The Grid Sandbox is an online innovation sandboxing platform for utilities to radically accelerate and scale solutions for a clean, reliable, and affordable electricity grid. It makes it easier for utilities to learn from and engage with their customers, like understanding their evolving loads, behaviours, and preferences for clean energy services — ranging from efficiency, distributed energy resources (DERs), and demand response. The sandbox platform also helps households learn about opportunities to invest in home energy retrofits, self-production, storage, and EV charging infrastructure while making it easy for them to try out new technologies, rates, and utility services.

In partnership with a local Calgary utility, a pilot of the platform was launched with eight Calgary homes, giving each access to a free virtual home energy audit, end-use energy consumption and production forecasting, and virtual billing. In exchange, the utility learned from and engaged with participating homes — informing future rate designs and energy service offerings. A series of virtual DER models like solar PV, storage, and smart EV chargers were also developed, allowing customers to virtually install them in their homes. This allows each household to clearly understand the costs, benefits, and impact of adopting these technologies on their bill and lifestyle.

The goal of this project was to make developing, testing, and evaluating utility and grid solutions easy and fast, because we don’t have another decade to spare when it comes to piloting small-scale climate solutions.