LISTSERV: Year-End Newsletter

We are pleased to announce that three Cal-IRES products are available for review. The report entitled California Renewable Energy Center: Vision and Development Metrics identifies a need for stronger and more robust support for California’s renewable energy deployment goals by the California Renewable Energy Center. A companion report California Renewable Energy Center: Scope and Structure identifies some specific current unmet needs related to high penetration renewable energy deployment and recommends a strategy to meet them. A third document, a working paper entitled Renewable Energy Futures Comparison – California vs. Rest of US, examines the differences and similarities between California’s renewable energy challenges and opportunities and those confronting the rest of the US. The report focuses on major renewable resource applications, i.e. wind energy, solar energy, geothermal energy and bio-power. Its general conclusion is that making the best of California’s resources and opportunities for leadership will require efforts that complement and leverage generic research and technology advancement work of Federal programs. We welcome your comments on any of these items.

General Renewable Integration items:

• All of us involved in renewable energy have reason to inform ourselves about the incoming California administration’s outlook plan for clean energy and jobs. The plan strikes a balance between renewable energy and energy efficiency and emphasizes job creation. It was highlighted in the last stages of 2010 election campaign. For Cal-IRES it is good news, because it clearly underscores the importance of renewable energy integration and a “full menu” deployment strategy featuring a mix of new building, community and utility scale supply capacity. It is ambitious and will provide ample challenges for Cal-IRES and CREC in the coming years.http://www.jerrybrown.org/sites/default/files/6-15%20Clean_Energy%20Plan.pdf

Utility Scale Renewable Energy:

• The California Energy Commission (CEC) proceeded with a Research Needs for Utility-Scale Renewable Energy RFP 500-10-503 with proposals due on December 21. Cal-IRES has offered to be team members on a couple of proposals, based on discussions with our advisors. “Critical objectives of the solicitation are to: develop new applications of mixed (hybrid and/or integrated) renewable energy technologies; develop and demonstrate innovative cost-effective designs, technologies or combinations of technologies; develop mitigation approaches that result in reduced environmental impacts, especially from utility-scale solar installations; design, develop and demonstrate engineering and modeling approaches for the management of variable energy resources.”

Renewable Energy Secure Community:

• Sonoma Mountain Village is a community being developed by Codding Enterprises on more than 200 acres in Rohnert Park and will be the first in North America, and the fourth in the world, to be endorsed by One Planet Communities, which enables the entire community to live within a sensitive ecological footprint. The $1 billion sustainable, mixed-use community calls for 1,900 homes and will be the largest development in Sonoma County.

• Cal-IRES congratulates the Applied Solutions Network and the organizers of Applied Solutions’ Annual Conference in Boulder, Colorado last week. Entitled Local Governments Rising to the Challenge: Providing Leadership through Community Transformation, the conference brought together action-oriented communities and thought leaders in sustainability-related disciplines. Cal-IRES (Gerry Braun) moderated and contributed to a session entitled Purpose and Need for New Financial Tools that kicked off a day of thoughtful and well-informed discussion on the topic of Financial Innovation to Leverage Limited Resources. Cal-IRES advisors Jan McFarland and Larisa Dobriansky moderated and contributed to later sessions entitled Financial Policies and Regulation: Priorities for Local Governments and Local to National: The Net Impact of Financial Tools.

LISTSERV: Cal-IRES News

Building our capacity: We are increasingly able to rely on the Cal-IRES website as our communications hub and program information repository. We are pleased to note that Monique Romero has accepted a position as our web graphic design developer. Our website is very much a product of Monique’s talent and expertise as a part-time consultant, and we are very glad to welcome her as a permanent member of the Cal-IRES and UC Davis Energy Institute team.

Reaching out for good advice: We are also pleased to welcome new advisors, including Mike DeAngelis, Manager, Advanced Renewable and Distributed Generation Technologies, SMUD; Blair Swezey, Director, California Market Development and Policy, SunPower Corp.; and Carl Weinberg, Principal, Weinberg Associates. Our advisors will soon be asked to convene and help set our priorities and focus our planning for 2011.

General Renewable Integration items:

• We continue to post upcoming events related to renewable energy integration on our web site, such as the Commission’s PIER program upcoming symposium “Paving the Way for Renewables” taking place on October 25 in Sacramento, CA or by remote webcast. For 2011, we’ve posted the “Save the Date” notice for April’s UC Energy Week at UC Davis.
• In our September blog we referenced the KEMA white paper on Virtual Power Plants (VPP), and Gerry’s presentation at their Innovation Forum on the connection between VPPs and Renewable Energy Secure Communities (RESCOs). Pike Research senior analyst, Peter Asmus, contacted Cal-IRES during his research on Virtual Power Plants (VPP) and creation of a data base of pending VPP projects. Their report on Virtual Power Plants has recently been published, with an executive summary and report brochure available for download at: http://www.pikeresearch.com/research/virtual-power-plants. Peter’s blog about VPPs ("an Internet of Energy") and how they differ from micro-grids can be found here: http://www.pikeresearch.com/blog/articles/what%e2%80%99s-this-buzz-about-virtual-power-plants
• Cal-IRES Advisor Larisa Dobriansky shared with us her paper entitled “Sustainable Urban Energy Planning: A Strategic Approach to Meeting Climate and Energy Goals.” Larisa’s paper focuses on the crucial role for sustainable energy planning creating the context and conditions for integrating and optimizing clean and efficient energy use within the urban built environment.

Utility Scale Renewable Energy items:

• For a window on the challenges and latest technologies for managing renewable energy on the grid, we’ve posted Cal-IRES Advisor Merwin Brown’s September 20, 2010 presentation New Electric Grid Technologies for Renewable Integration—The Need for Being Smarter for Transmission Summit West in San Francisco under Resources/USRE.
• As the November election approaches, we note that at least one California ballot measure has implications for USRE. Specifically, according to the state legislative analyst, Proposition 23 “suspends the implementation of AB 32 until the unemployment rate in California is 5.5 percent or less for four consecutive quarters. During the suspension period, state agencies are prohibited from proposing or adopting new regulations, or enforcing previously adopted regulations, that would implement AB 32. (Once AB 32 went back into effect, this measure could not suspend it again.)... Specifically, this proposition would likely suspend… (the) proposed ARB regulation that is intended to require privately and publicly owned utilities and others who sell electricity to obtain at least 33 percent of their supply from “renewable” sources, such as solar or wind power, by 2020. (The current requirement that 20 percent of the electricity obtained by privately owned utilities come from renewable sources by 2010 would not be suspended by this proposition.)” For the complete analysis, see http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/propositions/23/analysis.htm

Renewable Energy Secure Community items:

• A national conference entitled “Local Governments Rising to the Challenge: Providing Leadership through Community Transformation” will take place in Boulder CO November 10-12, 2010, including an entire day on adapting existing and developing new financial tools to break through the economic barrier impeding the necessary transformation of our communities to develop and implement low energy, water and transport use public infrastructure. Cal-IRES will participate in the conference. Gerry Braun will moderate a session on the second day entitled “Purpose and Need for New Financial Tools." For registration information, visit: www.appliedsolutionsconference.org
• Canby Net Zero Community Project Manager Dale Merrick shared the good news that their project was selected for Phase I funding [$2M] by the DOE Golden Field Office for a “cascaded" use of a geothermal resource for low-temperature power generation. View press release here: http://www.energy.gov/news/9498.htm

LISTSERV: Cal-IRES News

Our latest blog (http://cal-ires.blogspot.com/) answers the question of what Cal-IRES does and summarizes some recent activities by our core team, associates, advisors, and sponsors, with links to applicable sites, documents and presentations. We hope you will find the summary, and especially the shared items, of interest. We invite you to engage in similar ways. We have also archived prior Cal-IRES News on the blog site for reference, in reverse chronological order. Other relevant news:

On September 2, 2010, the CPUC approved nine grant recipients of the California Solar Initiative (CSI) RD&D Solicitation #2, for a total of up to $14.6 million, funds previously authorized. The solicitation focused on improved photovoltaic (PV) production technologies and innovative business practices. UCD’s West Village Energy Initiative, which aims to be one of the first large scale communities to achieve net zero energy through energy efficiency and onsite generation, was awarded $2.5 million. See http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PUBLISHED/NEWS_RELEASE/123039.htm, and note that Cal-IRES supported the proposal development and provided scoping for specific integration research in the West Village Energy Initiative context.

We continue to post upcoming events related to renewable energy integration on our web site, such as Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) Fall 2010 Speaker Series at UC Davis. These seminars are free, open to the public and run weekly September through December. CITRIS is a multi-campus UC initiative involving UCB, UCD, UCM and UCSD.

What Does Cal-IRES Actually Do?

I wish more people would ask this question, but just in case folks are too polite to ask, I thought I’d offer a summary of recent activity, arranged by topic.

Core team: Ronnie Holland and Monique Romero have combined to create and maintain a website that is the hub of our outreach efforts. It will get better and better based on further work and feedback from users. Do you have any for us? Ronnie was the point person for our first two Cal-IRES events in April and May, and also has been ramping up coordination and peer review of reports on cross-cutting projects, e.g. California Renewable Energy Center's (CREC) Renewable Energy Forecasting and Mapping Project. Along with some advisory work for national and California programs, Gerry Braun’s recent focus has been on a report addressing the forward vision and development metrics for CREC. It is for our internal CREC review. Its general theme is developing CREC to meet currently un-met needs in support of California renewable energy deployment. Gerry hopes to get it out to our advisors and sponsors in the near future; then on to other “deliverables” coming due.

Associates: Cal-IRES Associates have been supporting initiatives related Public Interest Energy Research's (PIER) Renewable Energy Secure Communities (RESCO) program. Karen Eggerman helped develop the presentation to the USDA on the California Rural Energy Action and Transformation Enterprise (CREATE), a joint initiative of Cal-IRES and the Applied Solutions Network, and she is also digging into issues around Community net metering. Our newest Associate, George Hay, has been supporting our efforts jointly with the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE) and Applied Solutions, to secure Department of Energy (DOE) support of a national RESCO roadmap. Response to ACORE’s letter to Assistant Secretary Zoi is pending.

Advisors: Our advisors have been sharing important information and helping forge our strategic relationships.

• Larisa Dobriansky has organized meetings in Washington with DOE regarding the proposed national RESCO roadmap and also has arranged meetings with potential partners in the next RESCO Symposium, including the World Alliance for Distributed Energy (WADE).


• Jan McFarland has working on implementation of SB 32, enacted in 2009, which directs the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to approve standard contracts and pricing for renewable energy (aka “feed in tariffs (FITs))” and shared with us Cal-SEIA’s study on FIT pricing¹.


• Merwin Brown was kind enough to arrange a presentation by Professor Igor Schvets of Trinity College, Dublin. Prof. Schvets is involved in an initiative entitled “Spirit of Ireland” that has many intriguing aspects, including wind integration that would have positive implications for Ireland’s economy and reflects some refreshing and holistic thinking.²


• Ron Edelstein forwarded a report that GTI had prepared to summarize the products that have resulted from PIER funding, which is smart and helpful thinking on GTI’s part considering the PIER reauthorization process getting underway in the legislature. One of the Gas Institute Technology's (GTI) projects is of particular interest to Cal-IRES, i.e. a Chula Vista study that GTI supported and Larisa Dobriansky also supported during her tenure with DOE. It was highlighted in a session Gerry chaired at the CADER Conference in April.


• Karin Corfee was a lead organizer of a KEMA Innovation Forum earlier in the year on the topic of Virtual Power Plants, and KEMA has now released a white paper on the subject. Gerry spoke at the forum on the linkage between virtual power plants and the RESCO vision.


• Geir Vollsaeter provided an update on his efforts to develop a deep water offshore wind pilot project in California. This is of great interest to Cal-IRES because California offshore wind resources are abundant, higher quality and less variable than onshore resources, and their potential development would change California’s long term renewable grid integration equation significantly.


• Tom Hoff reported on Clean Power Research efforts complementing CREC’s Renewable Resource Forecasting and Mapping work, and sees a connection to PIER’s pending Utility Scale Renewable Energy solicitation. Tom’s vision regarding solar forecasting affirms ours, i.e. he sees a need for real time forecasting information to be very broadly available and dubs his company’s prospective offerings “Solar Anywhere”.


• Rob Hammon and his Consol colleagues have been in touch regarding the successful proposal Consol submitted to DOE for funding of the Consol-led Building Industry Research Alliance.

Sponsors: We are in active dialog with colleagues at the California Energy Commission who have valuable information and insights to share.

• PIER Colleagues John Hingtgen and Hassan Mohammed brought information to our attention that we would have overlooked. John sent links to recent work at Stanford related to offshore wind, and Hassan sent a study of the economic benefits of Germany’s renewable energy deployment programs. In addition, Jean Baronas shared with Cal-IRES and CSEC the PIER Renewables team’s update on solar energy research & development (R&D) for California Energy Commission (CEC) Commissioner Boyd; Sandra Fromm was kind enough to share with CREC the team’s recent presentation to the Commission’s R&D committee; and Prab Sethi shared a draft of an excellent CREC overview he is developing for use inside the Commission.³

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¹ The price for the contracts would be set based on the wholesale price of energy and the valuable attributes like reducing emissions, reducing the need for adding new transmission lines, and generating electricity during hours of peak demand. The Cal-SEIA study showed that the value of renewable generation is between 5 and 12 cents per kWh over the wholesale price of electricity from natural gas, a fossil fuel. This additional value is based on the environmental, transmission, and reliability values of adding renewable generation to California’s electricity supply. See http://calseia.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/pv-above-mpr-methodology-final-20100423.pdf
A team led by another Cal-IRES advisor, Karin Corfee, recently completed work for the Energy Commission on FIT design. See http://www.energy.ca.gov/2010publications/CEC-300-2010-006/CEC-300-2010-006.PDF
² Professor Schvets’ presentation is not in the public domain but the link provides an overview.
³ Cal-IRES provided review and incidental technical inputs to their efforts. Contact Jean, Sandra and Prab directly for additional information.

LISTSERV: Cal-IRES News

Since our first Cal-IRES Forum held on May 12, 2010, we wanted to share recent developments relevant to topics presented that day, specifically:

• In early August 2010 the California Energy Commission submitted a response to the USDOE Request for Information on demonstration projects for the DOE Offshore Wind Program. Both Cal-IRES and CWEC contributed to this effort, which is discussed in the Cal-IRES Introduction: Cal-IRES Introduction; DOE Offshore Wind Program RFI Response
  
  
• DOE Announces $30 Million for Energy-Efficient Housing Partnerships including BIRA team lead, ConSol
  EERE, July 20, 2010. Rob Hammon of ConSol led the BIRA team, and Cal-IRES submitted a letter of commitment for the proposal.
  
  
• On the RESCO front, we launched our Cal-IRES blog on August 3 on the topic “The Reason for RESCO.” Our intention is to selectively highlight solid information or results in our focus areas of RESCO, RESB, and USRE, and our thoughts on its significance.

We were saddened to learn in late June of the loss of Ray Dracker, long-term colleague, who spoke on behalf of Solar Millennium at our May Forum. For those who knew him or met him at that event, we have posted A Special Note about Ray.

We appreciate your interest and future contributions.

California Needs to Know: Renewable Energy Integration Questions and Topics

Q: What is RESCO and why should we care?

The Reason for RESCO

A couple years ago the California Energy Commission launched a program entitled Renewable Energy Secure Communities, or RESCO. It aimed to create technical solutions California communities could use to deploy renewable energy in a locally integrated way for purposes of energy security and environmental stewardship.

What was the reason for this initiative?

In 2007 I was re-entering the world of renewable energy R&D after 13 years in the solar industry. So, I needed to update and organize my thoughts. One step was to review California’s renewable supply options and grade them according to applicability, development status, industry status and so forth. I noticed that some of them scale well to small systems, some to large power plants while most are economically viable in the mid-range which I chose to call community scale. Meanwhile, I had an invitation to visit UC San Diego, where most campus energy needs are supplied by combined heat and power systems integrated with efficiency and demand response measures… because this approach saves money.

Finally, one of our on-going projects involved providing technical and analytical support to communities interested in exploring “community choice aggregation”, a program established in California legislation that allows local jurisdictions to generate or purchase electricity for use in their communities. Attending project workshops around the state I discovered that large numbers of California communities have clean energy goals and are working to achieve them.

I am reminded of the saying: “Technology tells you what you can do; economics what you should do; politics what you will do.” Taken together the above insights led to the conclusion that community based renewable energy systems can, should and will be a big part of California’s energy future. The question I had to answer was: “What can a public benefits R&D program do to help communities move toward their energy goals without undue technical risk and with the tools necessary to capture maximum cost savings?”

It seemed unlikely that one renewable source by itself would result in an optimum solution. It also seemed that integrating multiple renewable sources with efficiency, smart grid and demand response measures would typically be the right approach. But interested communities would need to proceed in stages, from exploratory data gathering, modeling and planning, then to pilot deployment, and finally to full implementation of plans for energy security enabled by renewable energy. Technical risks at every stage could be mitigated through cost shared RD&D, and the shared experience of diverse communities would provide more of the needed technical solutions than a single project. So the Energy Commission’s Renewable Energy Secure Communities (RESCO) program was conceived, a solicitation was prepared and more than 50 California communities responded.

The abiding impetus for RESCO is simply that thoughtful and well informed communities are strongly inclined to act in their own long term best interest. Increasingly, an element of their long term interest is sustainability, especially 21st century jobs and strong, enduring local economies. Energy has long been a key factor in economic balance and stability in modern economies. Now inextricably linked to national and global issues like climate change, it may well become a decisive factor at every level of every modern economy in the future. Conceptually, it makes no more sense for a local economy to be over-dependent on energy imports than a national economy….maybe a lot less sense.

But local planners in California and the US typically don’t worry about energy. There once was a good reason for this; but no longer. In the past, economies of scale drove energy infrastructure to increasing levels of facility size and customer aggregation. Cost-effective modular energy sources were not an economic option. But they are now. A powerful new global clean energy industry has come of age in the past decade. Cost-saving clean energy solutions are rendering the old paradigm obsolete. Net zero is the appropriate strategic target for 21st century communities, and California communities must be empowered to achieve it in the context of their current infrastructure and resource opportunities. Centralized policy and planning is still necessary but it is no longer sufficient. In some parts of the world it isn’t even possible. That’s the reason for RESCO!

Gerry Braun

LISTSERV: Program Mailing List

Visit our website at http://cal-ires.ucdavis.edu, an up-to-date resource to valuable information, which now includes:

1. Proceedings for both the inaugural RESCO Experts Symposium held April 13, 2010 and the first Cal-IRES Forum held May 12, 2010 at: http://cal-ires.ucdavis.edu/events/past/.
   
   
2. Frequently updated calendar about upcoming speaking/relevant events at: http://cal-ires.ucdavis.edu/events/.
   
   
3. An updated Working Paper entitled "Integrated Approach to Renewable Energy Deployment in California: Summary of Conclusions and Recommendations" posted at: http://cal-ires.ucdavis.edu/about/working-papers.php.