Residential electrification is accelerating faster than the electrical infrastructure designed to support it. As more households install EV chargers and switch to electric appliances, existing electrical panels are being pushed to their limits, with upgrades often being too costly, complex, and inaccessible to homeowners. Smart electrical panels provide an alternative pathway by dynamically managing circuit-level loads to prevent overcurrent conditions and defer upgrades.

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 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.

In many communities, exterior lighting operates from early evening through early morning—times when renewable energy generation is minimal. Consequently, most exterior lighting relies on carbon-dense fossil fuels, contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, poor air quality, water pollution, and land degradation.

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.

In the fall of 2017, the Mexican Ministry of Energy awarded funding to the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara in collaboration with the University of California Davis to establish a lighting technology and design research center known as the Centro de Tecnología de Iluminación (CTI). This is a multi-year, public-private investment focused on addressing growing climate change concerns through translational research committed to clean energy and sustainability in Mexico.

Phase 1 of the Million LED Challenge was officially launched!  The MLC Phase 1 purchasing standards follow the Voluntary California Quality LED Lamp Specification published by the California Energy Commission and used by California investor-owned utilities to determine which lamps are eligible to receive incentives.