BERKELEY, CA —The California Energy Commission is providing $8 million in funding over three years for a new Demand Response Research Center (DRRC) that will be managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). It is sponsored by the Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program. The director of the new center is Mary Ann Piette, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

Being able to respond to electricity price signals in real time should enable power-users to save money, reduce energy consumption, and lower energy prices by making the power market more responsive to consumer needs. However, the technology to implement demand-response programs in California and the rest of the U.S. is only beginning to be available, and much remains to be learned about the program’s cost-effectiveness.

"With the opening of this research center," Piette says, "the California Energy Commission has taken another concrete step to making demand-response programs a reality in California. The Commission recognizes that demand response offers the state a powerful, rapid, market-based response to growing electrical demand." The Demand Response Research Center will initiate planning through a scoping study to be completed this fall.

Demand response has been identified as an important element of the State of California’s Energy Action Plan, which was developed by the California Energy Commission (CEC), the California Public Utilities Commission, and the Consumer Power and Conservation Financing Authority.

The DRRC will fund research in four areas:

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Policies, programs, and tariffs: Demand response can be designed as emergency-based or price-based. Research can develop a better understanding of how customers respond to price changes vs. emergency response, and better methods of measuring energy savings from demand-response programs.

Utility markets, technology, and systems: This includes intelligent and integrated control systems for demand-response control, and models of how demand-response programs affect the reliability of the electric power grid. Also needed are financial engineering models.

Customer and end-use technology and systems: An example of this might be an easy-to-use computer-based system showing energy savings possible from implementing certain energy reductions at a given price of electricity.

Consumer and institutional behavior: These studies address how people interact with the energy system and how energy provides for the needs and desires of people and businesses.