BayREN’s Business FLEXmarket demonstrates how a market-based approach can effectively reach customers historically overlooked for energy efficiency upgrades. Since kicking off in 2021, the market has delivered improvements that will save small Bay Area businesses approximately $20 million over the life of the projects. The projects also are expected to yield 74,000-megawatt hours of energy savings and 4,830 metric tons in avoided carbon.

BayREN, a coalition of local governments across the San Francisco Bay Area, was created to help local communities meet California's climate goals. As part of its mission, BayREN wanted to leverage the benefits of an open-market, pay-for-performance approach to bring innovative energy efficiency solutions to hard-to-reach small and medium-sized businesses.

Unlike traditional rebate programs, in which incentives are determined through a “deemed” estimate for each technology, in a pay-for-performance market, payments to contractors and project aggregators are tied to the verified energy savings and peak demand reductions achieved from a wide range of technologies. This ensures that incentives are technology-agnostic and aligned with actual performance and impact. BayREN faced the additional challenge of serving hard-to-reach, historically overlooked businesses because of their lower-than-average savings potential or higher-than-average acquisition costs.

Using Recurve’s FLEX platform, BayREN launched an energy efficiency market that delivered $20 million in reduced costs for hard-to-reach businesses in the Bay Area over the life of the projects.

“Thanks to our partnership with Recurve, the BayREN Business program has received over 300 project applications in just under 14 months — exceeding our expectations for rapid growth in this hard-to-reach market. Energy efficiency projects like these make a difference by helping underserved small businesses in the Bay Area’s disadvantaged communities reduce their utility and maintenance costs.”  
- Lowell Chu, SF Environment

Designed for Markets: Recurve's FLEX for Programs

Recurve's industry-leading FLEX platform enables pay-for-performance markets like the BayREN FLEXmarket with savings measurements built on pre-defined, transparent, and reproducible methods and open-source software that give all parties confidence in savings results and payment. This enables an open market approach that is technology agnostic and encourages participation from a wide range of providers of energy efficiency and flexibility projects, including upgrades to building infrastructure such as HVAC systems, refrigeration, lighting, and controls. These projects lead to long-term load-shaping modifications and sustained energy savings for customers and the grid while streamlining market access to deliver impacts.

Using building-level meter data and real-time advanced measurement and verification (M&V), the FLEX platform provided BayREN with secure data handling, project eligibility, enrollment, measurement, and settlement. BayREN program administrators could follow the performance of each demand-side asset (HVAC replacement, lighting upgrade, heat pump installation, demand response enrollment) in near-real time.

The FLEX for Programs platform also made it extremely simple for aggregators in the BayREN market to enroll projects and provided a high level of accessibility in savings calculations. Aggregator dashboards allowed them to visualize their projects’ performance in real time, allowing them to optimize their business models and identify new opportunities.

Helping Hard-to-Reach Businesses

Because of its flexible design, programs and markets using the FLEX for Programs platform can be easily calibrated and optimized for a variety of goals beyond energy savings. Incentives can be designed to promote projects that reduce peak loads, drive specific policy goals such as decarbonization, or target specific populations.

In BayREN's case, this meant offering contractors thousands of dollars more per year with higher incentives available for projects serving small businesses. This allowed contractors to meet these customers where they were and offer the solutions they needed to achieve their bigger goals for their businesses.

Outcomes

In 2022, the BayREN Business FLEXmarket delivered approximately $20 million in electricity bill savings to its targeted customers, 74,000 megawatt hours of energy savings, and 4,830 metric tons of avoided carbon over the life of the technologies installed. Energy savings means more money that businesses can reinvest to meet their own goals and drive growth for the local economy.
Recurve is actively supporting similar measured pay-for-performance programs emerging across the United States with the advanced analytic capabilities of the FLEX platform.

Curious how the FLEX for Programs platform can revolutionize your energy efficiency initiatives? Schedule a call with our experts today and see the future of demand flexibility in action.