SolarCity announced on September 10th a smart energy homes demonstration project in partnership with the SunSpec Alliance and Southern California Edison, where SolarCity will install rooftop solar PV, batteries, controllable thermostats, and smart inverters on 50 homes in the Southern California Edison territory. The team will demonstrate how smart energy homes, combining numerous distributed technologies, can be deployed and aggregated to advance the evolution of the electrical grid.

In addition to driving cost savings for residential customers, SolarCity intends to aggregate the portfolio of the 50 homes to provide distribution grid support as well as ancillary services into the CAISO wholesale market. SolarCity will use the data from the project to demonstrate the magnitude of benefits that these aggregated smart energy homes can offer to customers, the distribution grid, and wholesale markets.

“We plan to demonstrate the magnitude of benefits that smart energy homes, made of numerous aggregated technologies, can offer to customers, the distribution grid, and wholesale markets,” said Ryan Hanley, Senior Director of Grid Engineering Solutions at SolarCity. “We are pleased to partner with the SunSpec Alliance and its member companies on this important project.”

A $2 million grant award from the California Energy Commission (CEC) will fund the project, along with another $2 million in match funding from project participants including SolarCity. The project was selected in the CEC’s competitive bid process in response to the State of California’s Program Opportunity Notice (PON-14-303) “Advancing Cleaner, Less Costly, More Reliable Distributed Generation to Enable Customer Solutions and Zero-Net Energy Communities.” SolarCity’s Grid Engineering Solutions team will lead the company’s participation in the project.