KW Engineering (United States)

Decarbonization goals in the United States electricity sector are increasing the levels of renewable energy generation in the electricity supply system, and are driving increased attention to building electrification, which will increase the magnitude and shift the timing of the electricity system peak. These changes are motivating new approaches to coordinate building electricity demand with low-carbon renewable generation, elevating the importance of demand flexibility (DF) in buildings and the need to quantify the temporal impacts of DF. In this paper, we first characterize the hourly predictive accuracy of six commonly used baseline models in an application context of quantifying building-level load shift. Our analysis revealed insights such as hours of the day (afternoons), periods of the week (weekends), and seasons (summer) that were predicted with more accuracy than other time periods. In addition, the analysis showed tendencies toward overprediction or underprediction of load. Secondly, we provide the first published investigation of baseline erosion from repeated dispatch of building load shifting. We observed that as the baseline period is pushed back further from the prediction day, the distribution of errors across baseline model predictions increases, with notable inflection points near the three-week erosion point for two of the three models.

This article examines the current market for customer-sited electric-ity generation, or “self-generation,” activity in California and elsewhereas it relates to energy services companies (ESCOs). Solar photovoltaic(PV) and small combined heat and power (CHP) systems of less than 1MW in commercial and institutional facilities are discussed. Incentiveprograms in several states that are contributing to brisk activity and thefactors that seem most important to closing sales are also presented.While some CHP technologies can be sold on the basis of simple paybackperiod, fuel cells and PV projects typically require more creative ap-proaches. Several of the techniques that are used to justify PV projectsare explained. The old sales adage that you “sell the sizzle, not thesteak,” meaning that you must sell the benefits rather than the attributesof a product, holds true for self-generation (SG) projects, but it is impor-tant to know which attributes are worth selling.