The Irvine Company and Southern California Edison (SCE) conducted a ‘virtual ribbon cutting’ April 24 on the world’s first fleet of its trademarked Hybrid Electric Buildings, designed to manage their electric load.
The 21 high-rise office buildings are equipped with Tesla Powerpack battery systems and Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) energy management and optimization software that employs advanced analytics to enable each building to control its demand from the electric grid and respond in unison when SCE signals a need to reduce load on the grid.
The cloud-based optimization software continuously monitors grid conditions and coordinates demand reduction from all the buildings simultaneously when SCE calls for grid support. Irvine says its Hybrid Electric Building fleet can reduce peak demand by 25% and provide up to 10 megawatts of instantaneous load reduction for up to four hours to help SCE balance the grid.
The first buildings were dispatched by SCE in November 2017. The fleet was dispatched over 32 business days, with zero emissions, the company says, and with zero customer fatigue and zero impact on building operations – “No demand response program in the history of the energy industry has ever done that,” said Susan Kennedy, CEO of AMS. Irvine Company also estimates a reduction of energy expenses and operating costs by 10%.