On January 14, 2020 in Sacramento, California, Jackson Wang, CEO of e-Radio, was invited to provide docketed testimony for the CEC in their deliberations on Load Management Rulemaking. In theory, conventional Time of Use (“TOU”) rates, such as the scheme offered by many utilities (by default or optionally) where prices are set by time of day (approximating changing demand), is not sufficiently granular to extract maximum benefit of the random nature of renewable energy.

Jackson’s presentation, “Broadcast-Based Communication System to Facilitate Optimized Load Management”, was followed by representatives from the Bonneville Power Authority (“BPA”) whose presentation was on the successful results of its 2015-2018 Pacific Northwest CTA-2045 Water Heater DR pilot with e-Radio. BPA also invited the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance and a representative from the Washington Department of Commerce to give supporting testimonies on the successful pilot. This pilot resulted in new Washington State legislation requiring water heaters sold in the state to have an open standard for connectivity such as CTA-2045. In 2015, e-Radio won a CES award for “Technology for a better world” using the CTA-2045 format that was used in the BPA pilot.

It is reasonable to expect that a favorable California ruling could affect not only the US market but the international market as well. e-Radio’s UMC technology is particularly suited for Real Time information, especially at full market scale.

The January 14 presentations have been converted to PDF files and posted at https://efiling.energy.ca.gov/Lists/DocketLog.aspx?docketnumber=19-OIR-01.

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