Home, smart home

A $6.65 million grant from the DOE helped kick-start the project, covering the cost of the community battery — which should be installed later this year and up and running early next year. It also reduced costs associated with getting each home to Department of Energy Zero Energy Ready Home standards, including the home battery, which runs around $10,000.

The tight building envelope required for the ZERH standard means the homes require a solar system around half the size of a similar standard construction home. Overall each home is designed to cut average energy use by up to 40 percent, according to Bridleman.

A recent DOE study estimated that by 2030, grid-interactive efficient buildings like those at Shadow Mountain could save up to $18 billion per year in power system costs and cut 80 million tons of carbon emissions annually.

Every home here can act as a virtual power plant, both by sending electricity back to the grid during spikes in demand and by allowing SoCal Edison to island the entire community off of the grid if needed.

The community is also trialing high-output vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid functions. Every home is prewired for an EV charger, but 10 homes will have a Wallbox Quasar 2, and the homeowner can lease a Kia EV6, one of the few cars in the US capable of bidirectional charging.

The Quasar 2 is a bidirectional charger that can use the energy stored in the car’s battery to power the home or the grid. “The battery in the home has about 13 kWh in it, but a car can bring you somewhere closer to 100 kWh,” says Bridleman.

Over three years, both the EV trial and the community as a whole will be studied by the Advanced Power and Energy Program at UC Irvine to evaluate the microgrid and research ways to improve the technologies for future residential use.

Living in the future

Justine and Michael didn’t set out to buy a smart home; they were just looking for their first home. “We didn’t know what the microgrid was until we explored this area, but we like to think of ourselves as looking towards the future generations, even our own,” says Michael (for now, border doodle Ziggy is their only child).

The relative affordability of the Shadow Mountain option, plus the promise of energy independence, made it an easy choice. “It really seemed too good to be true,” says Justine. Now, five weeks into their smart home journey, they’re hooked.

“We’ve had a few smart bulbs and an Echo Dot in the past, but we’ve never had everything — even our home appliances — connected,” says Justine. It’s been eye-opening for the couple. “We have so much more control over and insight into our home environment.”

From turning lights on and controlling the HVAC with their phone and their voice to actually understanding what their home is doing on a daily basis. “Seeing which appliances draw the most power, and then assessing if that appliance needs to be taking that much power or how we can adjust it, feels pretty cool. It’s a different layer of insight,” says Michael.

While they have to use multiple apps to control everything in their home — the Schneider Wiser Energy app for the power, the SunPower app for the solar, the Ecobee app for the HVAC — the systems are interconnected, working behind the scenes to reduce energy use. “We’ve learned if you make it too complex for a homeowner, they won’t use it,” says Bridleman. Here, everything is automated with software; the app controls are merely for setting the automations up and daily convenience.

That’s part of what makes this a smart home of the future. It’s not about surface-level changes — sticking a smart thermostat on an aging HVAC system so that you can crank up the AC with a voice command. It’s about making the home’s infrastructure smart. And it’s not limited to new construction.

Smarter energy

While it’s easier to build smart from the start, much of the tech powering Shadow Mountain homes can be retrofitted into existing homes. And there are other companies innovating here, too. A new electrical panel from smart energy company SPAN allows for automatic load management, time-of-use scheduling, and other energy management features. But it costs $4,500. A more affordable option is to retrofit breakers into existing panels. Schneider is developing individual smart breakers that can be swapped into existing Schneider panels, which Wills says are in 25 percent of US homes.

Smart home company Savant makes individual smart power modules that can be retrofitted into all major electrical panels, allowing for energy monitoring and critical load management. Then there’s the $300 Sense Home Energy monitor that clips into any existing panel and provides insights into how your home uses energy, similar to those Michael and Justine receive in their state-of-the-art starter home.

Today, smart electrification of existing homes is still a significantly more expensive proposition than in new builds. But with more government incentives — including new tax credits for upgrading your home’s electrical panel and wiring that arrived this year with the Inflation Reduction Act — it’s a better proposition than it once was.

With rising energy costs, smart power in a home could soon become a necessity rather than a luxury. “At some point, it will be that a builder can’t sell a home if it doesn’t have a smart, solar, microgrid component to it,” says Schneider’s Wills. “The same for existing homeowners. It will be like trying to sell a car without power windows.”