Brian Lusher taught himself about the energy industry early on. Now he runs demand response for one of the biggest utilities in the country.
Some people turn to YouTube to watch music videos, clips of their favorite television shows, or how-to videos. Brian Lusher turned to it for a different reason.
Years ago, Brian started downloading academic lectures about the energy industry on YouTube so he’d have something tolisten to on long drives. At the time, he was a reliability engineer for an on-site power plant at a manufacturing facility. But his self-guided, deep dive into the industry helped land him a job at Duke Energy, where he’s director of demand response today.
This week on With Great Power, Brian describes some of the programs that Duke has deployed to help both residential and commercial customers manage their energy use. He also shares how demand response and virtual power plant programs fit into Duke Energy's larger strategy to manage load growth, including from data centers.
Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Mary Catherine O'Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe and Brad Langley.
Brad Langley:
Early on in my career, I had a difficult commute from San Francisco to San Jose and then back again at the end of the day. It would've sucked a whole lot more if not for sports radio.
Brian Lusher:
Here's the 1-0 pitch. Bailey drives one deep left field and gone.
Brad Langley:
I know it's not for everyone, but for me, sports radio made those miles fly by. We all have our thing, right? Brian Lusher used to spend lots of time driving too, but his road trip jam was actually YouTube. Don't worry, he wasn't watching, just listening.
Brian Lusher:
Yeah, so my now wife lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was driving two and a half to three hours either direction every weekend to come see her. And so as I was filling up that time in the car, I was listening to different things I could find on YouTube. And one of them that came up was a energy policy and markets course, and I got absolutely hooked.
Brad Langley:
Hooked on YouTube lectures, but it actually makes sense. Brian has always been really curious about how things work.
Brian Lusher:
Growing up in a small town in King George, Virginia, my mom was a middle school teacher. She had the summers off with us, got us excited about taking us to museums in Washington DC. And when I was looking for what I wanted to major in, fell into that engineering space by being broadly interested in a lot of topics. Mechanical engineering hits a little bit of chemical, electrical, mechanical capabilities.
Brad Langley:
Years before his YouTube phase, Brian earned a mechanical engineering degree at Virginia Tech. There, he was on a team that built an electric motorcycle pretty much from scratch.
Brian Lusher:
We were working with a local motor manufacturer, talking with battery manufacturers, and we basically stripped down a gas powered motorcycle and rebuilt it as an entire electric motorcycle. The end goal was clear on building the motorcycle, but really how to get there was not that clear and that's why I was attracted to the project.
Brad Langley:
That love of figuring out how to make things work landed him his first engineering gig out of college. It may not have been as exciting as building motorcycles. He was a reliability engineer at a paper company's onsite power plant, but it still scratched the itch. Later, he would land a job at Duke Energy in Charlotte where he now works as director of demand response. So no more long commutes for him, but he still listens to YouTube.
Brian Lusher:
I get made fun of by my team. I have a demand response YouTube playlist that's been sent out to our larger organization as I see new webinars and new ideas, but there's always something exciting.
Brad Langley:
And actually, Brian thinks he's found a way to get consumers excited about energy through Duke's demand response offerings.
Brian Lusher:
This vision that we have is like Spotify wrapped for demand response. Finding the right way to in near real time tell customers the value they added is super important. It really connects them to the incentive that they're getting either on a monthly basis or on some sort of regular basis. So as we can move customers to more real time information, clearer technology and indications on how they can be a participant and support the overall system, I think that's incredibly important.
Brad Langley:
This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid today. I'm Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change, they don't innovate fast enough. And while it might not always seem like the most cutting edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grade cleaner, more reliable, and customer centric. Today, my guest is Brian Lusher, the director of demand response at Duke Energy. We talk about some of the programs that Duke has deployed to help residential customers manage their energy use and how demand response and virtual power plant programs fit into Duke Energy's larger strategy to address load growth. But first, we talk about a new battery program for commercial customers that just launched in August.
Brian Lusher:
We've run a successful residential battery program for about three years now, and that's expanded now to over 6,000 residential customers allowing Duke Energy to send a signal to their battery, basically asking that battery to discharge back to the system up to 36 times per year. So evolving that program into the commercial space is something that we always wanted to do, but it comes with more technical challenges. When you start scaling these systems up, there's different interconnection requirements, software requirements that you have to factor in. And so we're starting relatively small with that offering. It's batteries that are similar to the residential programs and then we're going to continue working our way into batteries scaling up to a five megawatt size.
Brad Langley:
And is that the ultimate goal of the program to get it to five megawatts? What other goals are you guys working to and where are you at in the overall timeline of the pilot project today?
Brian Lusher:
Yeah, so we have filed that one as a full program. There's no intended end date, no intended cap on the participation. The five megawatts is really a limit on a per site or per customer basis, really to avoid having to extend engineering studies out to the network models and continuing to cause complexity on how these systems are controlled. So when you think about demand response really helping out the bulk electric grid, you've got tons of small little devices everywhere discharging a little bit or serving the customer load at that site, which then reduces the need on the overall system. And so when you're looking at a really small amount on a per site basis, that's really not that big of a deal for your control systems at scale. But once you start increasing that, say from five megawatts, if you went up to 100 or 200 megawatts at a single site, you need to factor in the transmission and distribution system design in those regions as well.
So we don't intend to cap that commercial industrial program. Our integrated resource planning team is deeply involved with what our growth projections are, but it's not going to be the only resource that we're growing on the system.
Brad Langley:
And having so few opt-outs I think really speaks to the program design and the effort that went into that. Clearly you guys got it right, but I'm sure it was a lot of work going into it. So what were some of the biggest challenges in designing that program and getting all the stakeholders aligned because that can be one of the biggest challenges as well. So what did you guys kind of do going into it? How'd you design it and how'd you get alignment across all thos various stakeholders?
Brian Lusher:
Yeah. In demand response, a lot of times these are programs that stakeholders want us to file. They're ones that manufacturers are willing to do the development to support. You also have the customers who are looking for ways to offset the cost of new equipment at their sites. And so a lot of the early work that we do in program development is customer research, ensuring that we're looking at a broad swath of our customer base and ensuring that these are programs that they're going to find interesting. And then we start working through the technical items after we've gotten a good base for the program design. And that's where we work with some of our long-term partners in the control space and continue to expand really what the forefront of inverter based controls look like for these storage equipment at the commercial sites.
Brad Langley:
And for those that may be listening who might be considering a similar program, what more can you share about the technology, the systems or the partners that are involved in this effort?
Brian Lusher:
Yeah, I would say start small. I think the space around less than 20 kilowatts, for example, that aligns with the residential space, that has been figured out. It has a broad alignment across the industry. There's plenty of partners like Energy Hub and Uplight and WeGrid and others that have battery control capability. And so there's multiple vendors and partners that you can look to work with. I think once you start getting into the larger systems, you add in the complexity of figuring out how does this tie into your distribution management system? How does this tie into your energy management system that the transmission operators are using? And so we're still working through some of those items as we look at the different scales of batteries. You want to make sure you've got enough control of that device that it's providing real grid value, but you also don't want to saddle that customer or that piece of the program with a lot of cost by requiring a $10,000 piece of equipment right at the grid edge on that customer site.
And so I think getting all of your standards teams internally aligned is really critical. Understanding what equipment customers are already installing on their premises is really important as well, which you can generally get from the interconnection data. And then ensuring you have technical people involved in the entire development process, reviewing those details and ensuring that you have a plan to move forward.
Brad Langley:
And you guys are also doing some work on the residential side with solar. I think it's a program called PowerPair. Can you tell me about that program?
Brian Lusher:
Yeah, that's correct. So PowerPair in North Carolina is really part of the clean energy portfolio standard that we were looking to expand access to cleaner energy to residential customers. And the way that we designed that program, and it was a pilot offering for the upfront incentive for these customers. So it's really offsetting solar and storage cost for a select amount of customers, but we required the customers who received that incentive to participate in either battery control programs under our Power Manager and EnergyWise home offerings or sign up for a time of use style rate model. So that way it's either the customer has control of the battery or the utility has control over the battery for a limited amount of times throughout the year to really understand what are customers more interested in. And so we limited those cohorts and we quickly saw that the utility control model filled up.
We capped it at 90% of the overall program volume, and that's one of the primary drivers of the 6,000 customers that are in that battery program today.
Brad Langley:
So obviously getting customers to join these programs is critical and the incentives play a big role in that. So what incentives are you offering to get folks to join?
Brian Lusher:
Yeah, for the power pair pilot, we're offering up to $9,000 per system, 5,000 going to the battery, 4,000 going to the solar aspect of that. And then we're paying customers an ongoing incentive as well for the battery control, and we think that one is really important. So when we made the program design, we felt that it was easier for customers to have a flat rate for them to easily decide and do the back of the napkin math on if this made sense for them. And so for a Tesla Powerwall three, for example, might cost about $16,000 installed. We're offering $624 a year for that customer to keep that battery connected to the system in an ongoing fashion. And so giving the customer some certainty that this is a flat rate, it's not based on individual performance, gave them confidence to continue scaling. Of course, when you're doing program design, you have to balance how much risk is there that that battery or that resource is not going to show up when you're doing flat incentive structures as well.
Brad Langley:
And what results have you seen so far that you can share?
Brian Lusher:
Yeah, so we've seen great customer interest, 6,000 customers participating over 50 megawatts of performance when you're looking at a one-hour value of that battery. When we look at operating this on the grid, we tend to run this in two and three hour long cycles. And so a customer might see a longer discharge, but we see relatively low opt-outs. Most customers aren't even noticing that we're running these batteries unless they're just interested in paying attention to their app and seeing the notifications.
Brad Langley:
And how long has this project been running and what's next for it? Because the evolution of these is obviously very important, taking the learnings, expanding. So where do you see this project going into the future?
Brian Lusher:
We launched this project in fall of 2024, and so that growth has been relatively fast in comparison to other program designs that we've launched previously. When we look at what's next, it's really the ongoing performance and analysis of the offering. Is this the most cost-effective way to provide incentives? Are there faster ways to get information and data back from individual manufacturers to continue to treat this like a grid resource no different than something else that our energy control center would operate? And then we're going through the traditional measurement verification that most utilities look at on energy efficiency and demand response programs just to make sure that we have a third party auditor that's validating the results that we're seeing from the advanced metering infrastructure as well.
Brad Langley:
So really good overviews on two specific programs. So pulling the lens back a little bit, what role are Duke's demand response and virtual power plant programs playing in this larger strategy to address load growth and improve resilience?
Brian Lusher:
Yes. So Duke Energy has a system that's over 50 gigawatts of total capacity, 50,000 megawatts, and demand response programs are currently offering up to around 2,500 megawatts in the summer, around 2,000 megawatts in the winter. And so we know that we need to grow these resources just like we need to grow other generating resources as there's load growth in our system. We are constantly having customers move into our service territories across the footprint, significant load growth in the Carolinas from customer growth as well as large loads coming into the territory as well. And so our approach, when we look at the load forecast from a planning perspective, it's what energy efficiency, what demand response can we first bring on the system? And then we take that remaining load growth and look at what generating resources we have to build. And so I just like to highlight that that's upfront in our planning process and no one from our planning teams is preventing us from scaling these programs.
They look to us to offer cost-effective programs that customers are interested in joining that are still below the avoided system costs that you would see otherwise.
Brad Langley:
And as it pertains to virtual power plants, it's been such a really hot topic in the industry for the past several years, and you're seeing varying degrees of success of VPPs throughout the country. Is there something specific to your approach or to your customer base that's helped Duke be successful in implementing different types of VPP assets throughout your system?
Brian Lusher:
I think the first one is you need people day in, day out that are breathing and living these customer sited resources. It's not a one and done. You don't just create this or build it in the first place and then walk away. We have over 80 technicians that are out in the field every single day connecting, reconnecting, talking with customers for our air conditioner load control programs. We've got water heaters and pool pumps and heat strips that are involved in those programs as well. And so I think the first piece is making sure that you run this like an organization that gives it the care and feeding necessary for this to operate over a long period of time. We first launched our programs in Florida in the 1980s and have continued to operate those programs till today, and then in the Carolinas and the Midwest jurisdictions in the early 2000s.
And so as people look at this being a resource, I don't consider it really that different from the other generating resources we have on the system. It just requires the care and feeding, the constant development on new technology, constant measurement and performance to ensure that it's operating well.
Brad Langley:
The Southern US is seeing some of the strongest data center demand in the country, and I think Duke has nearly eight gigawatts of electric service agreements with data centers, and you're really focused on turning that load growth into customer benefits. I believe Duke is investigating in demand flexibility tools right now. They're specific to data centers, such a hot topic. So I'm curious, what can you tell me about that work as one of the leading jurisdictions in this data center effort and making sure that those investments, that energy usage doesn't unfairly impact those customers that may not be paying for those types of systems?
Brian Lusher:
Great question. So when we're looking at data center load growth, there's two things well before we're even talking about flexibility that you have to plan for. It's what do you do if this load does show up once you've agreed to start investing in the system? And then what do you do if that load that said they were going to show up doesn't show up? And so the way we tackle those two problems is requiring a mix of contract terms or upfront payments from those customers, ensuring that before we go into a construction phase, we are capturing the cost required with those upgrades required on the system. And all of that happens through our economic development and large load growth space. And then when you move into the system operations and reliability aspect of this, we will not sacrifice system reliability for that load growth. And so we do engineering studies before that customer is coming in at that specific site, making sure that there's no negative impact on power quality and reliability to those customers surrounding that area or the grid as a whole.
And then you start moving into the much shorter term operations of how do you actually deal with the load flexibility that's required from these resources? And you can start this off at very similar to our large load interruptible service rates that we have today. You can have a breaker at the customer site and you can just disconnect them at those peak periods. But obviously from a customer experience, we talk a lot on residential customer experience, but from a commercial industrial data center customer experience, that's not a good one either if you just disconnect them at the breaker. And so we're working with some startup companies in the space, Mercury Computing is one of them that we've been doing some pilot work with on can you send a signal all the way down to the chip level to identify that there is a grid constraint or that we need this site to curtail and then allow the chip and the software to make the decisions on what it prevents from operating at those times.
And as we've gotten deeper and deeper into this, it's a fascinating space when you start looking at even the ownership model, you might have a site owner versus the owner of the racks and the equipment versus the web service or cloud service provider, and then you have an end software product that's operating on top of all of that. So you really going back into the stakeholder aspect of that, it's not one customer, it's four customers that you're interacting with in the flexibility space.
Brad Langley:
A lot of communities are kind of standing up and saying, "We don't want data centers. There's lots of negative ramifications for us both environmentally and energy wise, cost wise." What are you guys doing to also bring the community along in these projects so they can see that this could be good for us if handled appropriately, which we're very focused on doing. Is there the community engagement aspect of this that you guys are focused on to just ensure people know that you're taking this seriously and you're not going to do something that's going to be negatively impactful to them?
Brian Lusher:
I would say that in general, we've not historically needed to look at siting a large load similar to siting a power plant or a generation station. And as the entire narrative has shifted a little bit on this, we're starting to see that that approach is required. The community has to be involved in these decisions. It's completely the community's right to make decisions on things that are going to impact them or impact their families. And so no different from siting a generating site where you have community meetings and can share details around the financials and the value that this might bring to the community, I would anticipate in the future that we're going to continue to see more of that style of interaction with communities.
Brad Langley:
So last question for you. We call this show with great power, which is a nod to the energy industry. It's also a Spider-Man quote, "With great power comes great responsibility." So Brian, what superpower do you bring to the energy transition?
Brian Lusher:
I bring curiosity and understanding to the energy transition. I will go extremely deep into the weeds on some thorny, wonky legal policy scenario as far as I'll go deep into the weeds on a technical data sheet for a battery or inverter manufacturer. And so I think being able to hit the broad spectrum of interests and do that day in and day out lets us move the ball forward to the energy transition.
Brad Langley:
Great. Well, Brian, thank you so much for your time and for coming on the show.
Brian Lusher:
Thanks.
Brad Langley:
Brian Lusher is the director of demand response at Duke Energy. With Great Power is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. Delivering on our clean energy future is complex. GridX exists to simplify the journey. GridX is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy, all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid. Mary Catherine O'Connor produced a show. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed a show. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley. If this show is providing value for you and we really hope it is, we'd love it if you could help us spread the word. You can rate your review us at Apple and Spotify, or you can share a link with a friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life.
As always, thanks so much for listening. I'm Brad Langley.