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Community Power reports high smart-thermostat response rates in Smart Home Flex pilot
Summary
Staff reported Smart Home Flex pilot enrolled about 1,900 smart thermostats with participation rates near 90–95% across seven events; staff will run a formal impact evaluation and consider scaling in 2026.
Nelson Lomeli, Senior Program Manager for Smart Home Flex, updated the Community Advisory Committee on the pilot's enrollment and early performance. He reported that the pilot enrolled just over 1,900 smart thermostats (target 2,000), called seven events over a mild summer and recorded preliminary participation rates of about 90–95% during those events.
Lomeli described event strategies (including pre-cooling) and showed anonymized dashboard output for an Aug. 22 event where roughly 1,600 participating thermostats demonstrated a visible drop in reported energy usage during the event window. "We were seeing somewhere in the neighborhood of like 95% participation for the thermostats responding to the signals that we were seeing sent," Lomeli said.
On heat pump water heaters, Lomeli said Community Power is the default water-heater rewards program implementer for SDG&E territory under the TECH Clean California statewide incentive; about 10–15 program applications were in process and staff recently approved five Wi‑Fi‑enabled Rheem models that can be scheduled. The program also purchased universal control modules to increase enrollment capacity; initial shipments and tests are planned for December with broader rollout in Q1 2026.
Lomeli said staff has hired an evaluator to conduct a full impact evaluation of the pilot and plans to return with results and a scaling recommendation in spring–summer 2026. The committee discussed enrollment experiences, thermostats that lost connectivity, customer safeguards (mixing valves for water heaters), and how the program will serve households that rarely run AC.
Ending: Staff will send participation incentives and finalize the evaluation vendor; staff will return with validated impact results and a recommendation about scaling in 2026.
