really. And why those? They represent 50% of the number of commercial buildings, but over 90% of the energy consumption. So I'm thinking of large commercial buildings and in large commercial buildings like the one we're in right now. So cooling comes to this building in the form of chilled water through a chilled water loop that's cooled in one central location on this campus and that comes here. And then the cold water is used to cool down air, which is then blown through a central duct to different parts of the building. And then in the different parts of the building, you control how much air goes in. And it's the interaction between the control systems in different parts of the building, the weather outside, the people inside, and really many other quirks that determine what the chilled water load of this building is going to be over a day, which is why answering this question, which might seem simple, is actually not so trivial. How much does the cooling, A, what is the building's cooling load on a given day? And B, what happens if we increase the temperature set points in a subset of zones by two to eight Fahrenheit? In other words, if I don't do it everywhere, if I say I'm going to target some of the zones in this building and reduce their load, what happens if I do that? And so we started testing some buildings. We started this in 2020. And we tested this one, okay. And so we tested, so this is not actually data from this building that we did test the building we're in right now. This is from a building on the engineering quad. And the data you see in the plot there, so the y-axis is what I was trying to measure. So the serve cooling load, how much chilled water is going to that building on a given date? So each point is one day's worth of data. The x-axis is the mean daily temperature, so how hot it was outside. And then the blue dots correspond to a temperature set point of 74 Fahrenheit that we were giving the zones and the red dots two degrees higher. So the difference between the blue dots and the red dots here is what I'm trying to measure. And so a few important points here. So first, the number that we get, 20%, is the difference between those two lines I'm showing here. And that number is quite big. 20% reduction for a two degree Fahrenheit set point adjustment, two degrees is really not so much. The second thing you see is that there's, so a CI there stands for confidence interval. In other words, the building doesn't do the same thing every day in these conditions. But by, so we were calling this stress testing buildings, by testing these buildings repeatedly, we're able to observe the behavior of the building over multiple days. We collected data actually for three years. This is just one summer's worth of data and we can calculate these confidence intervals and that gives you information that you can then pass on to energy system operator to say, okay, the building doesn't respond the same every day, but I can give you some bounds on what's going to happen. Okay, and then another point I'd like to make about this plot is that I'm not controlling every single zone in the building. And this is especially important for commercial buildings where, so commercial buildings from this campus, for example, pretty much every single building has at least one critical load. And if the way you're controlling the building is uniform, well really as soon as you have one critical zone in the building, the whole building is critical, which means most of your cooling load on a campus is critical and there's nothing much you can do. But if you can start to say, I'm only going to control parts of the building, well the problem becomes a bit harder because now you need to understand what's the reaction of the building to that subset of zones, but there's a chance you can go from a building level priority list to a zone level or a room level priority list. Okay, so we tested many buildings and here really what I'm showing in this plot is the response of 11 buildings we tested. This is coming from their 1200 days of experiments over three years in total. We wrote software to be able to talk to different zones and buildings. We controlled over 1300 zones. We excluded 359 others. And we did this in 11 buildings across this campus. And here what you see is that the response and I'm showing data for two degree and also four degree Fahrenheit set point changes. So each of the groups of vertical bars is a building and the y-axis there is the percent impact. So the difference between the two lines I was showing on the previous plot. And what you see here is that the response varies two ways. The dot, which is the median estimate, sort of how much we think the building's going to give you, that's different from building to building. And one of the reasons is these buildings are all very different. Commercial buildings are all very different. Some of them are labs. In the labs we only control a subset of the zones and part of the chilled water load is for processed loads, which really we're not controlling. In other buildings like this one we get a lot more. You know this building I think we get something like 20%, 25%. And then the width of the confidence intervals is also something that changes from building to building. But by running these tests, by running these experiments, at some point I was trying to think of them as fire drills, you can collect data on the building and update your model for what's happening in the building. And that's something you can use to communicate to the people managing the system. OK, what is this all about? And I think this was said much better than I could by the people before me. I think the core question behind this is how do we build less infrastructure? If we're looking at the coming 25 years, there's a lot of investment there we're going to need to make no matter what. If there are ways we can find to build less of that infrastructure, that's going to have a lot of value. And so here, again, with the example of this campus, what I'm showing on this plot on the left there, the y-axis is total chill water load for the entire campus now, so all 150, depending on your count, 200 buildings on campus. And I'm showing curves for each of the years from, I think it was 2017 to 2021 on that plot. And this is what's called a low-duration curve. So y-axis is total chill water load on one day. And I'm stacking the days from highest to lowest from left to right. So how steep that curve is coming into the x-axis, that really tells you something about the value proposition of flexible demand, what Marianne was just talking about. And so the steeper the curve, basically, that means the more infrastructure you need to build for a small number of days. So how do I get to that 15% number that I have on that slide? So we tested, I said, 11 buildings over three years. So for those buildings, I have an estimate of what they can do when I change the temperature set point. And then we have some following work to say, for the buildings that we didn't test, how much do they look like the combination of buildings that we did test to extrapolate our estimate and generate a pool estimate for all buildings on campus? And this is sort of our best guess for what we think would happen in the buildings we didn't test based on what we did do. And putting that all together, I get to this 14% reduction number for a two-degree Fahrenheit set point change. So what I was trying to illustrate there is, I think these are things that we can do right away. We've been running these tests for three years. They're looking to the coming years just to piggyback on some of the priorities that we were given earlier. Some things I think that, how do we make data collection and automation cheaper, much, much cheaper than it is right now? Which parts of the buildings do we need to control? One other thing I didn't talk about so much, but when running these experiments, you realize that not all parts of the buildings are equal. So maybe you don't need to control every part of the building to get to this result. And then there's, I think the part that we're really just starting to scratch the surface on here, which is that there are people, I guess to what Ron was saying earlier, there are people inside these buildings and they're mixed use. And so for example, if I wanted to do something in this room, now I need to care about everyone in this room, not just me. And that's very different from the home or an office where there's one person you're looking at. And so that's going to be a challenge that I think we haven't really figured out yet. Great, and just to confirm, how many angry professors have called you about this experiment? Hi. So. Oh no, is there some? What? I was assuming the answer would be there have been very few. So yes, the answer is very few, but not to you. All the human element always is the most difficult. But with sort of small changes that actually add up, I mean, I think that's what we're sort of seeing here is like you, there's a lot of buildings. A few of them matter in terms of the total energy use, the total GHGs. And if you can make some small changes in those places, you could avoid a lot of cost and also save on bills too. If you're cutting, you know, your cooling use by 14%, that's really significant. We'll go to, I have a few questions and I'll open up to the audience. I'd love to just hear about the role of equity in your work. You know, I'm hearing about new technologies, buying new appliances perhaps, and maybe even just like the ability to be flexible with when you're using power. And part of my mind automatically goes to like, what if someone really needs air conditioning in that hour? Or they didn't have air conditioning and they need it, like we should make sure that happens. So just what is the role of thinking about including everyone in the energy transition as we go forward and sort of how that plays out in some of the research and work you're doing? So I'll just go down the line if you're interested to respond. Sure, yep. I'd say the three things. The first is integrated when you're starting out. That's our first principle. So when we developed tech, we looked at integrating the Justice 40 as a goal. So we started with 40% of incentives and benefits flowing to low income households or disadvantaged communities. 80% of our quick start grants, half of our pilots are focused on infrastructure or adoption barriers that are specifically focused in low income communities. Because again, there could be older infrastructure. There's going to be, there's challenges around payment and how we support financing those areas. So we focused intentionally a lot of them on the barriers and challenges there. The second is be intentional about how we support these customers. So in California with higher electricity rates, one challenge is you might have higher bills from electrification. And so what we said is we're going to collect really rigorous data initially to really understand these things and not start by giving people surprise bills. So focusing, okay, we're going into investments. They're going to have maybe high existing AC loads where we know there's going to be a benefit there or coupling efficiency measures with a heat pump, let's say water heater systems or something like that or working with low income programs so that we didn't have some of the adverse bill impacts until we know more about it. And the third thing is creating scalable models so we don't leave communities behind. We have a pilot called inclusive utility investment or tariffed on-bill investment. Dr. Holmes Hummel is one of the people we're collaborating with, but that's a really important element of, when we think about equity, it's also about the number of communities we can serve. If we have millions of homes that we need to serve in California, if we only get to 200,000 of them, that's not enough. So it's really thinking about how we develop scalable deployment models that can allow us to stretch our dollars further and meet more people's needs. Thanks. It's a great question. So the DOE, we have eight earth charts. We just released our last one, which was in October, the secretary announced it. And the eighth one is actually called the affordable homes earth chart. Because for us, what we look at is addressing the transition for LMI customers is actually equivalent to doing an earth chart. It is big enough. It's a huge challenge, right? There's challenges with, if you electrify many of these multifamily communities, you're switching who paid for the bills. In many cases, the gas bill is paid for by the owner, electric bill paid for by the tenant. So there's a challenge there. A lot of the technologies we have might not fit in multifamily communities or smaller homes. So how do you address that? The issue of infrastructure. Investing in low power appliances, much more efficient appliances, and developing them, that's part of the challenge. So we are addressing it in multiple ways, trying to get the economics, but also the fit addressed. The other thing is also, if you look at the IRA, there's a whole effort around what's called the HERA program, which is a direct install program for LMI customers. There's some really good research from ACEE Tripoli, I think, about six, eight years ago, that showed that rebate direct install programs have a much greater impact on loan monitoring customers versus rebate programs. So that's part of that strategy, looking at it as a direct install, how do we actually address it, and doing it in a comprehensive manner, right? Because it's not just about energy, it's about quality of life. It's about getting that dual pane window so that the air pollutants from the nearby freeway don't come inside the house, right? Getting rid of the swamp cooler so that you don't have mold issues. So looking at it from a very comprehensive manner, and being able to get technologies that really improve the quality of life, I think that's a focus area for us as we move forward. Great, thanks. Those are good comments. I'm gonna talk about the role of equity in flexible load, and one of the foundations in California is the concept of using electricity tariffs to incentivize devices to be flexible. One of the concepts I think is important is in the pilots, they often have shadow bills. So a shadow bill will be like a time of use and you'll get on a dynamic tariff. And your bill is, it's not gonna go up, it can only go down because your shadow bills are referenced. I actually think we should have low income shadow bills like a TOU all the time so they can only save money. So that way, if you have a flexible device and you can get it to use, it also helps in behavior. So if you go on a highly dynamic tariff, you could save money, but you're not gonna pay more. When we test low income consumers with automated thermostats that respond to prices, they don't use the automation. They turn it off and control it themselves, which a lot of us do. We only turn on the cooling or the heating when we really need it. So they may be not good candidates for that automated price response. We also are looking at the concept of installing batteries in appliances like there is a new electric stove that has electric cooktop with a battery in it. And we're also looking at, we're working with big ass fans and smart thermostats and can we actually have a battery in the fan so if the power is out, at least there's some fan. So how do you integrate fans, which are great for improving the comfort of the home. So just like Ram said, we need to actually improve the quality of life by also understanding the way they operate these devices. So there's a lot of work to do in this space. Great, thank you. John, anything to add? So one thing I would, I think one difference here is thinking about where we work versus where we live. I think that when it comes to equity, there's a difference there. And for multi-family dwellings would probably be counted by most people as commercial buildings, but I think it's different from a commercial building where you work because typically there are controls that are per unit, so per family. Whereas for commercial buildings where we work, I think one of the big differences is that there makes use. And so it's what I was saying earlier, many people are using this space right now. And one piece of data that I can share on that. So we did do, and I guess which talks a bit to the question about people getting angry for me learning experiments. So we ran a survey on this campus during last quarter. And so we're still analyzing the results, but I can't share two things that come out of that that I think speak to this a bit. The first one is, and this was a survey where essentially what we're trying to do is estimate what's called the willingness to pay from people from avoiding capacity upgrades. In other words, would you be okay with me changing thermostats every so often if it means I can avoid these big capacity upgrades at the centralized level? And the first thing is for the median estimate is quite small. For most people it's pretty cheap. But then there's what's called a long right tail. In other words, there's a small fraction of the population for whom it is very expensive and who really don't want you to do it. And I think in mixed use buildings, that is especially challenging. Something that we really need to think about is how do you manage that? If you really, if you want to be able to unlock flexibility potential from these buildings, which I think on the technical side, we think there is, how do you do it while responding to the needs of the entire population? Yeah, yeah. So I don't know if it's an answer. I think it's more of a challenge. Yeah, and I do think, I mean it was interesting, Marianne, on your slides, a lot of the demand, the flexible loads came from the commercial and the industrial sector in terms of like the total volume of being able to switch loads. So part of, I think what we're hearing is like, some sectors can and should do more work in terms of flexibility than others. And I just wonder what you think about that. I think that's right. So we don't have a lot of electric heat pumps yet in for either space heat or water heat. We do for air conditioning, but air conditioning is not used all hours of the year. So if we look at, in the spring, where the duck curve is the deepest, there's not a lot of air conditioning. That's why the duck curve is there. So as we electrified, there will be more flexible load in residents. But I agree with you, C&I is more sophisticated. So they're more able to understand the bill impacts and people want predictable bills. That's the other thing about using dynamic tariffs. It's a risk transfer, but the customers feel, I'm not sure they will adopt them. And it's reasonable for an individual who's a lot going on their lives to not want that risk. Right, like, I'm not sure I want that risk, but hopefully my appliance will figure it out for me. But we may see a role for third parties that can say, you've got these devices, I'm gonna help you figure out and it's in the cloud. Great, so just one more question. For me, I'm wondering about policy needs that you see to make what you're doing, where you see the building sector going work. So let's go down the line again, just, I know there's probably 10 things you all want, but maybe pick one in terms of a policy or regulatory change that would really help move this forward. I think Commissioner Hoekschild had a great line about, we're in the phase of the great implementation. And so a lot of the policy things I would look at are very implementation-based. And I think we have some great policy structures that are already starting. So in terms of implementation, really looking to the California Solar Initiative, the success we've had with electric vehicles, 25% market share, and dissecting those market structures that we've created to succeed with implementation. Because heat pumps are at low adoption, we need to scale them at a pace that's much, much quicker than actually be to the solar or EVs. So what that would mean is two components. The first is the California Heat Pump Initiative or the California Building Electrification Initiative modeled after the California Solar Initiative, the California Clean Vehicle Rebates Program, which is a multi-year, multi-billion dollar, large-scale investment to help give market certainty and help have deployment-based scale where we can reduce cost over time. So something like that that's large scale the same way we've succeeded with solar and EVs. The second is, and that helps really address upfront cost with that kind of thing. What you need also is a customer value proposition on operational cost. We've talked a little bit about that as well. And that is challenging right now with rates. So I would say the other policy element is the rate reform that allows operational costs to be bankable, that customers can see bills go down or you have a third party that can monetize that asset. And the reason why is you look back to why solar and EVs succeed, there's a customer value proposition. Hey, I can make your meter contractor says, I can make your meter run backward. Customer gets excited about that. Every solar ad I see starts with, do you want your meter to go backwards? Same thing with EVs, right? I'll make your gas bill disappear. We need that for electrification. So rate reform is really a part of it. Great, Ram. I'm gonna actually double down on what Teddy said, right? Rate reform. We cannot electrify. I cannot go to my neighbor and tell him to put a heat pump in because those bills are gonna go up, right? You can't do that. So we need to figure out our electric rates. As we saw that correlation states where you have low electric rates have higher proportion of heat pump adoption. I think that customer value proposition is something we hear, not just from California, from New York, from Europe, from everything, right? So we really have to think about how we structure our energy rates so that we can make electrification a positive value for the customer. Great. So I'm gonna make a comment about rates but also make a comment about demand response. The concept that Ram just said about rates is very important because it will slow down electrification because people are concerned about rates increasing. Dynamic rates are one way to address that. But that concept of having a shadow bill, I believe should be, if you're willing to go on a highly dynamic rate, you should only be able to save money. So if we had a shadow bill, a TOU shadow bill for everyone, it would really help us justify the investments and we will need third parties to help. Currently, the third parties are delivering about three gigawatts of demand response. But they're doing that with capacity payments in so many hours, 100 hours of DR. Can they also enable those devices for the DR to continuous price response? So we actually need a new business model for these third parties to help facilitate those hot summer day DR events and that continuous integration because the DR aggregators are saying, well, okay, we just went out and recruited all these DR customers. Now you want price response, how do we do those together? So we have to figure out new business models to deliver that with some guarantee that this reference tariff, you can only save money. So those third parties can help you figure out how to control your devices. So there's work on the controls and communications. Great, thank you. John? So picking one is hard. But I guess, so there are two, okay, so I'll pick one. And I think that addresses- You can have two. Two, well, then I'll give you two barriers that I see, I like the phrase about implementation. How do we get to implementation? How do we move from planning to implementing the transition? How do we do that? Two barriers that I see that are very big for me are labor costs, which I think is linked, in some ways to that, legacy systems. Sort of, because these are big investments, long, slow turnover, long duration projects, this is one reason why all these buildings are different is because they were all designed, built, retrofitted, changed, updated, upgraded at different points in time. And so what's in them is different everywhere. And I think so, the one I would choose would be something around codes, something around regulations, both within buildings and also thinking about, earlier, I think it was Ron was saying something about the things cascading up. If you do a retrofit of a heat pump or something, or you upgrade your panel, and then that bubbles up into upgrading the transformer, and that means more, and so that goes up. If there were easier to say, at the substation level, for example, I'm going to be doing some managing of loads, which means I don't need to upgrade that substation. There's gonna be a lot of savings, and therefore a lot of incentive, I think, to do that, which is different, I think, a bit from the rate, sort of like the changing to a different rate value proposition. It's more about investment costs, saving on investment costs, and so I don't know if that's the only way, but codes, I think, is one way to try to tap at that value stream. Yeah, great. Let's go to any questions from the audience. We have a couple minutes. Do we have microphones for folks? Let's go, this lady here. Can't see that well, I'm here. Hi, thanks. Mindy Craig with Blue Point Planning, and I've had the opportunity to work with a number of you guys on various action plans for the state. Super loving this panel, it's awesome. One of the, I have so many questions, but I'm gonna try and boil it down. One of the things I hear, which is great, is the loading order, energy efficiency, and then local renewables has always been something that we've talked about, and then community neighborhood, and then importing. And one of the things we have been not talking about today is that intermediate, you just started that, that there's something between talking to a homeowner and importing our energy. So I think at the district scale, using combination of thermal, solar, and storage to answer some of these problems. And I'm just kinda curious if you guys can talk a little bit about that as a way of scaling this work and not working with just an individual, but looking at this sort of load sharing amongst a district or a neighborhood or a community. Yeah, I think both of you guys have some projects related to that. Do you wanna start? Sure, yeah, I can take this one. So the whole connected communities effort is looking at community scale. So we have a district in Spokane, which is in downtown Spokane, a large commercial building that went all electric with the heat recovery chillers. And they're using demand flexibility to avoid a substation. And then there's other projects which are looking at multifamily, right? How do you actually do centralization of heating, water heating? Because we are going from an era where we talked about energy efficiency to an era where we're gonna be worried about power efficiency. And centralization and community scale really helps your power efficiency. So we have a number of those projects that are going on. It's something that we look at more in depth. Happy to talk to you more, Mindy, about those things and what we're learning. But you're right, going to community scale, there's also a potential benefit for resilience because you can put in maybe additional different, like fuel cells, for example. I'd be able to provide you community scale resilience, right, so we're looking at all of those. Yeah, so Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is actually the national coordinator for the Connected Communities Program, and thanks to ROM. And one of the reasons we were innovating in that space was we were involved in something called Oakland Eco Block, which is led out of UC Berkeley. And it's a retrofit, an urban retrofit to try to create an urban microgrid and include small businesses and homes. Not every home on the block is part of it, but it is energy storage, energy efficiency, electrification, and EVs. And it's very difficult, the regulatory hurdles are huge to do those things. So the team is Trees Pfeffer at UC Berkeley, is the lead on that. But I also think that the comment Jacques made about when we, the distribution system upgrades are really where a lot of the action is also. We heard the 10 times investment, 10 times size. And so the, your neighborhood block and your local distribution, your substation is a super important part. And there's a lot of vendor, some third parties that are trying to do EV charging that's spread out on the distribution system. So we will see things for EV charging, which is different than just price response. But there are a huge need for understanding the locational value of these load management systems, as well as the community scale micro grids. I think that's a huge space for us to continue to invest in and try to understand how to bring communities together around these systems. And if you get a chance, I would encourage everybody to talk to distribution planners at Utilities. There are just very few of them. They have a very different way of thinking. Yeah. They're hard to find. Yeah, hard to find. You'll learn some stuff. Let's do one more question, because I know we're gonna get in the way of lunch. So let's go to this woman here and then we'll close after that. Claire Broom, 350 Bay Area. And thanks to the panel for really a fantastic discussion. I'd like to take Marion's last question and maybe drill down a little further, because I do think the policy barriers are a huge issue. You've shown all this potential for more flexible load, for decreased investment in infrastructure when you, and some of it's locational, but particularly when you can decrease peak load demand. And so I've been extremely frustrated that, and this is a question where you're gonna, you can all throw up your hands. But when the Public Utility Commission doesn't let EV charging in shared multi-unit apartments happen, when they refuse to let the local solar cover that charging, that's a problem for the kind of things I think you're trying to do. And the fact that they don't value resiliency when they do a cost-effectiveness study of DERs. So okay, over 95% of outages are on the distribution grid. So should there be a value for resiliency? So I guess my question is, how do we get the regulatory infrastructure aligned with your vision? Anyone wanna take this very simple question? It's a, we might have to continue over lunch though, just to preamble. It's a really good question, and it gets to the point of how, we're going to decarbonize. Question is, how quickly and how much does it cost that's a big, big question. How much does it cost and what kind of value will we get at it? How can we afford to do it? And so one really, the reason why tech has so laser focused on data collection, we have customer satisfaction data, we have through the CEC, we have about 80% of electric meters and gas meters in the whole state where we're doing rigorous data analysis to come up with these questions of, on it across 7,000 homes, 10,000 homes across the state, where are we seeing the highest avoided costs? What are the load building in places that didn't have cooling? You're getting to a point where we need more information to make large scale, large multi-billion dollar investments that we need to do. So I come back to the information data collection element that we really need to continue that so that all of these processes are very data driven and right now we need more data to make these strong investment decisions. And data access. Yeah, I mean that's kind of what tech has already done is we have public data sets, 20,000 installs that are already public. You can download them today, right? We're getting meter data later this year that will be anonymized, aggregated, but public so people can actually start using this information for stakeholders. Yeah, I- The variant of the last word. Well, I'll just make a really quick comment that I like your idea of valuing the local resilience. And I think our valuation frameworks need to evolve because we've done energy efficiency and lease cost utility planning, but we're in a new era with climate change and with electrification. So I do think we need new metrics and that will help enable some of these things to be more cost effective and hopefully the utilities would have the incentives to facilitate the DER investments as well. So it's a good point. And I think just to- The last last word. Last last word. We are doing some frameworks because resilience is not just the grid resilience. It's about your efficiency. It's about getting better envelopes. So if you're looking at how you can get passive survivability and resilience is a holistic framework. So that's something that we are definitely looking at. Great. Thank you guys all for being here. Let's give our panel a hand. Thank you.