In March, CBE’s research team received the welcome news of a successful proposal led by the UC Davis Energy and Efficiency Institute, with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley, to form a new California Energy Product Evaluation (Cal-EPE) Hub. The objective of the Cal-EPE Hub is to evaluate commercially available technologies that are relevant to institutional and commercial customer procurement processes, including products related to energy efficiency, renewable distributed generation, and distributed storage. This work will lead to a buyer’s guide directed toward potential customers hoping to make more informed decisions.
Fred Bauman will serve as Principal Investigator for the UC Berkeley team, which also includes the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE) and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). To support the product and technology testing under the Cal-EPE Hub, the Berkeley team will provide expertise for all of the testing to be conducted at UC Berkeley laboratory and building facilities. CBE, CIEE and CITRIS will also provide access to their existing facilities and equipment for testing these clean energy technologies. CBE will provide access to our Controlled Environment Chamber, a full-scale test room with dedicated HVAC system for controlling all thermal conditions within the room, as well as our Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel and field measurement toolkit. CIEE will provide access to their headquarter building in downtown Berkeley, a testbed for integrated HVAC, lighting, and plug load technologies in a real world small office setting. CITRIS will provide access to Sutardja Dai Hall, a 140,000ft2 institutional office building which has been used extensively in the past to develop and evaluate energy efficiency measures for HVAC, lighting, and plug loads to reduce energy consumption and electricity demand.
The project is expected to begin during the summer of 2018, and the award to UC Berkeley will provide up to $600,000 over the next five years. We look forward to sharing updates as the project gets started in the coming months. The successful proposal was submitted for the solicitation, “Increasing Adoption of Emerging Clean Energy Technologies through Procurement,” under the Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) Program, which is managed by the California Energy Commission.