Rice University
IN-3: Innovation 3

The Environmental Defense Fund defines demand response as “end-use customers reducing their use of electricity in response to power grid needs or economic signals from a competitive wholesale market.” Rice University participates in several demand response programs that are available to customers in the deregulated ERCOT (Electricity Reliability Council of Texas) electricity market. These programs include the ERCOT 30-minute Emergency Response Service (ERS-30) and the CenterPoint Energy Load Management Program. In addition, Rice engages in 4CP management, which refers to the management of electrical usage on the coincident peak usage day for each of the four summer months (June, July, August, and September). The Environmental Defense Fund promotes demand response in saying that it “diverts money that would generally go to a fossil fuel power plant to homeowners and businesses instead. In this scenario, a utility or demand response provider sends a message for participants to reduce electricity use at key times in exchange for a credit or rebate on their utility bill, in addition to the cost savings they will earn through conservation.” Additional benefits identified by EDF include “enhanced reliability on the power grid, as well as curbing energy use during the hottest and coldest months, offsetting the need for expensive, inefficient, and dirty ‘peaker’ plants generally only used to generate power several dozen hours per year during these periods of extreme weather.” See http://blogs.edf.org/californiadream/2014/04/21/demand-response-people-not-new-power-plants-are-driving-the-clean-energy-future/

Beginning in calendar year 2013, Rice continually contracts 3 megawatts of electricity capacity at minimum into demand response programs 24/7 across the entire calendar year. This means that in a moment of distress on the electrical grid, Rice has pledged to shed 3 megawatts from its electrical import, thus helping to prevent rolling brown-outs in the community while also helping to keep the dirty peaker plants offline (or from even being built). Rice employs a variety of strategies on campus in order to achieve this, including calls to conservation sent out via email to the entire campus community, changing building air conditioning schedules and temperature set-points, and fuel-switching to natural gas-fired cogeneration, which is considerably cleaner than coal-fired power plants.