University of California San Diego’s Design Lab joins forces with contractors and startups to reimagine residential electrification strategies amid shifting solar economics.
A new initiative out of the University of California (UC) San Diego and solar contractor Northern Pacific Power is reimagining residential electrification for California’s post-NEM 3.0 landscape.
Housed in the UC San Diego Design Lab, the Agile Electrification project brings together academics, solar contractors and clean energy startups to help the residential solar sector adapt to shifting economics and customer priorities under NEM 3.0
“It was very clear that net metering 2.0 was going to go away,” Andrew Krause, Northern Pacific Power’s CEO and one of the founders of the project, told pv magazine USA. In his view, it was an opportunity to evolve the industry, not a curse. But, he explained, certain lobby groups were fighting for business as usual.
“We thought that innovation was required to improve the quality of companies,” he said. “There was this contractor knowledge gap between what the industry knew how to do and what it needed to do to meet the new requirements that customers have.”
That gap became the inspiration for Agile Electrification, which has since developed open-source modeling tools and a “Contractor Playbook” that lays out new approaches to residential solar.
“When we first started, we had a pretty open mind around what kinds of tools and capabilities we needed to analyze the economics of solar under this new net billing era,” explained Chantelle Domingue, one of Northern Pacific Power’s designers-in-residence at the Design Lab, adding that there was a palpable sense of doom and gloom around NEM 3.0. “We wanted to say, ‘Well, if we take into account new tools and new battery and solar pricing, what happens when customers decide to electrify?’ We wanted to model all the possible scenarios they could move down and figure out the economics of each one.”
Eventually, along with eight other software providers and startups, the researchers developed physics-based models for 60 homes in Northern California that were based on actual energy usage. Domingue explained that the models could be manipulated to show how changes like adding storage or fully electrifying would impact the customer’s current bill and future financial outcomes.
The designers noted, however that it’s not that easy.
“There are a lot of data gaps,” she said, “because building out that pipeline with quality data is a challenge, and most contractors aren’t positioned to put the pieces together.”
The 60 models that Agile Electrification created form the basis of the strategy laid out in the Contractor Playbook.
“In most cases, combining solar and electrification resulted in the best financial outcome for the customer that covered the upfront capital cost of the equipment needed,” Domingue said, though this isn’t true in all cases.
“There’s a very clear price signal to homeowners that they should invest in clean energy in a way that sets them up to either defect or cooperate with the grid,” Krause added, explaining that net billing has accelerated this utility death spiral that makes self-consumption of solar energy more economical.
“At least in areas like Northern California where the conditions are ripe for this, we’re getting a little glimpse into the future of how the grid might grow up,” he said.
