FOR ELECTRIC, SOLARAND BATTERY-POWERED MICROGRID COMMUNITIES

from Mann Report March 2023

BUILDING UP

critical loads such as lights, refrigeration and WiFi, as well as additional high-capacity loads such as HVAC and domestic hot water. When the sun is shining, individual and community batteries can be continually recharged using excess solar generation until the grid connection returns.

“SunPower and KB Home have a long-standing history of leading the new home industry with energy innovation and sustainability,” said Matt Brost, vice president of sales, new homes, at SunPower. “With this project we are taking a large leap toward creating communities from the ground up that are designed to produce sustainable and affordable energy and resiliency to the impacts of climate change on our grid.”

SunPower Corp. conceptualized the project and is the project lead. It will oversee the project partners, provide energy services and technology and ensure the home energy systems support the microgrid operations. It will also provide solar panels, battery storage and EV charging options for each home.

KB Home, SunPower and UCI joined forces to reimagine a new home community built to reduce carbon emissions, cut energy costs and provide new ways of producing reliable and resilient energy, the announcements said. With a $6.65 million Department of Energy (DOE) grant, microgrid design and engineering support from Schneider Electric and collaboration with SCE to ensure a smooth transition between grid and offgrid electricity, these homes are now available to the public.

“KB Home has been at the forefront of deploying advanced technologies and energy solutions for the benefit of our

Blackouts may be a thing of the past for one new Southern California Community SunPower Corp., University of California, Irvine (UCI), Schneider Electric and Southern California Edison (SCE), which announced a collaboration with KB Home as the strategy, research, technology and energy providers for the homebuilder’s newly launched Energy-Smart Connected Communities in Menifee, California. More than 200 all-electric homes will be solar powered, equipped with individual battery storage and connected to a microgrid powered by a large, shared community battery. These power outage-resistant communities are the first of their kind in the state.

These communities offer a new vision for how individual homes interact with the electrical grid, the partners said. Every home, while maintaining its regular service with local utility Southern California Edison, is designed to operate during an outage as part of a self-supporting microgrid, drawing energy from its own SunVault storage system as well as a large community battery. They are designed to support homebuyers. In our pursuit of building better homes, better communities and a better future, we believe that our all-electric, solar- and battery-powered homes at Oak Shade and Durango in Menifee, California have the potential to deliver significant energy savings,” said Jeffrey Mezger, KB Home’s chairman, president and CEO. “Working with industry and academic leaders, we plan to explore how these energy-smart connected communities can help protect the environment and turn our homes into their own power centers designed to deliver resiliency while also reducing the overall cost of longterm homeownership.”

KB Home was the first builder to make every home it builds Energy Starcertified and has built over 160,000 Energy Star=certified new homes since 2000. The company estimates that its sustainably designed homes have cumulatively reduced energy utility bills for its homeowners by an estimated $856 million. Additionally, to date, these KB homes have reduced CO2 emissions by an estimated cumulative 6.3 billion pounds. The homebuilder has also delivered over 14,000 solar homes, producing an estimated total of 75 million total kilowatt hours of renewable energy annually.

Sustainability & Resilience

All 219 of the homes in the new Durango and Oak Shade communities will be built to meet the Department of Energy’s Zero Energy Ready Home criteria, which include Energy Star, WaterSense and Indoor airPlus. These additional features could help homeowners reduce average energy use by up to 40%. Each home comes with a SunPower Equinox solar system, designed to achieve net-zero energy, a 13kWh SunVault Storage battery, high efficiency appliances, flexible loads such as electric heat pump water heaters and HVAC systems and other smart technologies like Schneider Electric’s Square D Energy Center (which integrates transfer switches, inverters, metering, monitoring and more into one smart panel) and connected wiring devices such as switches, sensors and dimmers. All homes will be pre-wired to be smart electric vehicle (EV) charger ready, and some will demonstrate bidirectional charging, which enables an EV to be an additional source of energy for the home during a power outage. EV chargers will be available for purchase at the time of sale. Additional energy services offered by SunPower allow residents to enroll in a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) program through which their battery storage, EV chargers and other flexible loads can automatically dispatch to support the electric grid. Enrolled homeowners may be eligible for compensation for their participation in the program. UCI will also simulate the connected microgrids, analyze data from the VPP program and collaborate with SCE to determine its effectiveness in supporting grid infrastructure. The Advanced Power and Energy Program (APEP) at the University of California, Irvine will acquire and archive data from microgrid events and conduct research to enhance the technologies deployed in similar applications in the future. It will ensure that the microgrid controller meets the national standards that evolved from prior research conducted by APEP for the DOE using the UCI Microgrid as a platform for both the development and demonstration.

The project partners will conduct research to measure the energy efficiency of each energy-smart connected community in comparison to traditional residential solar communities. They will explore how to build all-electric homes that will more effectively meet the requirements of future energy codes and how a connected community, energy storage batteries and bi-directional EV chargers can maximize efficiency and comfort — and help keep the power on for a certain period of time at a community level. The research will continue throughout and beyond the development cycle of both communities.

KB Home, which is responsible for the design and construction of the energy-smart connected new home communities, is the only national builder to have earned awards under all of EPA’s home builder programs, including Energy Star, which establishes energy-efficiency standards, WaterSense, which outlines water-efficiency standards, and Indoor airPLUS, which focuses on indoor air quality.