UCLA hosts its Demand Response Forum on Thursday, January 9, 2014. Speakers from major California utilities will share their progress in implementing Demand Response and UCLA's Smart Grid Energy Research Center or SMERC will present its Demand Response technology for smart appliances. We are currently accepting speaker nominations:
Demand Response is a way to incentivize electricity demand to efficiently manage generation resources. Demand response is considered to be an effective mechanism to transition from the legacy grid to a smart grid. The peak one percent of the demand lasts for less than forty hours in a year and the top ten percent peak lasts less than four hundred hours. Effective use of demand response can reduce these peaks and save billions of dollars in infrastructure costs. The initial demand response ideas were based on the wholesale market structure. The full potential of demand response will be realized with the increased participation of residential consumers. There are many challenges that need to be addressed to increase retail consumer participation. This forum will consider the current technology and suggest future directions that will enable utilities to meet the expectations from the demand response technology. Smart appliances are integral to the success of demand response. The forum will discuss existing standards and protocols for smart appliances and address the challenges for wide consumer acceptability. UCLA's WINSmartGrid™ research and technology will be presented as an example of the foundational research being done to connect residential loads such as appliances and commercial loads such as HVAC and lighting controls to a communications network. Technology and demonstrations at UCLA will be presented and discussed. Smart meters have been installed in more than fifteen million US homes. Most of these meters communicate with the monitoring systems looking outwards, i.e., away from the house they meter. Demand response programs become more effective if the meters look inside the house and currently smart meters are being retrofitted to include communication with smart appliances using home area network (HAN) capability. This forum will discuss the lessons learnt from smart meters and how that will guide the standardization and protocols for HANs. Demand response research is a part of the smart grid research at SMERC. We believe that industry-university collaboration is important to the success of the smart grid and demand response as it would allow research innovations to be implemented in the backdrop of real-world infrastructure. Electricity supply is a resource most consumers take for granted and often small incentives such as a few percent reduction in bills may not be effective. This forum will discuss different incentive schemes being considered by the utilities for increasing consumer participation in their demand response programs. UCLA's approach to DR using WINSmartGrid™ involves interacting with the customer's loads through mobile apps, and this research has shown that a simple interface and logistics are important for consumer interaction with demand response. There is a great potential for mobile devices such as smart phones to increase consumer involvement with demand response programs. This forum will discuss the use of apps on for residential loads such as refrigerators, washers, dryers and more recently electric vehicles. Currently the active projects at SMERC include Demand Response, Electric Vehicle Integration, Microgrid Modeling and Integration, Information Security in Grid infrastructure, and Wireless Interfaces for Sense-and-Control of the campus grid. These research projects and associated concepts are being tested within the context of the UCLA SMERC living lab. The living lab consists of building and residential loads as well as electric vehicles plugged into the grid - all integrated with smart grid technologies to support the various demonstrations. This campus living lab smart grid concept enables SMERC to understand how to enable a smart grid in a community the size of UCLA and subsequently, the modeling and simulation/verification of such models would provide a guiding light on scaling up of the campus grid to one encompassing the City of Los Angeles or beyond even to other regions of California or the nation. This forum will bring together utilities, technology providers, service providers, government and universities together to discuss the present status and the future of Demand Response. This event is meant for utilities, demand response technology providers, regulators and policy makers who are interested in seeing what is possible, government entities such as DOE labs who have created substantial technologies for demand response, standards organizations, etc. At this meeting, we will be discussing current technology demonstrations and research projects as well as those that would are being planned over the next several years in UCLA and California. |
UCLA Faculty Center
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Speakers from previous forums include:
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