“In some ways, we were super-fortunate to start with Shifted,” Eide said. “We’ve done pilots with them; we know their capabilities.”
Hawaiian Electric’s program is more complicated than the standard demand-response or VPP program, she pointed out. Typically, participating homes and businesses are called on to reduce power use or inject power into the grid during predetermined hours or when grids are under stress. Hawaiian Electric is so eager for customers to supply grid services of this kind that it’s started paying solar-equipped customers to add batteries that can store power during the day and discharge it after the sun goes down.
But Hawaii, with its solar-saturated grid circuits and fast-shifting weather patterns, also needs much more precise, flexible and fast-acting help from its customers. That’s why its grid-services program pays more money for aggregations like Shifted Energy’s that can respond within seconds to balance the grid — and includes penalties for the aggregators that can’t perform as promised.
Electric water heaters have been remote-controlled to turn off during times of peak grid demands for decades. But they haven’t been tapped for fine-tuned grid responsiveness in the past, Frizzell said. That’s largely because the software and hardware required to understand just how much power thousands of water heaters are using at any moment in time is technically challenging to design and expensive to implement — potentially more complex and costly than the grid services are worth.
Shifted Energy uses cellular-network-connected control units to maintain high-speed communications with its water heaters. The units supply “the telemetry we needed to inform machine-learning algorithms to understand how families were using their devices,” Frizzell said.
That machine learning is critical to determining just how much electricity is being used by each water heater, and how much electricity each one can go without before the water in the tank starts getting too cold, he said. “That means we don’t get cold-water calls — the customer is happy.”
At the same time, Shifted Energy, OATI and Hawaiian Electric have the data they need to know down to the kilowatt just how much electricity use can be deferred from individual water heaters, different sets of heaters sharing the same grid circuit, and the entirety of the water-heater fleet, at any point in time, he said. That’s vital for hitting the performance targets that Shifted Energy is contracted to meet, he said. “We have to be within 10 percent of that forecasted performance. Otherwise, we get hit for liquidated damages.”
Shifted Energy’s machine-learning algorithms can also forecast just how much electricity its water heaters will need, and how much they can defer using, in 15-minute increments up to a week into the future. “Our utility clients rely on that,” Lagon said.
The smarter the algorithms, the more information they can discern about the water heaters they’re analyzing, he added — including things that aren’t measured in kilowatts of power. For example, Shifted Energy doesn’t need to measure water temperatures inside the tank; its algorithms can predict those temperatures down to a degree or two based on electricity-usage data.
Shifted Energy’s technology can even detect water-heater leaks, he said. While Lagon declined to detail how it does that — the company has a patent pending on the machine-learning techniques involved — it hasn’t yet misdiagnosed a leak, he said. “We’ve had property managers telling us we’re wrong, and then they found the leaks behind the wall.”
A grid asset for the masses
The fact that Shifted Energy targets water heaters allowed it to deploy its technology in 2020, while battery and solar vendors were struggling with Covid-19 supply-chain disruptions, Frizzell noted. Those supply bottlenecks have slowed deployments for solar-plus-battery VPP operators such as Sunrun, which landed a grid-services contract with OATI in 2019, and Swell, which won a large-scale contract with Hawaiian Electric in 2021.
Both Sunrun and Swell have software that allows them to control the batteries in the homes they’re aggregating to respond to the second-by-second grid fluctuations that Hawaiian Electric’s program is designed to mitigate. “An energy resource could be something as obvious as solar PV with an energy storage system,” Jim Laehy, the director at OATI managing its Hawaiian Electric program, said in an August interview. But “water heaters have been very effective in providing grid services” as well.
Water heaters can also be used for “solar sponging,” Lagon said — soaking up excess solar power and converting it to overheated water that can be brought down to temperatures safe for use in homes via valves that mix in cold water. Hawaii is the first state to actively reward customers for using more power in ways like this as well as for using less of it, but it might not be the last. Absorbing excess power is a service that’s becoming more valuable on power grids that generate a surplus of renewable energy at certain times of the day.
Shifted Energy plans to spend some of its new funding “expanding our platform on the renewable-firming side,” Frizzell said, describing the category of services that help integrate clean energy into the grid. “We’ve done a really good job with solar, but we want to add wind.”
Frizzell cited the work that Shifted Energy is doing for Nova Scotia Power, the utility serving the Canadian province of the same name, which is rich in wind power. Over the next two winters, Shifted Energy will partner with efficiency provider EfficiencyOne to equip thousands of water heaters to turn on and off to respond to spikes and sags in wind power generation.
Pilot projects with Arizona utilities Arizona Public Service and Tucson Electric Power will test similar solar-soaking and load-shifting capabilities, as well as test Shifted Energy’s machine learning to forecast how load patterns change as more people switch from fossil-fueled to electric heating.
Frizzell expects demand for Shifted Energy’s technology will grow as the tens of billions of dollars in federal tax credits and incentives for home electrification made available by the Inflation Reduction Act start to drive faster adoption of electric heat pumps and heat-pump water heaters. He wants to ensure that residents of economically disadvantaged communities can tap into the grid value of this transformation.
“It’s not just the right thing to do,” he said. “It makes economic sense to get in front of these frontline communities that have been historically overlooked.”
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This startup turns electric water heaters into grid batteries - Canary Media
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