Antelope Valley School District (AVSD) recently signed an agreement with CEL to participate in a new utility Dynamic Rate program with Southern California Edison (SCE). The project team is evaluating Knight High School as a potential first location to try the new rate.
AVSD has a large amount of solar, brand new HVAC, and an advanced Building Automation System (BAS) that can control and monitor buildings' energy usage. However, the district still struggles to manage its energy. This is due to the mismatch between when its HVAC system is using energy and when its solar arrays are producing energy. On top of that, they face rising energy complexity due to multiple sets of prices and tariffs for energy consumption and production—each of which has complicated demand (kW) and energy price components.
The California Energy Commission (CEC) will require electricity providers in the state to offer dynamic pricing as an option to all consumers by 2027. Dynamic rates are meant to help generators like SCE adjust energy consumption costs based on the burden of adding new technology within the grid and could result in cost increases or even more complicated energy management challenges.
With its ability to automate building energy management for commercial customers in response to real time and time-of-use utility rates, CEL’s technology is a natural solution to help schools with the cost and hassle of dynamic rates.
AVSD’s unique challenges present an opportunity for a win-win scenario. It's a great opportunity for the utility to find ways to streamline the district’s tariffs, sending important signals to customers who help protect the grid. It's also a great opportunity for AVSD to get a handle on its future energy costs while layering CEL's technology on top of its existing BAS in order to uncover the benefits of using automated tools to handle pricing and comfort.
Through this project, CEL will connect to AVSD’s building controls system, learn its occupant comfort preferences and occupancy schedules, and then automatically manage comfort within preference in response to the real-time price—with a goal of maintaining comfort at the lowest possible price.
This partnership has the potential to reap the same benefits as CEL's traditional pilots. These include reducing up to 24% of total peak power and up to 30% of HVAC peak power, as well as shifting up to 16% of the load from high-price periods to low-price periods.
CEL is still enrolling medium and large non-residential SCE and Pacific Gas & Electric (PGE) customers in dynamic rate pilots. We can install our cost-saving technology at your site and manage rates on your behalf. If we can beat your rate, you recover the difference through an incentive! Contact us for more information on how a pilot program could impact your school or business.
