Building GIANTS | Nate Gunesch
Nate Gunesch, a DOE Energy Innovator Fellow, joins us to discuss the exciting Building GIANTS program. Discover how smart buildings using electric heating and cooling systems are being converted into thermal batteries. This innovative approach to flexible load management helps reduce peak power demand, lowers carbon emissions, and saves money for Burlington residents. Learn about commercial and residential opportunities to easily participate, including new financial incentives for local heat pump owners. Help our City achieve Net Zero Energy today.
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Nate Gunesch, a DOE Energy Innovator Fellow, joins us to discuss the exciting Building GIANTS program. Discover how smart buildings using electric heating and cooling systems are being converted into thermal batteries. This innovative approach to flexible load management helps reduce peak power demand, lowers carbon emissions, and saves money for Burlington residents. Learn about commercial and residential opportunities to easily participate, including new financial incentives for local heat pump owners. Help our City achieve Net Zero Energy today.
transcript
00:00 Jennifer Green: Hello, Burlington and welcome to Net Zero Energy. I’m Jennifer Green, director of sustainability for the City of Burlington, where our goal is to reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel usage. We’re so pleased to have Nate Gunesch here with us today. Nate is the Department of Energy fellow, and it’s particular Nate is a DOE energy innovator fellow who’s been here at BED for nearly two years, helping us on a new DOE funded program that we refer to as building giants. It’s great to have you, Nate.
00:41 Nathan Gunesch: Thanks, Jen. I’m excited to be here.
00:43 Jennifer Green: Well, we know that you just did a presentation at the Better Buildings by Design Conference. So this is all sort of top of mind. All these questions are going to ask you, starting with what is building Giants and why the acronym Giants.
00:57 Nathan Gunesch: Yeah for sure. The Building Giants program is a flexible load management program. As Jen said, supported by a DOE GRIP grant. GRIP is a Grid resilience and Innovation Partnership grant. We had a gentleman here at BED named Freddy Hall who helped us apply for that grant, and he came up with the great acronym Giants, which stands for Grid Edge Integrated and Aggregated Network of thermal storage. And that’s a lot of big words all thrown together. But it actually sums up the program really well. What we are trying to do is essentially convert buildings, smart buildings that are, have, have electrified smart HVAC systems into thermal batteries and connect them back to BED so that we can control them and use them as grid enabled assets.
01:50 Jennifer Green: So we know, of course, BED is really committed to innovation. So this is sort of right up there with our innovative mindset. How long is this idea of buildings as battery storage been around. Is this a new thing or is this something that is on the on the cutting edge doing?
02:05 Nathan Gunesch: I think it’s been around in theory for quite some time. If you talk to our energy Services department, they would say that we’ve been doing demand response initiatives since the eighties. However, there are not very many utilities rolling out programs of this scale throughout the US. Elsewhere in Vermont, in Green Mountain Power and Efficiency, Vermont territory, we have other commercial and industrial demand response and flexible load management programs that are currently underway. And at the end of the day, I think people recognize how valuable this is from a technological standpoint and how much sense it makes. But it is somewhat challenging to implement. So we’re seeing a lot of pilots all over the country and the pilots go beyond just, you know, using buildings as thermal batteries, but also using vehicles for vehicle to grid. And so again, all of this has been around in theory for a long time, but we’re really trying to take it to the next level by improving the level of connectivity that we have with these buildings that we’re using in this.
03:15 Jennifer Green: Okay. So so folks that are listening that are building science people, it may be really clear for the rest of us. Can you simplify that even like how physically does a building become a battery? And what do you mean by a demand response.
03:28 Nathan Gunesch: As a utility? We deal with both energy. Most of us think about buying energy, right? Because at our residential meter we buy by the kilowatt hour. But for commercial, large commercial customers and for utilities, we also care about power, right? The kilowatt and we don’t necessarily need to get into the physics of that or the electrical engineering or anything, but we can definitely say that our costs as a utility are driven very much by our transmission peaks and our capacity peaks. And if we’re able to reduce the amount of power, the amount of demand that we have as a utility during those peaks, we actually are able to save a ton of money and we can pass that savings down to the customer. There’s a second benefit, which is that those peaks are also the highest emitting times, on the grid, right? So there are, sort of the dirtiest assets left on the New England grid, come on, to supplement our power supply during those periods of peak demand. What we do when we do flexible load management or demand response, we, we try to shift energy usage earlier in the day. Right. In Vermont, we have a lot of solar, which is pretty amazing considering how far north and how cold we are. But we get a lot of solar production. Especially in the summertime when we are able to shift a building’s energy usage earlier in the day. We take advantage of that solar, which is cheaper. It’s zero carbon and that’s a huge advantage that helps us as as a entity of the city of Burlington, meet our Net Zero Energy goals. So that’s, that’s super important. That’s almost as big of an impetus for this program as just the cost savings piece as well.
05:18 Jennifer Green: How do you physically shift energy to cheaper times earlier in the business day?
05:23 Nathan Gunesch: The vast majority of the time we’re working with their HVAC equipment, right? So this is electrified heating and cooling systems. Things like ground source heat pumps, central chiller plants like you might have at large hospitals or universities or other major commercial buildings. We can also use residential assets like heat pumps. So we have a part of building giants is a ductless heat pump program. And another element is things like refrigeration. So your beverage coolers at a grocery store. And what we do is we actually move energy usage earlier in the day by preconditioning a space. So consider a beverage cooler at a grocery store. We might see that cooler more than necessary, more than it would normally be cooled in advance of a peak event. And we we have great predictive algorithms that we use to know when peak events are coming. And we, we hit them almost every time. And we’re able to shift energy usage by cooling that that those cases of water in the fridge, they don’t care if they come down a few degrees. So that then during the event, we’re able to actually set the set points of that refrigeration system back a few degrees and lower the load on that, that piece of equipment. Now, that’s not a ton of demand reduction by itself, any one piece of equipment. But when we create this aggregated network that includes, potentially hundreds of residences. Dozens of businesses were able to really start to add a lot of demand reduction in into, what we do. The thing I should note also is that we take a lot of care to make sure that there aren’t negative impacts on people’s comfort, right? We aren’t here to incentivize discomfort. We don’t want to give you money to put on a sweater. That’s not what we’re trying to pursue. So when we choose buildings that are appropriate for this program, we select buildings that have very strong thermal envelopes. And because of those thermal envelopes, they can withstand some of these temperature shifts without occupants ever really noticing. So we’ve done quite a bit of testing with a few local businesses with whom we have great partnerships. Champlain College and Hula. And they were early pilots, guinea pigs in the program. And what we did was tested exactly how much we could shift their buildings without causing any complaints from their occupants. And we had a ton of success. We kind of crept up to success, right? We started small, reached that equilibrium point where no one’s having a negative experience in the building, but we are maximizing our demand reduction, which again, gets back to the savings for the customer.
08:08 Jennifer Green: How does it physically happen though? How does that temperature change physically happen?
08:12 Nathan Gunesch: Yeah. So we use essentially a remote control system in on commercial and industrial buildings. We have a third party called Dynamic Organics who we work with. And then we have our own in-house tools for residential work. And we are able to remotely, contact your HVAC system or your refrigeration system and request a set point change. So we do it pretty much right here from the BED office. But again, in, in close coordination with each customer, customers are always able to opt out if they don’t want to participate. We, we want to make sure that no one feels like they’re having any kind of discomfort put on them, but we are able to do it remotely. So there’s very little there’s some setup work on the part of each customer who participates. But once the program is up and running, we hope that customers hardly notice anything other than our reminder text that an event is coming and the bill credit that we put on the bill.
09:07 Jennifer Green: Okay. That’s great. So you talk about when the program is up and running. So right now, you mentioned two businesses that are part of our commercial pilot. What is up and running mean?
09:15 Nathan Gunesch: Right? So we’re currently in the process of commissioning six customers. Between those six customers, we have well over a dozen buildings, ice rinks, refrigeration at grocery stores, as well as traditional HVAC systems, chiller plants and so on. And we are getting those systems commissioned this summer, hopefully to be able to hit the peaks that we have here in 2026 by improving the technology that underlies this, we’re able to move away from traditional demand response, which typically is only used a handful of times per summer, to something that we’re able to call actually a handful of times per month. Right. So we not only are we, getting more and more customers to participate in the program, we’re also increasing the number of events we can call, which again, helps us hit as many of those peaks as possible and keep bringing costs down for people of Burlington.
10:11 Jennifer Green: Okay. So let’s fast forward to summer 2027. How many events do you imagine you would, quote unquote, sort of call, at which point you would lower the temperature for X number of either homes or businesses? Yeah. Any ideas?
10:24 Nathan Gunesch: We only anticipate calling two to three events. We may call up to five. We we let all of our customers know that that’s the case. Sometimes you might get a big heat wave at the beginning of the month and another big heat wave at the end of the month. So we need to be able to address both of those if they come up. Which is why we give ourselves up to five events, but we don’t want to call too many more than that just because we don’t want to be in customers buildings more often than absolutely necessary.
10:50 Jennifer Green: So I am curious about sort of who who makes the call and who’s paying attention to the weather. I imagine for a lot of Burlington Electric customers, you’re not even imagining there’s someone here on staff whose job it is of the one of many things that they do is to be anticipating extreme weather events, i.e. extreme heat.
11:07 Nathan Gunesch: Yeah, we have folks in the billing department, as well as in policy and planning, who are constantly monitoring what the forecast is. And the forecast for grid peaks is heavily related to the forecast for energy prices. And we’re regularly monitoring those, those energy prices as well. Again, all part of the initiative to keep energy costs as low as possible for people in Burlington and our external partner, Dynamic Organics, they also do some of that modeling to see when those upcoming grid peaks might occur. Interestingly, the way the the system peak works for all of ISO New England, it’s less about what Burlington’s peak for the year is in true peak for the year, and more about what our exact demand is during the peak for the entire system. What’s unique about that is that we are, or at least what’s interesting about that is that we’re therefore beholden to the major metropolitan areas in New England. Boston, right. So when Boston has a huge heat wave, even if we aren’t experienced, we usually are. But even if we aren’t experiencing that extreme heat in the same way, at the same time, we will end up needing to call our peak for that Boston heat wave. Right. Because that’s setting the tone for the entire grid, and that’s what we have to react to. So there’s a lot of math that goes into it.
12:34 Jennifer Green: We’ve had a conversation about the commercial sector. Do you want to talk a little bit about what’s going on in the residential sector as well?
12:39 Nathan Gunesch: Absolutely. And I think the residential program is especially interesting because it’s more unique. There are a lot of commercial and industrial flexible load management programs in the country, and there have been, as I mentioned, for many decades on the residential side, what we’re trying to do is create the conditions that will allow people to buy ductless heat pumps and run those ductless heat pumps for heating more of the year. We have a lot of natural gas in Burlington. We have high, very high overlap, something like 97 percent overlap with Vermont Gas Systems, which is unique for Vermont. Most of Vermont is on unregulated fuels, fuel oil and propane. As a result, our spark gap, our cost of operating a heat pump for heating versus the incumbent fossil fuel system for heating is, is a real challenge, right? So a lot of folks get ductless heat pumps or ducted heat pumps in the Burlington area, and they love the cooling and they use the heating in the shoulder seasons, but they’re not using their heat pumps. As much as we would like to see from a fuel switching and carbon emission reduction standpoint, what we can do by introducing flexible, flexible load management for heat pump customers is actually pass incentives for operating those heat pumps and participating in those flexible load management events to those customers, which in turn reduces the cost of operating the heat pump in the wintertime. And in the long run, we’re actually hoping to roll out what we call a volumetric end use rate for heat pumps that participate in the program, which means that if you own a ductless heat pump and you participate in these FLM events, you would actually pay less per kilowatt hour all the time for use of that heat pump. And again, when we’re dealing with the low and fairly stable price of natural gas here in northern Vermont. We have to be able to think in terms of these innovative rates and innovative programs. Otherwise, we are really have a hard time with the economics of heating with heat pumps. Right. This helps us meet that economic gap, that spark gap that we’re dealing with.
14:58 Jennifer Green: If I had a heat pump and I was hearing you talk, Nate, I’d think, yeah, I’d like to get involved. What are you recommending customers do?
15:05 Nathan Gunesch: Well, this fall, we’re planning to roll out the residential program in earnest, and we will be posting on Front Porch Forum and on our website and doing other outreach in the community. So keep an eye out for that. Once that becomes available, you’ll know this is the moment to reach out, and you can get Ahold of our Building Giants team internally and will be able to point you in the right direction. We’ll be working with electricians in the Chittenden County area to do the installations of the devices, so it’s fairly low effort on your part. In the end, we just need to coordinate a site visit, get the system commissioned, and then we can start calling events. Once you are signed up, we are offering a five dollars per month bill credit just for signing up for the program. In addition to the free infrared heat pump controller and home energy monitor that we’re providing, again, at no cost to you.
15:59 Jennifer Green: Thank you. Nate. Well, you’ve been a DOE Energy Innovator fellow for coming on two years at BED. It’s been a pleasure to have you as a colleague and to see this project move from conceptualization to reality. Thanks for all your work.
16:13 Nathan Gunesch: Thanks, Jen.
16:16 Jennifer Green: Thank you again for listening to Net Zero Energy from Burlington Electric Department. If you have any questions about the show or what BED offers regarding rebates or technical support, look for us at burlingtonelectric.com or call us at 802-865-7300. We’re here to help you on our mutual path to Net Zero Energy.