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Transcript

How to Enroll Your Building in Demand Response and Prove the Savings · NOXTalks

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Knox Talks, the AI-generated podcast exploring the groundbreaking ways technology shapes our built environment.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're diving into money your building might already be earning, except nobody's collecting it.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Grid interactive buildings get talked about like they're some future vision.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Digital twins, transactive energy, all of that.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing: many commercial buildings already have the control capability to provide grid flexibility right now, with much of the gear they've already got.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: The part nobody talks about, the mundane part, is enrollment and measurement.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly where the dollars are.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: So what's demand response?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: When the grid gets stressed, a heat wave, a generator trips offline, programs reward buildings for shedding or shifting load for a few hours, pre-cool the space, float the set points, dim some lighting, stage the plant down.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Your BMS does this kind of thing every day anyway.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Demand response just means doing it when the grid asks and capturing value for it.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the money's real.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: The U.S.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Department of Energy's national roadmap for grid interactive efficient buildings estimated that widespread adoption could save on the order of$100 to$200 billion in U.S.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: power system costs over two decades.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that's system-wide savings, not a pool of money paid straight to buildings.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: But at the building level, the value shows up through event incentives, capacity payments where those markets exist, and sometimes lower peak demand costs.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a fun one.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: The plumbing has been standardizing for years.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Open ADR 2.0B has been the workhorse protocol for automated demand response signals for over a decade.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Open ADR 3.0 arrived in late 2023 with a more modern API-based architecture, and by March of 2025, the first certified 3.0 products were already on the market.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: On the equipment side, AHRI standard 1380 defines demand response requirements for certain variable capacity HVAC systems in residential and small commercial applications, systems up to 65,000 BTU per hour, and IEEE 2030.5 covers smart energy communications for distributed resources, including load control and pricing.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the important distinction: your existing BMS may be perfectly capable of doing the load shedding.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't necessarily mean it speaks directly to the grid.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes all that's missing is a gateway or software layer that turns the external signal into sequences your controls already understand.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Capability and connectivity are two different questions.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Ask both.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So why isn't everyone enrolled?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Two gaps.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: First, the enrollment path.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a large account, direct utility or market participation may be available.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: For other sites, an aggregator, often called a curtailment service provider, can bundle sites together and handle much of the enrollment, testing, dispatch, and settlement work.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly which route applies depends on your utility and market, and it's worth engaging multiple providers so you can compare services and negotiate the incentive share.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Second gap, and honestly, this one's worse, measurement.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Plenty of enrolled buildings can't see the value they're earning because there's no documented methodology behind it.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: The payment hits some account nobody reconciles, and the savings blur into the monthly bill.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Invisible money looks like zero money at budget time.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the fix, and it's two layers.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: For your own reporting of avoided energy and demand costs, an IPMVP aligned approach gives you the framework, measurement boundary, baseline period, adjustments, all written down.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: But don't confuse that with the settlement baseline.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Your utility, aggregator, or market will normally prescribe its own calculation, often built from recent comparable non-event days, sometimes recalculated for every single event.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Know both methodologies.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Document both.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Three takeaways.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: One, audit what you've got.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Ask your controls contractor what your BMS can shed and what it would take to receive an automated signal.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Two, map your enrollment path and get quotes from more than one aggregator.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: 3.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Understand the measurement rules before your first event.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Know how the program calculates your settlement baseline, and decide how you'll track the result internally.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the idea worth sitting with.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's just never been on the balance sheet.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: The buildings that win the next decade won't necessarily be the smartest ones.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: They'll be the ones that figured out how to get paid for what they could already do.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Innovations are