Part laboratory, part energy plant and entirely connected, several smart buildings in Spokane, Wash., demonstrate what future energy management and distribution might look like. A team consisting of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; electrical contracting firm McKinstry, Seattle; and energy utility Avista, Spokane, Wash., are at the center of an effort to showcase how buildings and the grid can work together in the future.

Based on their collaboration, McKinstry and Avista launched Edo—a Seattle technology company that helps connect buildings and utilities in an effort to better manage energy consumption and improve efficiency. Often, electrical contractors can find themselves in the middle of these efforts.

Since it opened in 2021, the company has leveraged existing technology to partner with utilities and make buildings grid-interactive, while it continues to innovate other potential technologies.

Evolving from Spokane collaboration

Edo evolved out of the sustainability innovations in the South Landing part of downtown Spokane. That South Landing project, beginning in 2018, was a team effort between Avista and McKinstry to develop a state-of-the-art, zero-carbon campus with a distributed energy resource management focus.

Today, the site covers about five blocks and includes what may be one of the most intelligent neighborhoods in the world, according to McKinstry and Avista. It was the brainchild of Avista’s chairman Scott Morris and includes the Scott Morris Center for Energy Innovation: a 40,000-square-foot structure with an all-electric central energy plant that feeds the zero-carbon Catalyst Building, Scott Morris Center and other buildings to be developed on campus.

For Avista, the system challenges the more traditional approach to sustainability (which often focuses more on merely bringing down a building’s energy consumption), said Kit Parker, Avista’s product manager for renewables and storage. While companies can simply install solar panels or other energy sources that can also pose a challenge to the grid, she pointed out, there are approaches that take the entire community or grid into consideration.

“We’ve thought about it holistically. We ignored the kind of standard lines of demarcation and instead focus on optimizing for the whole system. [The South Landing] project began a new way of thinking about the way buildings and the grid can work together,” Parker said.

   

Edo has a grand mission of optimizing commercial buildings into virtual power plants to decarbonize the built environment at scale. A step toward that future is a Department of Energy (DOE) Connected Communities grant to extend the benefits and concepts demonstrated at South Landing to surrounding neighborhoods.

“The timing was really fortuitous. It lined up perfectly as we were incubating Edo as a new entity,” said Hendrik Van Hemert, Edo’s managing director. “The DOE grant was an opportunity to demonstrate at scale what we had been thinking … it was an opportunity to identify a community [for which] we can apply a number of interventions to make the delivery of energy more reliable and affordable and address all the key challenges in decarbonization.”

Community outreach

As part of Connected Communities, Edo is now reaching into the Spokane community for participation from building owners with the goal of scaling what was incubated at South Landing, Van Hemert said. 

“Edo and Avista are now recruiting residents and building owners to participate—50 to 75 of which will be residential customers, and another 25 to 50 will be a combination of small and medium-sized businesses and larger commercial and industrial customers,” he said.

Avista is leading the residential recruiting and offering smart thermostats and rebates on residential batteries. Avista can adjust thermostats during high operation times, and customers are compensated for their participation.

Edo’s efforts focus on commercial buildings, which test interventions including smart thermostats, batteries or water heater controls. Offerings may evolve over time.

“We think about the particular goals we’re trying to address at the distribution system level, and we design the interventions that have the greatest value for building owners and for the utility,” Van Hemert said.

The customer can always to opt out at any time. For those who do participate, there are bonuses and incentive payments.

Van Hemert considered some variables that can be addressed over a fully integrated network. Edo could, for instance, identify an energy event (such as a period of high heat that demands excess power). Rather than just reducing all buildings’ energy uses, the approach can be more nuanced.

   

“We can precondition, or precool a space,” before the temperatures peak, “and let the building drift through that [heat] event,” as one example, he said. In that way the building energy use can be managed with no occupant impact.

Another example may be seeking alternatives to reducing load for four peak hours, Van Hemert said. “We might know that some buildings can reduce consumption for two hours before they start to become uncomfortable, and so we can actually stagger and stage different interventions across all of the connected buildings to provide a more reliable resource for the utility for a bigger block of time.”

Today, Edo uses South Landing as a “living laboratory” where it researches and tests new technology innovations or approaches. By leveraging the development, Edo can offer grid-interactive efficient building technology so utilities can shift electric loads between buildings based on demand.

Spokane continues to serve as a laboratory for other national programs. The district around the South Landing project has a diverse set of residents and commercial spaces.

“The appeal of testing this particular neighborhood is that we would learn a lot about how different demographics would respond differently in a program like this,” Van Hemert said.

Forward thinking for contractors

For electrical contractor McKinstry, Edo reflects its approach to meeting the future challenges of an electricity-hungry world. 

As a contractor, “Our job is to find areas of the built environment that could be optimized,” said Megan Owen, McKinstry’s senior vice president for strategy and markets. The company then seeks out ways to make that a reality for its customers, whether through utility savings or funding sources.

By partnering with building owners, she said, “we say, ‘let us take a look at your utility bills, let us look at your infrastructure, let us look at how your building is being operated and let us provide you with facility improvement measures or energy conservation measures.’”

Part of this effort requires interfacing with the utility to examine rebates or opportunities and identifying challenges a building places on the utility.

When it came to the South Landing project in 2018, “a number of different innovations came out of that because we were trying to do something different. Edo was one of those innovations,” she said. It helps illustrate the shifting role of electrical contractors as buildings become more connected and intelligent.

For one thing, the relationship contractors have with a customer may evolve beyond one-time building, to gaining an operational understanding and providing controls, management or maintenance. 

With programs such as those Edo leads, “that means more work happening, and for contractors it is developing demand that likely wouldn’t have been there,” she said. 

So ECs may benefit by doing some of the advanced innovative work building owners and utilities are seeking.

Opportunities beyond building

“The electrification boom is on—that’s not debatable. There’s a lot of electrical infrastructure that’s getting put in,” to meet that boom, Owen said. “The idea of Edo is that the building’s initial electrical infrastructure isn’t the end of the story. A lot of that work can actually get done in the already-built environment to make it more efficient.”

Looking at the long-term electrical contracting demand, “The swath of work that we believe is needed now, is to take the built environment and make it more efficient,” Owen said.

As the world changes, and utility constraints and demand increase, “we could sit back as an electrical contractor and just wait for it to happen to us and try and keep pace, or we could really lean into the innovation,” she said.

In that way, companies that have worked in parallel become partners. For example, an EC and a mechanical contractor can enter partnerships to serve a customer’s efficiency and connectivity demands. These partnerships, Owen said, “really push what’s possible, and bring [their combined] expertise to the table.”

Meanwhile, in Spokane, the Connected Communities go-live date will be the end of 2025, and Avista’s role with the contractors will be ongoing.

“This is a way that we can increase the capacity of what current infrastructure provides, and to test what could likely be a really important solution in the future grid,” Parker said.

One of Edo’s goals is helping create the incentives needed to make technology acquisition such as batteries more beneficial for businesses, homes and utilities.

For Edo, Van Hemert said, “We think a lot about the kind of transition we’re going through and it can be a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.”

A utility planner may not design a system for batteries that aren’t installed in buildings, while building owners are reluctant to install batteries without programs they can participate in. Edo anticipates the connectivity of networked systems and cooperative efforts will help resolve the transitions and meet the challenges and goals ahead.

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