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.

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.

The California Lighting Technology Center, in collaboration with Southern California Edison, RMS Energy Consulting LLC, and the California Energy Alliance, are establishing a working group of industry stakeholders to help develop recommendations that will simplify and clarify the nonresidential lighting and lighting controls language contained in the 2022 Title 24, Part 6 Building Energy Efficiency Standards.

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.

The California Lighting Technology Center developed a series of lighting education videos in support of the 2019 Building Energy Efficiency Standards (Title 24).  Videos cover four key topics:

In June 2017, the President issued Executive Order 13801 on Expanding Apprenticeship in America, which establishes an expansive vision for increasing the number of apprentices in the nation to an unprecedented level across all industries.  The overarching goals of this Apprenticeship: Closing the Skills Gap grant program are threefold:

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.