SPEAKER: Froylan Sifuentes Postdoctoral scholar Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory DATE: Wednesday, October 10, 2018 TIME: 4:00-5:30pm PLACE: 126 Barrows TITLE: The Role of Commercial Buildings in China’s Renewable Electricity Future: Forecasting Load and Demand Response Potential DESCRIPTION: As renewable energy continues to play a large role in China’s electricity grid, obstacles for increasing grid flexibility need to be addressed. My work focuses on identifying these obstacles and assessing the potential of demand response (DR) to provide flexibility in times of extreme need in a future with large penetration of renewables. This talk will first describe a national load model, which uses a physically based commercial load model. Second, it will present estimates of DR’s provision of flexibility across hours of high and low netload, as well as hours of high down and up ramping. BIO: Froylan Sifuentes is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He conducts research on the changing Chinese electricity system and how to integrate higher penetration of renewables into national decarbonization pathways. Froy earned his Ph.D. from the Energy and Resources Group in 2018 working with Professor Duncan Callaway on the intersection of building controls, electricity, and renewable energy. He has worked as a researcher at Tsinghua University and the State Grid Electricity Research Institute in Beijing, China. He obtained his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.