The home of the future won’t just be more efficient and powered by cleaner energy than today’s houses. It will interact with the broader energy system in ways that reward the people living there — and that help ensure there’s enough electricity for everyone else.
The power grid is already straining to keep up with current demand in the face of extreme weather, like heat waves across the West or winter storms across Texas. To address climate change, the housing sector needs to stop burning fossil fuels and switch to electricity for its energy needs, but doing so could layer a whole new challenge on this already-stressed system.
Simply electrifying all buildings significantly increases the demand for electricity, necessitating even greater buildout of renewables and wires to deliver that clean power. That adds cost and complexity to the clean energy shift when getting any grid infrastructure built is hard enough already. But if these newly electrified buildings are “grid-interactive” — that is, equipped with tools to control when they do and don’t use energy — then these buildings can lower the cost to keep the lights on and accelerate the adoption of clean energy.
This kind of grid interactivity is already happening, albeit at a relatively small scale: Homes can heat water or cool their interiors when renewable power is cheap and abundant, offsetting demand in the hours when grid power is dirty and expensive. Batteries offer even more flexibility, and smart electric-vehicle chargers can adjust the flow of power into cars based on momentary signals.
“I don’t think we should be calling it the ‘home of the future’; it’s the home of the present, because the technology is already here,” said Elta Kolo, vice president at Huck Capital, which invests in the sector.
But relatively few households have achieved the full-fledged vision of generating, storing and consuming power based on signals from the grid.
“The state of grid interactivity today is very poor,” said Cisco DeVries, CEO of OhmConnect, one of the leading aggregators of grid-interactive home devices. “We are nowhere near where we need to be.”
Often, people don’t stand to clearly benefit from becoming more active citizens of the power network. The grid was designed to deliver electricity to passive consumers, and most regions lack systems for rewarding customers who behave in ways that help the overall system. Even when those incentives exist, folks have to care enough to participate in an obscure energy system that they know little about — or be persuaded to sign up even if they don’t.
The urgent question facing the movement for carbon-free homes, then, is how do you convince millions of people to participate in the broader energy system?
The first step is to equip homes with devices that can be controlled digitally. That’s exactly what the “smart-home” industry has spent years trying to do — selling connected devices based on appeals to comfort, security and energy savings.
Consumers haven’t responded as quickly or comprehensively as Silicon Valley evangelists said they would. But after years of industry efforts, smart, controllable devices are finally starting to find their way into millions of American homes.
“Households are increasingly getting smart devices, and people are saying almost universally that the top goal for their smart devices is energy savings,” DeVries said.
Smart-home adoption is a crucial stepping stone to unlocking grid-interactive homes. But the latter demand even more from residents. Once a home is outfitted with an array of smart appliances, owners must choose to use them not just for personal comfort and safety, but also to help the broader energy system. Realizing that vision involves surmounting a number of barriers:
- Grid-interactive homes depend on timely and accurate energy data, which is still generally hard or annoying to get from utilities, even though it’s supposed to be easily accessible.
- They also depend on widespread ownership of smart energy devices. Smart thermostats have broad adoption, but electric-vehicle chargers, battery storage, smart water heaters and the like don’t yet have mass uptake.
- Installing heavy-duty energy appliances requires contractors, and we’re in the midst of a nationwide shortage of trained electrical contractors.
- Typical utility rates don’t offer any reward for shifting energy use. If you pay the same for a kilowatt-hour no matter when you use it, then why bother shifting your consumption?
- Savings customers can get from grid participation are getting washed out by increases in utility bills.
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