The California Lighting Technology Center is excited to kick off research into today's Residential Energy & Automation (REA) Systems in collaboration with California's statewide electric emerging technologies program, CalNEXT.
REA systems combine home-energy monitoring features with automated appliance management and control of distributed energy resources (DER) such as electric vehicle (EV) chargers, rooftop solar panels, and stationary battery energy storage (BES).
These new systems have significant potential to advance residential energy efficiency and peak demand reductions. Other benefits include residential load flexibility in the form of complete islanding or single family homes, which can remove significant load from the grid, and discharging of stationary and mobile BES (via bidirectional chargers), which can add capacity back. In addition, these new systems can make homes more resilient during grid outages by automatically switching loads to local BES when the grid is unavailable.
Curious about the REA research questions CLTC and partners are starting to answer? Visit Cori Jackson's November 2022 LD+A Research column to learn more.