Environmental and consumer advocates, along with Illinois’ regional electric grid operator, launched an innovative pilot project this month to demonstrate how demand response can continue to support grid reliability year-round and lower electricity costs for Chicago businesses, institutions, government, and homeowners. The pilot program, called the Combined Capacity Asset Performance Project (C-CAP), is a collaboration of Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Accelerate Group, Citizens Utility Board (CUB), and PJM Interconnection. The project will show how strategically combining resources can allow demand response to continue to compete with other sources of power in the market under new performance requirements. The idea behind C-CAP is simple: If a building, energy storage, or renewable energy site can’t meet the stringent year round capacity performance market requirements on its own, it can combine with other buildings or off-site distributed energy resources to create a combined asset that fill in each others’ gaps. Through the C-CAP collaboration, it is possible […]