The Lancaster Advanced Energy Community Project

This report presents key findings from the Lancaster Advanced Energy Community Project, led by the Zero Net Energy Alliance (prime contractor) and Lancaster Energy, a community choice aggregation serving the City of Lancaster, which is approximately 70 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. Key challenges and solutions addressed in this implementation phase of the California Energy Commission’s Advanced Energy Community Initiative included: 

1. Development of an innovative virtual power plant and an enterprise-level distributed energy resource management system focused on the unique needs of community choice energy providers.
2. Strategies to scale deployment of customer-sited distributed energy resources via innovations in finance, incentives, and customer engagement.
3. Virtual power plant integration of three large-scale community microgrids, solar+storage, and flexible loads that enhance resilience and reduce customer bills and utility procurement costs. 

The project also demonstrated effective strategies that optimize the value of distributed energy resources by leveraging the ability of community choice aggregators to act as registered demand response providers. Customers participating in the Lancaster Virtual Power Plant also received an innovative flat-rate value-sharing tariff, distributed as a monthly bill credit. To promote rapid adoption of virtual power plant software, the project created a low-cost perpetual user license that has been offered to all community choice energy agencies. This enables other community choice aggregations to take operational control of a custom-tailored virtual power plant platform that features open-source code stacks (supported by OpenADR and the Linux Foundation), which in turn enables ongoing collaborative refinement by customers and other development partners.

In summary, the virtual power plant platform and advanced energy community program framework demonstrated multiple co-benefits for Lancaster customers, the community choice aggregator, the electric grid, and the broader community. These include bill savings, peak load and greenhouse gas emission reductions, improved resilience, new revenue streams from demand response program participation, and a statewide scale-up pathway for broader virtual power plant deployment.