Innovative Low GHG Residential Space Conditioning Technologies
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being her. My name is Sarah Beaini and my team and I are very excited to share the highlights of our project titled: Innovative Low Greenhouse Gas Residential Space Conditioning Technologies. While our portfolio has a heavy focus on heat pumps, we also had a concerted effort to broaden and generalize the learnings to home energy saving products and services to low and moderate income and disadvantaged community households. The underlying research theme was to address how can we improve low and moderate income customers access adoption and acquisition of energy efficient heat pumps that use low global warming potential refrigerants. A key learning from our project is that the mean feature that drivers
LMI customers adoption is cost savings and while we are you know technology providers are offering a lot of additional benefits and market for choice, comfort, convenience, and connectivity. Cost savings remains to be the primary driver for acquiring and adopting these technologies. So our portfolio has three primary objectives. The first was to develop blueprints for energy
innovators on how to design, market, sell, and finance their product or service for LMI and disadvantaged communities. The second was to demonstrate an easy install window heat pump with a low global warming potential refrigerant in these LMI and disadvantaged communities and the focus uh was to deploy 100 gradient units in the California Central Valley. And the third objective was to demonstrate different mechanisms of how to improve the heat pump energy efficiency that uses a low global warming potential refrigerant with three different concepts. One was to incorporate thermal energy storage. One is to incorporate a
heat pipe assisted heat exchanger. And one was to look at an oil free membrane compressor. So our portfolio objectives were achieved through six parallel projects EPRI was the prime coordinator, you know prime entity leading the team. Our technology provider is Gradient and our primary community engagement partner is GLYNT.AI and also we had great support with Redwood Energy. These six projects were summarized here on the left you know they evolved around the theme initially of this window heat pump Glynt lead two projects that are focused on meaningful energy engagement and credit building with utility payments and Gradient lead two projects - one was the deployment of 100 units in the Central Valley and one was on the heat pump energy efficiency Improvement by evaluating an oil-free membrane compressor. And the EPRI team led two of
the technology development projects one focused on the thermal energy storage and one focused on the heat pipe assisted heat exchanger. And all our work definitely would not have happened without the engagement and support of several community business organizations that we'll be referring to throughout our presentation and we've listed here on the on the bottom right. So I'd like to introduce the three communities that we had the opportunity to work with throughout this project.
We initially started working with Modesto and that relation was built through GLYNT's relation with the City of Modesto. GLYNT established the Smarter Cooler Homes Program which led a variety of research surveying activities and community engagement effort that you'll be learning about shortly. Two key highlights to mention that the team uncovered the alignment between the demographics and user voice in Modesto and the rest of the country and that's where the theme of Modesto Matters emerged and we also learned that Modesto is already engaged in this energy transition for the deployment of the Gradient products. The primary challenge we had was to identify eligible sites that had windows that were you know sash windows that opened vertically up and down so that uh the technology fit was um was was what drove um the the challenge to identify the right community and thanks to our collaboration with Redwood Energy and their relationship with a variety of affordable housing property uh managements uh we were able to identify an eligible community in Tracy. So Eden Housing uh manages the Stone Pine Meadows which is a multi-family affordable
housing complex that's a newer construction in 2000, that was built in 2000. This was a 72 uh apartment unit complex they all had standard sash windows and they were currently using Central inducted HVAC system that was upgraded in 2020 but actually resulted in higher utility bills for the residents and they were pulling back from using them as much so that they wouldn't have to uh bear the util you know high utility cost both for cooling and heating. And then thanks to Liz Grassi for connecting us with the community in Fresno. We got to work with the Lowell neighborhood which is very close to downtown Fresno This historic neighborhood um the majority of the homes we deployed in were single family construction that were built in the early to mid-20th century. Most of the residents were either using swamp coolers , window ACs, space heaters, and floor radiators. So with that uh you know I'd like to say that today is really an invitation uh on all our six projects you know we're going to give highlights about them shortly and we could easily spend you know a half hour or full hour on each of the six um so we'll give highlights and then be able to discuss more details during the Q&A and with that I'd like to hand it over to Martha and Jose to learn about the blueprints for energy innovators. Thank you, thank you, Sarah.
This is Martha Amram, CEO of GLYNT.AI and I'm joined by Jose Borroel, our community manager in Modesto, and Kelly Martin, our program manager. I apologize I'm having a travel day with delays so I'm calling from an airport and if the background sound is too much we can switch to having Kelly Martin present, but uh next slide please. So as part of uh what we did
in as part of this grant collaboration um GLYNT was the meaningful community engagement and our uh remit was to figure out the consumer Purchase Journey for low to moderate uh consumers and show how it could work first for the Gradient and then generalize to other products and we were able to do that during this project but we took it a step further as well because as you can see across the top where it says design market and sell that's the consumer Purchase Journey but we also figured out that unless you finance this there's just no way that the target audience that we wanted to market to could afford the upfront cost and our surveys show that in Modesto consumers are willing to put up to about $800 on a credit card to buy energy saving products if there's a real money saving purpose to it but beyond that they're going to need some financing and so that opened the door to our second project which is credit building with uh ontime utility bill payments we summarized our research in a body of writing uh called the blueprints for energy innovators this is seven chapters and five appendices that were written for two audiences one somebody like Vince here on the project who's like a energy saving entrepreneur and an energy innovator we know him well and he was kind of one of the folks who were thinking about it your writing what would he need to know to be able to market and sell a product to load a moderate in income consumers first and then the second one would be if you were in a community - Fresno, Tracy, Stockton and you wanted to invite an energy innovator to come and collaborate in your area. What would you know want to know and what would you need to do to is figure out your readiness? So with that in mind everything we did in Modesto we had an angle towards how would this scale across California and across the us and our deep dive into Modesto shows that demographically it's very much representative of LMI communities around the US hence our phrase Modesto Matters I do want to point out that our research showed that the target market for the consumer purchase journey is the 25th to 55th percentile of household income that's about 38,000 to 75,000 so for a family of four that's still uh below the you know poverty level and does qualify that family for LIHEAP and other programs but it is not below the 25th percentile so some of the like low and affordable income housing occupants may not be part of the target market that we think has a modest amount of discretionary income next slide please so through focus groups next slide please thanks through focus groups surveys, local surveys, national surveys, we were able to establish the consumer Purchase Journey that's the starting at the left where the decision makers start getting into awareness and interest into a product all the way to the right where there's actual experience um post sale experience and then you can see how many products are sold and then there's also a social proof feedback loop which is those who experience a product post on social media and other places and that informs the buying decisions of the next cohorts what you see here is in purple is the standard online consumer Journey circa 2023 and what we found is during COVID and the pandemic that the target community quickly migrated to being very digital and they too are participating in exactly this way with doing a ton of online research and checking with in information sites and so on across the bottom if marked by gray arrows are the um frictions that we found that are unique to the LMI market and the bottom line is twofold next slide one is the product must save money that is the key buying reason nothing else comes even close no surprise the city folks in Modesto told us that from the beginning but all of our research also validated that and in order to be money saving net of financing you have to have pretty good financing and you have to have access to financing so that was our second key finding there's just no seed at the energy equity table for all of the target market we studied without financing that is um affordable and acceptable next slide please and so this led us to focus on the reflect credit card and develop an offering we call reflect credit card. Let your credit score reflect your on-time utility payments so if you connect your utility bills at you know at the website for your local utility to an autopay to your credit card and the credit card is designated just for this purpose the credit card will report your on-time payments to credit bureaus and this will raise your credit score we did a lot of market research on this we've been working with a well-established credit card offer um provider that focuses on the LMI market and we've learned a lot about how to enable this product we see this product as opening the door to the entire Purchase Journey. My colleague, Jose Borroel is going to tell you about a capstone project that he put together with um several other Modesto um residents who form a consulting firm called Debrief Methods and Debrief was able to do 100% online digital tests of the credit card offer for Modesto LMI and that's a combination of energy and uh credit adult uh credit themes for LMI adults and I believe this is probably the first time such a sophisticated online digital test has been done and turn it over to Jose next slide please.
Perfect thank you so much Martha so as Martha mentioned we performed three parallel online studies that really focused on understanding the lower moderate-income adult and our findings really validated our previous studies uh as Martha was mentioning so the studies were an online ad study the second one was a market assessment and the third one was a user experience study. So in the social media ad study we presented individuals a series of ads on Facebook and on Instagram and really had the gave them the opportunity to self- select uh what image what graphic they really resonated with them and we what we found is really ad marketing that really garnered uh messaging around money uh rewards or cash back really had the highest appeal the second was really uh wording around tips and tricks and then the third following was uh wording around boosting credit this really uh gets us thinking if we really want to begin engaging low to moderate income households we really need to begin thinking about how we are going to do so online just as a data point 7 out of 10 people are on Facebook on an everyday basis so meaningful community engagement is online now. The second study we performed was a market assessment to better understand the digital apps and the ecosystem and what we found was not shocking enough that there's very little in existence of apps that are about sustainability apps that are around energy and the few that exist are dedicated utility apps that very few individuals have the ability to play with and use on an everyday basis so this begs the question if we really want to reduce greenhouse gases at the household level we really need to begin uh thinking about how we're going to be changing the individual's behavior the study the third study that we performed was a user experience research and we created high fidelity app that we call Reflect as Martha mentioned and we heard directly from the lower moderate-income adults and we did this by breaking down the reflect app and we really presented them with the individual features and had them rank their level of interest and we found that nearly all participants shared high interest in the Reflect app the core components as Martha is mentioning was money saving by reducing utility bills boosting credit and rewarding the individual for being sustainable this is important because the average user doesn't really look at their utility bill and reflect will change that so the next step for glant will be working to establish a credit card partner uh the second is in 2023 uh following this year a couple months following this year they will really be glad to share and speak to anybody that we wanting to partner uh and then the third is hey if you want to read more about uh the blueprint for energy indicators we would love to share some of those and from there I'll pass it back to Sarah. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon. I'm Andrew I'm from Gradient and I'll be sharing about our project of deploying 100 field units to the Central Valley of California next slide please so a few of the key objectives with this project were centered around gathering feedback about how the residents use the Gradients and any key differences compared with their existing systems and we really wanted to understand as much as possible around the question of will this technology fit these residents and fit these communities and uh in addition to that as GLYNT covered really well an important another important factor is uh cost savings and uh making sure that any any technology that we uh want to send out to these communities um is is a kind of confirmed and validated that will save money and so an important important objective was to assess the impact on residents utility bills and and also any kind of secondary energy saving behavior that we might observe and impact on this stands to be significant if we can validate usability among these LMI communities that's just one less barrier that exists to uh to deploying these at greater scale and um and further further allowing the adoption of this technology in a community and region that really needs this solution and as you can see this map to the right of the State of California shows in red the Central Valley as the most polluted region of the State of California and so any any way that we can help address this it stands to be very impactful and the Gradient technology itself would directly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by electrifying all the homes heating and cooling that is used by the Gradient and uh further the system also uses a low GWP refrigerant so any any deployment of these systems would further mitigate any potential um greenhouse gas emissions. So as Sarah mentioned
uh we we deployed to two main communities in the Central Valley one was Fresno the other was Tracy. Fresno is is these two photos up above primarily single-family homes and each each home we had the opportunity to be be there in person all the installation work was was done by the grant partners um ourselves, Gradient, EPRI and Redwood Energy and we had the opportunity to meet all the residents on the initial install uh get to learn about their home a bit and um learn about their energy needs as well and so for each home we we actually sized and uh deployed units based on their need so ranging from 1 to 4 units based on the size of the household and beyond the the first interactions with the homeowners which which were very very fruitful in terms of learning about their experience of the system. Our grant partner, Redwood Energy did an incredible job of staying engaged with these residents and surveying them throughout the study period next slide please so what were a few things that we learned uh first was was definitely around this usability topic and um it was it was very very great to see that um a lot of the homeowners were able to integrate these systems really effortlessly into their homes and we we saw this when in the first interactions we had with them and then it showed up later in the surveying as well uh one of the survey questions was centered around ease of use with all the residents giving a score and uh the Gradient scored very high on that on that scale with over two-thirds of respondents giving it the highest possible rating the system also comes with some advanced features that that comes with an app and this was new to to many residents and few had few if any had used an app to uh control and and better um have flexibility with their their systems but many found this very valuable and some advanced features such as controlling it from across the room scheduling proved to be very valuable uh particular for residents that had any health or mobility issues were uh controlling it without having to go across the room to to physically control it was very valuable and then the other the other really significant finding that that stood out to us was this uh modular uh modular use capability and so in in a lot of homes we installed you know anywhere from two to four systems in different rooms different sides of the house and uh whereas a traditional HVAC system you have to just run it and you have to heat the whole house all at once the Gradient allows you to heat each room independently and so if you're only in the living room or you're only in the bedroom you have the flexibility to only heat or cool that room as you want and uh we knew this this could be a great great value and great means to save money potentially but um really left out the page that respondents um they got back to us and said that nine nine times the number of surveyed participants used the gradients in this modular way versus using um them all at once which which was really significant to us and uh this was this was driven largely by by the flexibility and desire to save money and and understanding that the less that less energy that your whole home uses the more money you'll save and you can do that in this modular fashion and as Sarah also mentioned there's a dozen other findings we could go on for quite a while but um those are the two I'd like to highlight for now and I'll pass it back to you, Sarah. Thank you, Andrew. So for the next portion of our presentation we're going to give very quick highlights about the three technology development projects and we can go into more detail about each of them uh but we'll save that for the Q&A so we'll get started with Vince Romanin on uh the oil free compressor of oil free membrane compressor by Gradient.
Thank you , Sarah and thank you everyone for joining. Um so the goal of this research project is to develop a lower cost compressor for heating and cooling technologies um compressors are one of the main drivers of weight cost and maintenance in today's HVAC systems and so if you can improve on that you can have a significant benefit um to the overall system performance and cost and accessibility um so today's compressor technology involves sliding metal surfaces inside of a rotating compressor which means precise manufacturing to tolerances careful sealing and careful control of lubrication which drive cost and so we uh patented a type of compressor that doesn't have any sliding seals and therefore needs less precise manufacturing less total material and potentially no lubricants um which is an added benefit that would really open up the design space for new types of refrigerants and new types of cycles as well uh helping reduce the carbon footprint of these systems at the end of this project we wanted to prove the initial concept of this new category and type of compressor uh and we were success successfully able to do so we designed prototyped built and then integrated into a full cycle this new category of compressor um and while this first demonstration was operationally successful much more research is going to be needed to understand the limits on its performance and to better characterize its reliability and so we saw a 16% efficiency compared to state-of-the-art of 50 to 60% this is much lower but not entirely unexpected for the very very first demonstration of a new type of technology um and we identified some areas to investigate to see if these were aspects of the design that can be improved or not and what the upper limit on efficiency is and then next we identified key areas of research that need to be done in order to prove that this new type of compressor can last a very long time in the field uh as existing compressors do um and so it was a really exciting first step to demonstrate this new technology but more research will be needed to continue to bring it to market. Thanks, Sarah. With that I'll pass it off to Aaron. Right. Thank you, Vince. This next project uh deals with thermal energy storage and potentially integrating it with a windows style heat pump um so thermal storage itself is a fairly mature technology so if you look at that plot on the top right you know they've been using commercial buildings for many years to manage peak demand and it gives you a lot of flexibility in your equipment's operation so if you look at the schematic on the bottom right uh it shows that dotted box right that sort of represents the outdoor portion of the window heat pump um so you do have a secondary loop that's bringing water glycol into the indoor uh so that setup makes it very easy to integrate a storage device and also the capacity from that storage device can then allow you to downsize the primary heat pump so you use less refrigerant and the overall cost comes down for the customer so in this project uh we modeled the per performance of a you know heat pump with integrated thermal energy storage uh for different California climate zones focusing on you know obviously residential applications looked at different sizing strategies and um the possibility of enhancing the overall performance with more optimal controls or more advanced heat exchangers and our key finding is that you know based on current conditions you know utility rates and so forth thermal energy storage itself it's not quite cost effective in the residential sector um another thing we found was you know control strategies are usually optimized for overall cost uh in terms of operating equipment or enhancing the performance of set uh you know the heat pump itself so they're not necessarily always aligned with reducing greenhouse gas emissions um so there's probably some additional work that needs to be done if that's your primary goal in you know instead of just reducing the payback as much as possible for the customer um so with that I'm going to pass it over to Matt Robinson on his Heat Pipe Assisted Heat Exchanger Project. Thank you, Aaron. Good morning. Good afternoon to everyone my name is Matt Robinson I'm going to be describing the Heat Pipe Heat Exchanger Project in this portfolio projects so the goal here was really to develop an alternative approach to the secondary heat transfer loop that is common in low GWP refrigerants uh usually to isolate the flammable or toxic refrigerant so the approach we wanted to take we wanted to leverage a heat pipe not a heat pump but a heat pipe to try and open up 18 to 30% Energy savings over that secondary heat transfer loop that is more common nowadays so what did we need to do to do that we had to go from essentially a paper like a pen and paper design to something we could actually evaluate in the lab for a proof of concept so we started off with a heat pipe model we then worked that into a heat exchanger model and then once we started getting reasonable results in terms of performance and size of that performance we uh we actually did a search for manufacturers who are willing to work with us to try and improve the design in particular on manufacturability aspects and then ultimately on fabrication of a prototype for us to evaluate which is where we ended this portion of the project with an evaluation of the prototype in our uh thermal laboratory which is a bit hard to see in that picture in the bottom center but that's the uh the prototype in its test rig and the big takeaway from that was that we were really a promising takeaway was that we were able to get efficiencies on the order of 90% in heating and cooling mode with of course more work to be done and we can discuss that in the Q&A section. But I will pass it back to
Sara. Thank you uh thank you, Matt. Thank you everyone so in closing we want to thank SGC for enabling our groundbreaking research and we're not stopping here we're talking about you know this journey to provide uh accessibility and improve adoption and make available these energy saving products for LMI and disadvantaged communities and we're continuing this effort through all these four facets right and if we look at the foundational concept ceps of affordability and adoption we learned how much energy equity is really in the financing and payment capabilities that you know the different um social uh classes the the everyone wants energy savings but the difference is in their credit capacity for financing on the education aspect uh we had to through our deployment you know Community deployment experience we had to make sure we did translation of the material so that the the residents were able to understand what um what the technology was about how to use it um so there's both uh financial and uh energy literacy that needs to to happen in providing educational um resources that way and on the technology front while uh there's a big focus on you know energy savings but it's also very critical to understand the non-energy benefits and needs of the customer so that that access and usability uh to enable the the behavior changes for Savings in energy and cost can be realized and so with that uh we'd like to thank you all uh for your time and attention and look forward to the discussion. Thanks.
2024-08-24 14:57
