California's First Solar-Powered Microgrid Neighborhood Has a Giant Community Ba...

As part of a series of articles on smart homes, the Verge visits an energy-efficient home in the southern California desert that's "part of California's first planned smart, solar-powered residential microgrid community." A surprisingly small number of solar panels on the roof soak up the sun in the desert landscape... funneling power into the tightly designed building envelope. Here, a 13-kilowatt hour home battery sits beside a smart load panel that controls every electrical appliance in the home, from the hybrid electric heat-pump water heater and high-efficiency heat pump HVAC system — both Wi-Fi enabled to share data — to the light switches, EnergyStar fridge, and energy-efficient induction cooktop. Using software algorithms, the Schneider load center intelligently determines where to best draw power from — the SunPower solar panels, the battery, or the grid. It then makes recommendations the Conriques can use to set automations that change power sources or reduce energy use when prices and demand spike...

The 43 new residences in KB Home-built Shadow Mountain, which launched in November 2022, and the 176 more planned as part of two communities, Durango and Oak Shade, are all-electric, solar-powered smart homes. By next year they will be connected to a 2.3 megawatt-hour community battery, sending any excess energy their panels generate to the common power source and creating a community microgrid. When the power goes down, the microgrid will kick in, isolating all 219 homes from the grid and keeping their essential functions up and running. The homes will draw first from their own battery (and potentially their EV) and then from the community battery. "When the system hits a potential steady state, they can ride a power outage for days, if not in perpetuity, with proper solar production," explains Brad Wills of Schneider Electric, manufacturers of the home's smart load panel, the community's microgrid components, and the software that runs the system...

Developed as a partnership between SunPower, KB Home, University of California, Irvine, Schneider Electric, Southern California Edison, Kia America, and the US Department of Energy, Shadow Mountain is designed to be a blueprint for how we can build better, smarter communities in the future... A recent DOE study estimated that by 2030, grid-interactive efficient buildings like those at Shadow Mountain could save up to $18 billion per year in power system costs and cut 80 million tons of carbon emissions annually.

The article describes how the community helps the larger power grid:

• They can send electricity back into the grid during periods of peak demand.

• The local power company now also has the option to "island" the entire community off the grid in times of high demand.

• The community "is also trialing high-output vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid functions."