At its July 10 business meeting, the California Energy Commission (CEC) approved $2.5 Million for the first phase of a two-phase, $27 Million "Responsive, Easy Charging Products with Dynamic Signals" (REDWDS) grant for the "Rural Electrification And Charging Technology" (REACT) project to deploy charging technology on farms and at other rural locations that is responsive to dynamic grid signals.
You can read the full press release here while this post will focus on the importance of the regulators in advancing electrification and demand flexibility.
The Energy Commission’s programs are critical to the energy transition in general and, in particular, to aligning energy supply and demand. Gridtractor itself was launched because of an EPIC grant that enabled deep research into how to shift agricultural pumping identified the Ag and rural electrification opportunity as a byproduct of that research.
That research also provided California’s first successful response to the dynamic pricing approach that became CalFuse with 1 MW of load, which in turn led to the AgFIT pilot with Valley Clean Energy (a partner on this project as well), which in turn demonstrated results at a 5 MW level, prompting the CPUC to authorize the 100 MW of dynamic rates pilots that not just Gridtractor, but all REDWDS participants, will respond to.
Another EPIC grant is enabling Gridtractor and Monarch Tractor (a partner on this project as well) to develop the bidirectional charging and IoT technologies necessary for REDWDS.
The CEC's role in funding pre-commercial technologies, and providing innovators the runway they need to develop and deploy them at small scale, is not new. What is notable is the growing alignment between CEC solicitations and CPUC-regulated markets, culminating with REDWDS in which the solicitation goals and the market mechanisms to achieve them are tightly synchronized. The alignment of technology R&D and market innovation are necessary to achieve the state's reliability and decarbonization goals.
