New Grids on the Block

Basically today most buildings are running like a V8 engine at a stoplight and they‘re idling.

Buildings as citizens. Cool!
Henze: This notion of better citizens of the grid is one that I would like to use because buildings matter. Buildings matter in that they, both in the United States and Europe, take up about a 40% share of the total energy consumption. So, we’re talking about the single largest sector of energy use. How can we make a building smarter, more responsive to recognize when people are home, when people are at work? How do we make buildings listen to what the grid needs? There’s clearly a large role for energy storage. Energy storage might eliminate the need for flexibility in the built environment at some point in the future. If we have enough storage in the electric grid system, electric storage or other forms, then we might not need any change in the design and operation of buildings. But I’m basically driven by the belief that that is not going to happen anytime soon. So rather than waiting for large scale electric battery or electric storage to come down in price, why not use what is available? The notion here is buildings have some innate flexibility that has been left untapped so far.

So, how do you encourage uptake and the change of habits?
Henze: It’s understood that the easiest way to entice building owners of commercial buildings or building owners of residential buildings to participate in this opportunity, is if there is an economic incentive. One of the shortcomings there is, we are often not able to introduce the dynamic electric rates to customers the way we would like to because public utility commissions don’t allow that to happen. And they don’t allow it to happen because there’s a concern for some population groups that they don’t know what to do with this kind of complexity. The common example is your grandmother. How would she respond to real-time pricing or dynamic price scenarios? Or in the absence of her knowing how to deal with that, would she be left with higher expenses that she incurs because she didn’t know, oh, I wasn’t supposed to bake cookies at 3:00 PM. That makes public utility commissions historically conservative in their willingness to experiment with residential customers. Because you don’t want to have anyone unsuspecting and vulnerable be left with a large bill to foot.

What really causes the shift? Economics or saving the planet?
Henze: Good question, will the financial benefit incentivize them to do the right thing in terms of allowing buildings to be flexible, so it matters when we need it? That leads to a second question. When do we need that flexibility? It’s clear that the dire predictions of the grid becoming unstable and failing because we have too much wind and solar and too many brownouts and blackouts, will be corroborated – in fact, it’s happening already. We are ramping up the amount of renewables, the renewables penetration, so we’ll be ready when we get to the point where that flexibility is required. At the moment, the renewables penetration in the United States is still low, we’re still mostly burning coal and natural gas. And as you know, because of our hydraulic fracturing, we have a lot of natural gas and in fact, we are turning off a lot of coal fired power plants because we have so much natural gas. And that is a good thing because natural gas has about half the carbon content of coal. Unfortunately, now we’re shipping coal to other countries where it’s burned because they need it and we do not. So that, of course, gets back to the fact that we are one big planet and if we don’t emit in the United States, it might be emitted elsewhere. We have to think in terms of global interconnected systems.

How urgent is this?
Henze: From a US perspective, we have what is very expensive in Europe – natural gas in abundance, which allows us to operate power plants that are very flexible in their behavior. So, do we need grid-interactive efficient buildings today in 2021, else we die? No. Yet, I argue that as we are ramping up, as we’re retiring more and more fossil energy power plants, we are increasing the need for the demand side to be more flexible. Another reason we are making a conscious switch from high carbon content fuels to low ones is the fact that we experience widespread droughts and water shortage, especially in the West of the United States including my state of Colorado, which affect our energy system. Energy and water do go hand in hand: If we have conventional fossil fuel, to reject heat we need water. If we don’t have water, we have fires that bring down our electric distribution systems. Hence, as you can see, energy flexibility is also building block of increasing the resilience of our energy system infrastructure in the face of climate change. Consequently, it’s something that deserves research and planning, so that we’re ready when we need it.

What can we do today?
Henze: The answer for today is to develop and deploy automated systems in the loop, like control systems that receive a demand response signal, and they would say, okay, electricity is expensive now, or we’re falling into a so-called demand response window. And then you would maybe have reduced cooling or heating for a certain set of hours. There would be the risk of discomfort, for the occupants. But that’s what we can do today. In the future, I want buildings to be occupant-aware and occupant-centric and be there for people and not just trade energy against comfort. We need to better understand the indoor environment and our wellbeing and productivity as humans. Under what conditions are researchers here at Eurac Research more productive? I might actually forego opportunities for saving energy and saving cost by steering our building operation towards maximum productivity of the occupant, but without the idling when the building is not or only partially occupied.

So, would you plant a tree or would you buy a Tesla?
Henze: I would plant a tree. Definitely. The forest is my sanctuary. I love everything about trees during all seasons, but I also think that we have some way to go with electric vehicle battery circularity. Here’s an interesting question: If I don’t buy the EV today, will the battery technology ever get as advanced as it needs to be? The only way we get to the better technologies is by having people now buy and consume inferior technology because the better technology doesn’t just appear. So, in a way I really should be buying that Tesla. Then again, I love Italy and I love riding my Vespa. So, between a tree and a Tesla, I would choose riding my Vespa, maybe even through a forest.