June 14, 2021
Southern California Edison (SCE) has upgraded its membership with the California Plug Load Research Center (CalPlug) to Partner level.
SCE is one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, serving a population of approximately 15 million via 5 million customer accounts in a 50,000-square-mile service area within Central, Coastal and Southern California.
As one of CalPlug’s founding advisory board members, SCE has partnered with the center on a number of projects designed to improve energy efficiency.
“We have been fortunate to have a long-standing partnership with SCE,” says G.P. Li, CalPlug director. “Their ongoing support has enabled our continued high quality multi-disciplinary research into understanding and managing energy consumption.”
Most recently, SCE supported the development of SIM Home, a CalPlug simulation and testing facility that enables multiple projects, including modeling plug-load energy consumption across varied device use profiles and serving as a test bed for student research and development experiments.
CalPlug and SCE collaborated in assessing future trends (roadmap) toward energy efficiency strategies in plug-load devices, including intelligent controls. They have developed new approaches and prototypes for feedback devices to help residential customers understand and manage their energy consumption, and conducted research on how interventions can affect users’ attitudes and behaviors toward residential energy use.
CalPlug was established in 2011 to improve energy efficiency in the use and design of plug-load devices. CalPlug focuses on energy efficiency solutions, efficiency evaluations of consumer electronics, standards development, education, public outreach and user behavior studies. CalPlug will address challenges in plug-load efficiency for both residential and commercial buildings by collaborating closely with utilities, manufacturers, advocacy groups, research institutions and energy policymakers.
– Sharon Henry
