The California Institute for Energy and Environment at CITRIS and Banatao Institute has been awarded a $2 million grant from the California Energy Commission to demonstrate demand response strategies in large commercial buildings.
The project, titled Super-GX, is led by Dr. Therese Peffer, the associate director of CIEE and the CITRIS Climate initiative; Dr. Peter Crabtree, a visiting project scientist and the principal investigator of CIEE’s Building Efficiency for a Sustainable Tomorrow (BEST) Center; and Dr. Carlos Duarte Roa from the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at UC Berkeley.
Demand response strategies that aim to balance energy supply and demand in large commercial buildings have shown much potential, but their adoption has been slow due to technical, social, and economic factors. Large commercial buildings often rely on isolated energy systems—such as separate controls for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) and lighting—that are difficult to integrate. Additionally, there is a lack of education and training in the building automation industry to develop and deliver standardized solutions.
Super-GX seeks to demonstrate a grid-responsive supervisory control system that scales demand flexibility in large commercial buildings through integrated Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). The project offers a unified platform that normalizes energy system data through standardized programming, making the data accessible for a wide range of applications independent of the local control system. Using an advanced open-source solution, the platform will coordinate across multiple energy systems—including HVAC, lighting, plug loads, and electric vehicle charging stations—and buildings, allowing building managers to easily adjust energy use in response to local energy supply, electricity prices, and other reliability signals. Super-GX will also support grid stability during peak demand times and aims to reduce energy use by at least 10 percent during the summer and 5 percent in the winter.
The project team—which includes TRC Companies, Altura Associates, and the National Alliance for High-Performance Building Operations (NAHBO)—will deploy Super-GX in up to ten buildings at UC Irvine and Honda America. If adopted across all existing commercial buildings with a building automation system, Super-GX could potentially save 51.3 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 18.4 million kilograms, and lower energy costs by $11.7 million over 15 years.
Beyond energy savings, Super-GX will serve as a model for upskilling building technicians. The project team will work with community colleges and industry partners to develop training resources. “The project will ensure that building technicians are prepared to understand, maintain, and troubleshoot system interactions, avoid and correct overrides, and manage energy use in anticipation of scheduled peak load events,” explained Crabtree.
The team will also partner with stakeholders to develop an extensive market deployment plan to commercialize the Super-GX platform and contribute to open standards development.
“The key to this project is the demonstrations,” said Peffer. “Real estate portfolio managers and campus building operators want to see tangible results. By putting these strategies into action and training people to be able to use them, we’re aiming to enable faster adoption of grid-flexible technologies by these key stakeholders.”