Load flexibility—also known as demand flexibility—has the potential to be a significant, clean, and cost-effective resource for maintaining a reliable power grid, particularly as renewable energy becomes more prominent in California's energy mix. The California Lighting Technology Center (CLTC) at UC Davis is conducting research to enhance load flexibility solutions for buildings, which are major contributors to the state's energy use and emissions.

At UC Davis, the California Lighting Technology Center is establishing “The Color Lab” in collaboration with the Center for Mind and Brain to explore the impact of discrete color spectra on stress, mood, and alertness.

CalNEXT is a statewide initiative to identify, test, and grow electric technologies and delivery methods to support California’s decarbonized future. CLTC is excited to be part of the CalNEXT team to support the evaluation of electric emerging technologies.

The California Lighting Technology Center is expanding its research capacity to lead a new effort demonstrating vehicle-to-building (V2B) mobile battery energy storage (MBES) as emergency power backup at a Caltrans’ facility in Oakland, California.

This $5.3M project is funded with $3M from the California Energy Commission’s Electric Program Investment Charge Program (EPIC) Program and $2.3M in match funds from project partners.

The California Load Flexibility Research and Development Hub (CalFlexHub) brings together a multidisciplinary team of experts from numerous sectors—including industry, utilities, academia, manufacturers, and non-profits—to identify, evaluate, develop, fund, and demonstrate promising pre-commercial energy efficiency and distributed energy resource technologies that are flexible, interoperable, and grid-integrated.

Exterior lighting generally operates from early evening through early morning, a period of little to no renewable energy generation, which means this lighting is primarily powered by carbon-dense fossil fuels. Fossil fuel use is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), poor air quality, water pollution and land degradation. In addition, low-quality exterior lighting characterized by poor color, inappropriate light distribution, and inadequate light levels has also been linked to increased crime rates and reduced physical activity within the surrounding community.

CLTC and its partners, the California Energy Alliance and UC Irvine's California Plug Load Research Center, received $1M from the California Energy Commission to identify, test and recommend commercial and residential plug loads that present the best opportunity for energy savings as part of future energy codes and appliance standards.

Interior lighting remains a large component of electricity use in non-residential buildings. In California, electric lighting has both a direct effect on peak load, and an indirect effect by increasing cooling requirements during summer peak hours. Effective daylighting combined with electric lighting dimming controls can directly offset electric lighting energy by reducing lighting levels when necessary to reduce the load on the cooling system.

The Empower Procurement Product Evaluation Hub is an ongoing project aimed at evaluating distributed energy resource (DER) products using a systematic approach and summarizing the data in a way that is useful for large commercial and institutional customers (e.g., K-12 schools, universities, local/state government, agriculture, commercial real estate). The Hub will allow institutions to choose appropriate and efficient products for their application, thereby saving money, energy, and the environment.

Traditional outdoor lighting technologies operate at full power throughout the night, even when areas are vacant.  This extra load, energy waste and light pollution can be averted by updating the lighting system with energy-efficient light sources and lighting controls.  By installing these technologies, adaptive lighting strategies can be implemented that provide the right amount of light when and where it is needed.