Since December 2020, the City of Boulder has partnered with Fermata Energy on a vehicle-to-building (V2B) project at the city’s North Boulder Recreation Center to provide the city with new ways of reducing peak demand as a means of reducing its energy costs. The collaboration has demonstrated how V2B can produce electricity bill savings using the electric vehicle battery.
Boulder connected its all-electric 2020 Nissan LEAF fleet vehicle to Fermata Energy’s vehicle-to-everything (V2X) system, which consists of its FE-15 bidirectional EV charger and proprietary energy management software platform. With the FE-15 connected to the recreation center’s electrical system, Fermata Energy’s software monitors the electrical load, looking for opportunities to reduce peak loads using energy from the EV battery as opposed to having it be supplied entirely by the grid. Boulder’s EV is then recharged automatically after the peak event has passed.
In eleven months of successful usage, Boulder has saved $2,963.44, an average savings of almost $270 per month — or, approximately equal to the monthly payment for many popular EVs, such as the Nissan LEAF.
“The results we achieved in Boulder offer compelling evidence of how a municipality can leverage an electric vehicle asset for both mobility and facility management,” said Fermata Energy founder and CEO David Slutzky. “Through Fermata Energy’s cloud-based V2X software and metering technology, we were able to continuously monitor the building’s energy usage, and during peak energy events, optimize the discharge of the EV’s battery to support the building’s electrical loads and to reduce peak demand charges.”
“The City of Boulder is working to promote electric vehicle adoption, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and enhance community resilience,” said Matt Lehrman, the City of Boulder’s Policy Advisor, Energy Utilities. “This project not only tested the ability of one EV to reduce the energy costs for the North Boulder Recreation Center, it helps us better understand how this technology could be used at other city facilities and potentially one day in community members’ homes.”
In July 2021, The City of Boulder project won the IDC Government Insights Fourth Annual Smart Cities North America Award, Smart Buildings division. According to IDC, the Boulder project “exemplifies a forward-thinking municipality that is effectively leveraging technology to offer new services and economic opportunities.” The award recognized how Fermata Energy’s cutting edge V2X solution turns a traditional cost-center, an EV Charger, into a revenue-generating, grid-supporting asset.
At a site in Rhode Island last summer, Fermata Energy’s V2X technology earned over $4,200 by participating in a utility demand response program in partnership with Electric Frog Company and National Grid. That demand response program, called ConnectedSolutions, calls upon distributed energy resources to provide capacity during utility peak demand events.
