[NBLUG/talk] LF Energy & SCP + indoor meeting space update

[Tom Most]

On Sun, Oct 2, 2022, at 8:39 AM, Brad Morrison wrote:
> Tom, 
> 
> Do you know if Sonoma Clean Power uses LF Energy's work in their work? SCP has a program called GridSavvy Rewards (https://sonomacleanpower.org/programs/gridsavvyrewards) that monitors energy usage and offers incentives and adjustments based on the electrical grid's needs at the individual customer level through smart thermostats and electric vehicle chargers. I do not know what the back end software is that they use to do that. Possibly a contractor...?
> 

My heat pump water heater is enrolled in the GridSavvy program. Industry jargon for this program is "demand response" — essentially a way to automate reducing the load on the grid. It's not about *monitoring* energy use, but reducing it or shifting it in time, so that supply matches demand. (CAISO has some fun graphs of this match-up on their website <http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx>.)

A water heater's a great case for this — there is 80 gallons of scalding-hot water sitting in an insulated container in my garage, connected to the house via a thermostatic mixing valve. It could stop heating the water for hours at a time and I'd never notice.

When I first enrolled the program was administered by Olivine, Inc. <https://olivineinc.com/> but they sent an email in May that they'd be changing providers. I don't know who the new provider is, but the credit is still appearing on my bill. No idea if they use any of the LF Energy-associated software or standards.

> Did you read the PD article? Have you heard of LF Energy before?
> 

Yes to both. I work at a startup in an adjacent space (solar for commercial buildings) and stumbled across LF Energy some time ago, though last I looked all their projects seemed more oriented toward direct interactions with the electrical grid.

LF Energy is an industry consortium, so some of these projects appear to be about companies seeking collaborators for their projects, such as OpenGEH <https://www.lfenergy.org/projects/opengeh/> which appears to be business process automation software developed for a Danish transmission operator. SOGNO <https://www.lfenergy.org/projects/sogno/> appears to be a code dump from an EU research project (the premise seems to be doing grid telemetry over 5G?). Others are open implementations associated with a consultancy, such as FlexMeasures <https://flexmeasures.readthedocs.io/en/stable/> with Seita <https://seita.nl/>. In the latter case the open-sourceness is a selling point because it nominally avoids vendor lock-in, and the Linux Foundation is a familiar brand.

---Tom
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