RTF June 2019 Meeting Recap

June’s RTF Meeting was another productive one. With lots to cover, the RTF, as always, stayed engaged, asked the important questions, and made meaningful decisions on a number of complex topics. If you missed this month, here’s what was covered.

The RTF finished up its final two demand response technologies, Residential Water Heaters and Refrigeration Warehouse Controls. As with the previous four technologies, these analyses focused on estimating the maximum technical per unit potential, and will be passed on, along with additional factors for consideration, to Council staff and the demand response advisory committee for further development. Refrigerated warehouses are an especially great candidate for demand response because of their large loads and the flexibility enabled by thermal capacitance and product temperature tolerances. Because of this ease, where DR incentives are available, refrigerated warehouses typically participate in programs. However, the DR potential is very site-specific so the contract analysts had to rely on existing case studies and modeling efforts to estimate typical potential per site as a function of refrigerated space or tons of refrigeration.

For residential water heaters the DR impacts represent the amount of input water heating electricity that is eliminated or deferred until after an event is complete. Contract analysts calculated the maximum obtainable per-household impacts from residential water heaters during a DR event, without considering program design and characteristics. Since water heaters do not run 24/7 under any realistic scenario, the impact estimates approved by the RTF include the influence of runtimes and water draw profiles. These last two presentations conclude this year’s work on demand response.  With these six technologies, the RTF was exploring its potential role in supporting the region in demand response and the potential for DR to be included in the RTF’s scope of work in future years.

To that point, at this meeting there was a presentation about the next 5-year cycle, going from 2020 to 2024. RTF staff is currently working with the RTF Policy Advisory Committee on a draft 2020-2024 work plan and business plan. This draft budget will preserve the main components of prior budgets for things like maintenance of existing measures, development of new measure, enhancement of analytical tools, the annual RCP survey and report, as well as RTF staffing and management. However, this cycle will see the expansion of the scope to include the addition of natural gas analysis for existing dual fuel and new gas only measures as well as technical analysis of demand response technologies.     

This month’s meeting wrapped up with a brief check in on how the SEEM calibration is progressing. Contract analysts presented that the draft Monte Carlo scenarios are complete as well as the draft SEEM runs for most RBSA II homes.  They still have to finalize SEEM runs and run automated regressions and generate calibration factors. There are two subcommittee meeting planned before the next RTF meeting  and the goal is to land a decision on the SEEM calibration at the July RTF meeting.

The July RTF meeting promises to be a big one. Between the 20-year anniversary of the RTF and SEEM’s grand finale, it’s another must-attend.