Flex Appeal: Emerging Best Practices for Communications to Recruit Households into Load Flexibility Programs
Virtual power plants and automated demand-response programs have increased across the U.S., though the industry still hasn’t figured out how to talk to the customers it needs to enroll.
Free Tool Brings Consumer Reports-Style Testing to Commercial Energy Efficiency Products
Commercial customers in California lack support when purchasing advanced energy efficiency products and distributed energy resources. These decisions are complex and reliable product performance information, particularly for comparing specific products, can be difficult to find. Yet, these customers are crucial to advancing the state’s electrification and energy efficiency goals.
California Pilot Finds Cost, Not Product Availability, Is Still the Main Barrier to High-Efficiency Commercial Heat Pumps
Space heating and cooling account for 41% of total commercial energy use nationwide, and in California, most of it still runs through gas-fired rooftop units. New research presented at the 2026 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings, based on two CalNEXT pilot incentive programs, finds that higher efficiency heat pump rooftop units, known as HP RTUs, are increasingly available on the market. The bigger obstacle to adoption is that current incentive levels don’t cover enough of the added cost.
Smart Controls Cut Peak Water Heating Costs for Low-Income Households, but Only When the Closet Has Room to Breathe
New research on heat pump water heaters was presented at the 2026 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings tested a smarter approach in real homes, and found it can meaningfully cut costs and emissions, but only where the equipment has room to work.
WCEC Engineer Named One of ACEEE’s 2026 Champions of Energy Efficient Buildings
UC Davis Western Cooling Efficiency Center engineers and researchers attended the ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings this month. WCEC contributed to five papers presented at the conference. We would like to also congratulate Subhrajit Chakraborty who was named one of ACEEE’s 2026 Champions of Energy Efficient Buildings on behalf of his work […]
Slipping Through the Cracks: How Advances in Aerosol Sealing May Hold the Key to Greater Home Energy Efficiency
Research conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Center for Energy and Environment, and the UC Davis Western Cooling Efficiency Center delves into the benefits of aerosol envelope sealing techniques for existing residential buildings.
WCEC Receives Best Paper Award from ASHRAE
Erfan Rasouli, Emily Fricke and Vinod Narayanan were recipients of the Science and Technology for the Built Environment Best Paper Award
WCEC Engineer Presents at the IEA Heat Pump Conference
WCEC presents at the IEA Heat Pump Conference on a Multi-function Heat Pump (MFHP) system that uses one outdoor unit to provide both domestic hot water (DHW) along with space cooling and heating.
Are Southern California students and teachers breathing clean air?
New laws and funding push ventilation to boost air quality and slow spread of COVID-19. But experts cite too many loopholes and not enough consistency.
New Published Paper by WCEC that Experimentally and Numerically Characterizes the Performance of a Novel Cooling and Heat Recovery System
In this study a M−cycle heat and mass exchanger was used as a heat recovery ventilator (HRV) to recover energy from the exhaust air stream during winter and as an IEC during summer to cool the ventilation air.