DOE grants $65 million for ‘smart’ homes that talk to electric grid, like one in CLT

Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, appearing Tuesday in Charlotte, announced up to $65 million in federal grants to expand testing of “grid-interactive” efficient buildings nationwide.

While better insulation and windows save on energy costs, the Department of Energy’s Connected Communities program supports emerging technology that lets homes and buildings interact directly with each other and the electrical grid. Homes that can automatically adjust interior temperature settings during the day, for example, save energy while helping utilities more efficiently meet power demands.

The Charlotte campus of the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-supported group, is working with Meritage Homes to test some of the newest technologies in a home built in a new community in west Charlotte. Duke Energy helped EPRI study energy-use patterns in such homes.

Homes and commercial buildings use 74% of the nation’s electricity, and account for most of the peak demand at times like early morning and late afternoons. The electric industry accounts for one-third of U.S. carbon emissions, Duke says, and buildings for another third.

New sensors, controls and analytics, coupled with advances in building science, can help make more efficient use of that energy and cut emissions.

That’s especially important as electric utilities figure out how to integrate renewable energy, whose output rises and falls depending on whether the sun shines and wind blows, with the output of nuclear, coal- and natural gas-fired power plants.

“The intermittency of renewable sources of energy require that they plan better,” Brouillette said in an interview. “Until we reach a point in America that either we have grid-scale battery storage and we can offset the lack of sun or the lack of wind efficiently, or we continue to have baseload power to offset the intermittency, the more information we can provide to the utility the better.”

One of two DOE-funded test sites, a community in Hoover, Ala., uses 44% less energy than comparable communities and 34% less power demand during winter peak hours, the department says. The DOE funding announced Tuesday will expand those demonstration sites five-fold, it said.

Meritage Homes makes energy efficiency its trademark. The company makes spray-foam insulation, conditioned attics and high-performance windows standard in all its homes. In partnership with EPRI, it’s testing new measures such as in-home battery storage and “phase change” materials that help moderate interior temperatures by changing from solids to liquids and back again.

Whether to mandate such measures in new structures should be left up to local communities, Brouillette said, through building codes or tax incentives.

As renewable energy expands, coal, a major fuel for Carolinas utilities for generations, is dwindling in the U.S.

Duke Energy said last week, in announcing new emission-cutting goals, that it will phase out its coal-only power plants in the Carolinas by 2030. But the Trump administration, which had pledged to save U.S. coal jobs while voicing skepticism that humans have played a major role in altering the climate, insists coal still has a bright future.

Brouillette said DOE is now looking at coal, or coal ash, as possibles source of rare-earth elements that are used in batteries and for which China is the largest global supplier. Export markets for coal, in fast-growing countries such as India and Japan, and for U.S.-developed carbon-capture technologies also remain viable, he said.