Congratulations to the City of Huntington Beach, who – in partnership with UC Irvine’s Advanced Power and Energy Program (APEP), Altura Associates, Inc., and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has been awarded funding from the California Energy Commission (CEC)’s EPIC Program to pursue integration of new technologies for an Advanced Energy Community.
As covered in the Orange County Breeze:
Together with funding from Southern California Edison and Southern California Gas companies the team will receive a total of $1.9 million to develop and apply master community design tools and to integrate innovative, high efficiency and sustainable energy technologies into a Huntington Beach community. The project will become an example and blueprint for the entire State of California regarding how communities can be revitalized, become more sustainable, and lower energy costs.
In this project, the team will integrate and optimize promising new energy innovations into a unified system that efficiently interacts with the existing community electrical grid/infrastructure/buildings, serves various end-uses, obtains performance data for scale-up, and performs cost-benefit analyses for demonstrating economic feasibility. The technologies that will be integrated in the AEC include the following:
- Energy Efficiency Measures (EEM) to increase the energy efficiency and reduce energy (electrical and gas) usage and emissions,
- Renewable energy sources such as solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, and anaerobic digestion of organic waste,
- Energy storage systems for electric, thermal and chemical energy storage to complement the intermittent renewable energy,
- Electric vehicles (EV) and fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV) with EV charging FCEV fueling infrastructure,
- Modernization of electric utility infrastructure, natural gas infrastructure, and natural and renewable gas resources in the community,
- Zero Energy community design concepts,
- Zero emissions backup power (hydrogen fuel cells) for critical loads,
- High temperature fuel cell systems for direct use of local renewable fuel to produce power, heating, and or cooling,
- Smart energy management systems for residential, commercial and industrial buildings, and schools and parks within the community, and
- Smart-grid technologies such as automated demand response, smart appliances, smart electric vehicle charging systems, and electric energy storage systems in the residences, commercial and industrial buildings.
Read more in the OC Breeze here. Coverage is also available from the City and from Altura Associates. For more on the CEC’s EPIC Program, check out the EPIC Innovation Showcase.