Reducing power plant carbon emissions may ultimately be in the hands of electric utility customers with the technology to automatically reduce their usage not only during peak demand but continuously.

Some utilities, relying on time-of-day rates or discounts to fixed tariffs, already signal customers through mobile phone texts to reduce power consumption during certain hours or as overall demand rises.

But much more can be accomplished, according to an analysis under way at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Electricity Markets and Policy Department. What it will require is for local utility grids to become truly interactive with their customer loads using “technologies that are promoting demand flexibility and enabling a comprehensive transformation to a modern grid,” said Kate Strickland, research manager of utility and regulatory strategy for the Smart Electric Power Alliance.

Strickland on July 28 moderated a webinar, “Crowd Sourcing Carbon Reduction with Demand Flexibility,” which introduced some of Berkeley’s analysis of projected future demand for the U.S. Department of Energy using grid-interactive technologies (GITs). The webinar also included some examples of programs and technologies already employed.

Natalie Mims Frick, an energy efficiency program manager at the lab, said the deployment of GITs, enabling customer systems to interact with a utility, could cut the nation’s utility carbon emissions by 6% by 2030, according to the lab’s analysis of 2013 data.

“The study [was] funded by the Department of Energy’s Building Technology Office,” she said, in its effort to develop “a national roadmap for grid-interactive efficient buildings.”

“The primary driver of the emissions reductions is the decrease in fossil fuel-based electricity generation, due to lower overall electricity demand, [as well as] changes in timing of electricity consumption through demand-flexibility measures and technologies that can shift usage to hours with lower emissions rates,” she said.

In other words, the sophisticated technology that DOE wants utilities to deploy would lead to the “crowd sourcing” of emission reductions. And it would occur seamlessly, without the need for a customer to continually have to worry about it.

One utility that already works with customers to reduce demand, more on an hourly basis, is Holy Cross Energy, a cooperative serving rural communities in central and western Colorado.

Lisa Reed, power supply supervisor at Holy Cross, said “demand flexibility will absolutely be key to our successful journey to 100%” carbon-free power.

“We are already seeing evidence of this in our peak-time payback program, where our members can opt in to receive emails or text messages from us, asking them to voluntarily reduce their consumption,” she said. The company targets a two- to four-hour period during which it expects demand to significantly increase and then contacts subscribers in the program.

“For every kilowatt-hour they reduce during that period, they get paid a substantial incentive: 50 cents or $1,” depending on the overall peak that occurs. “And with our individual members doing this, we can also save our membership as a whole, upwards of $15/kW in avoided demand charges on our wholesale electric bill,” she said.

One of the utility’s largest customers, the Eagle River Water & Sanitation District, participates “by simply changing the timing of their water treatment and pumping runs,” Reed said.

For those customers who have the ability to store energy on-site, the co-op has contracts to buy power from them if it is needed.

“Another approach that we have is our distribution flexibility bill credit, a tariff-based program that we created [in which] we basically buy a capacity call option from our own cooperative members. We pay them a set monthly bill credit in exchange for having the option to manage their flexible resource,” Reed said.

Tyler Rogers, senior director of sales at EnergyHub, a Reno, Nev.-based company that helps utilities with distributed generation technology, said harnessing “flexible load,” as Holy Cross does, will grow in importance.

“I think EnergyHub, based on a study we’ve seen … feels like there’s about 400 GW of flexible load [in the U.S.] that will be out there for the grab in 2025,” he said. “That’s sizable, and I think this is all coming from the penetration and adoption of technologies like” smart thermostats, electric vehicles, residential storage, grid-interactive water heaters and rooftop solar. “Today, there are about 17 million smart thermostats in the U.S., about 2 million EVs and about 3 million homes that have rooftop solar. … So in terms of crowdsourcing, the opportunity varies depending on the penetration of these different technologies, but I think we can all agree that they’re only going to grow.”

The question across the industry, he said, is “how do we aggregate and build these resources in a way that makes customers happy but also delivers the benefits, the massive grid benefits that [Berkeley’s Frick] summarized. How do we decarbonize?”

Customer Experience

Also crucial, Strickland said, are the best practices that could be used to access that potential power while giving customers “a successful experience.”

“Customer experience is a critical component of fully leveraging demand-flexibility programs and resources both today and into the future as we look to scale,” she said.

Reed said Holy Cross has a lot of “early adopters.”

“We have a lot of members who are fully engaged, but they are not the majority,” she said. “The consumer whom we want to participate is this ‘set it and forget it’ type. They want to set up the system once we get them to enroll in the programs, and then they go on with their lives. We need to make this consumer’s experience as painless [and] as simple as possible, perhaps even a one-click simple, like ordering something online from Amazon,” she said.

Adding that a utility marketplace needs to be more than a store, she said, “Consumers want an experience. They want to trust us as a resource, and they want an easy way to enroll in the program and get the product needed to make that participation simple.”

Rogers agreed with Reed, to a point.

“We’re trying to solve a problem by not building stuff,” he said. “I fundamentally believe that it’s cheaper to go ask a customer who has a thermostat or a battery to let us tap into it for grid benefits than building out a grid solution to that problem. I think that’s fundamental to this discussion. So if you if you believe that, then yes, you have to do this in a way in which customers are happy. And that makes it harder.

“If you have a marketplace, allow a customer to pre-enroll a device that they’re buying into your utility program at the point of purchase. Make it super easy. Find a way to stack benefits, energy efficiency and demand response incentives to get to a low cost. A low-cost device for customer is extremely important.

“We believe it’s best to not tie the ongoing incentive to individual customer performance,” he added. ”A lot of data has shown that if you’re tied to performance, it gets complex for the customer to follow, and they oftentimes will leave a program.”

To that, Frick added: “I think in the research from our roadmap, we found that [as] customer and market value propositions, consumer acceptance are still challenges to deployment.”