The Future of the Smart Grid and Smart Home Energy Technologies

As California advances toward its goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045, there is a missing link between smart homes that provide automation with advanced energy devices or distributed energy resources (DERs), such as rooftop solar panels, electric cars and energy storage batteries, and today’s utility smart grid that allows for two-way communication between the utility and these customer technologies. The Smart Homes Study deployed a residential distributed energy resource management system (RDERMS) in a 100-home real-world laboratory equipped with the DERs and smart loads of tomorrow in San Diego Gas & Electric utility territory. Leveraging continuously updated energy prices and weather data, the RDERMS cloud hub analyzed the information and communicated with DERS to optimize consumption at the lowest cost to the residential customer and monitored savings under various static time-of-use and dynamic rate plans.