This event will showcase two projects that received seed grants from the Bits & Watts Initiative in the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Removing Legal Barriers to Transmission in California and Beyond for a Clean Electricity Grid

Michael Mastrandrea and Michael Wara

Removal of barriers to electric transmission deployment is essential to fully realizing the benefits of recent federal climate legislation and meeting California’s clean electricity goals. Transmission also plays a critical role in ensuring grid reliability in a clean electricity grid in California and the West. Many of the most critical barriers are legal and regulatory in nature. This project aims to develop proposed solutions to transmission siting, interconnection, and cost-allocation challenges.

No-Calibration Building Models: Unlocking targeted electrification and demand management through hybrid data and physics models for multi-zone commercial buildings

Jacques de Chalendar

The push to decarbonize and to electrify is a major driver for change in commercial buildings. However, current research and practice in building energy management overwhelmingly rely on synthetic simulations of reference buildings that poorly represent real-life operations. The actual impacts of retrofits or demand management strategies will likely vary significantly from building to building. Creating models and calibrating them to historical data is time-consuming, and models quickly become outdated as building behavior changes. This project aims to develop a framework and the associated computational tools to automatically create no-calibration hybrid physics-based and data-driven models for buildings using real-world measurements from distributed zone level sensors.