Can Load Flexibility Transform the Grid? Extensible is About to Help Prove It Can

Our team at Extensible Energy is excited to be a part of the recently launched California Load Flexibility Research and Development Hub (CalFlexHub).

Led by Lawrence Berkeley Lab and a team of university researchers, manufacturers, market analysts, and software companies, the CalFlexHub team will show how load flexibility technologies can be standardized, commercialized, and deployed across multiple building types in California.

Standardization and commercialization is at the forefront, but there’s an even larger mission, and that’s to help our state to achieve California’s Renewable Generation and Decarbonization Goals. You can read more about the program’s goals and objectives on the website.

In the words of our President, “this is a big effing deal.” The work that Extensible will be doing with the University of California at Davis and other distinguished CalFlexHub partners is essential to transition California to 100% clean energy by 2045.

Why? Because the vast, vast majority of California’s buildings aren’t even close to being “smart” about their own energy usage, let alone about the supply and demand of grid energy. With more renewables being added to the grid from both distributed and utility sources, the dreaded California duck curve will not be flattened or tamed without load flexibility software and its brilliant ability to intelligently flex building loads and optimally shift the time of use.

If we are successful—and we will be—CalFlexHub is going to demonstrate to California and perhaps the rest of the U.S. that load flexibility technology can work anywhere, that it can reduce carbon emissions, and that it benefits renewables, consumers, utilities, and low-income communities.

And that’s a good thing, because if every building can’t be an intelligent, grid-interactive distributed energy resource—then accelerating renewables onto the California grid will be in serious jeopardy. The grid will become less reliable. Homes, businesses, hospitals, and schools will experience more rolling brown-outs, blackouts, and green-outs—when clean solar and wind kilowatt-hours are curtailed instead of optimally and intelligently used, 24/7.

So, make no mistake: The work we’ll be demonstrating at CalFlexHub is a giant step forward toward modernizing California’s grid and every building that’s on the grid. But wait, there’s more.

Don’t forget that load flexibility software is not a future technology. Extensible Energy’s DemandEx software is one of the leading load flexibility technologies that are already in the wild, helping reduce the energy costs of building owners while doing its part to balance the grid.

If you’re reading this, you can help make load flexibility a larger part by adding demand flexibility technology to your school, business, warehouse, or house of worship today, as many DemandEx customers have already done – in California and beyond. The mission of CalFlexHub is to show how we can scale this renewable grid-saving technology. And we will.