[MUSIC]
Thanks everybody for
inviting me to speak today.
I look forward to talking about some of
the EPIC research that I think is relevant to
these topics that we teamed up today.
As the attendees are heard,
there have been a couple of references to
the EPIC program, the CEC funding.
But I'll get into that a little bit more detail,
and then I'll talk about some of the examples of
our research that relate to
this area or research that we funded.
For those who don't know,
the electric program investment charge is
a ratepayer-funded program, research program.
Funded by the rate payers of the investor on utilities,
so PGE, SGE, and SGNE.
That money is shared among the IOUs and
the CEC to fund research that will
support the rate payers in those territories.
As Gary mentioned previously,
some of the research that they're
working on that he talked about,
his talk is EPIC funded.
They're using some of
their EPIC research funding to look at these issues,
particularly those that are
supporting innovations in the state
for preventing wildfires and making the system harden.
The research covers a lot of different topics,
a lot of different areas.
From the CEC perspective,
we're really looking at three kinds of
broad categories as driving our research initiatives.
As you know, the state's priorities
on decarbonization are very strong.
We have multiple efforts focus
on removing our reliance on fossil fuels
and improving the renewable generation that we would
utilize to make our state greener.
I'll skip the middle one and go to Resiliency.
Resiliency, as you know, is very important.
The wildfires of this year and
the previous recent years have shown that having
solutions that provide repairs was resiliency is
critical and is needed sooner rather than later.
Some of the other technologies we talked about
today will help in that arena as well.
I would say across the board,
we also have an emphasis on affordability
and equity in the sense that we
really want to make these clean energy solutions
available to the resonance
of low-income and disadvantaged communities.
They're usually the last to get the opportunity
to take advantage of newer technologies.
We're wanting to find ways to bring
these newer technologies into those communities.
They also will benefit the
most from reduction in their energy use.
That theme goes across all of
our research and is a critical emphasis.
I'd have to say that if I think about
EPIC strategy at technology level,
I would say that we have
efforts that look at integration across the board.
Introduction, it was pointed out that
my team works on the smart grid-related.
We're very technology integration
focused related to microgrids,
energy storage,
and tools for aggregation
of distributed energy resources.
But we also have research areas
that focused just on specific technology.
As was previously noted,
there's a high demand for
a diversity of energy storage technologies in the state.
We have a very robust research program that focuses on
diversifying the portfolio of
technologies available to the state.
We generally focus on non-lithium ion technologies.
Integration research areas and technology-focused areas.
Here's a layout of
our portfolio over the last eight years.
We are excited to
have the CPUC renew this program just recently.
The original program was set up for 10 years,
that's rapidly coming to a close at the end of this year.
The PUC had a proceeding which
just renewed the EPIC program for another 10 years.
We're very excited about that,
and renewed our funding for the CEC for
another about 130 million year.
As you can see,
we distribute that across a variety of
different topic areas to
help bring innovation to the state.
I would say that we've had quite a bit,
as you can see in the D carb and resiliency area.
In multiple areas of D carb we have
more growing in the transportation
electrification sector.
You'll find in the future that we'll be looking more
at hydrogen that came up earlier in the conversation.
We see the necessity of expanding our analysis of
where hydrogen can provide long-term storage or
other solutions to the state,
and also in decarbonization.
Here's just some numbers that we'd like to throw out,
show the impact of the program.
Since it's ratepayer-funded,
we'll like to show the ratepayers that we
do provide value to them for this funded research.
In the approximately 1 billion of
funding that we have released over the last years.
The projects and the companies
that we're supporting that research have resulted
in about $1.8 billion
in additional funding private investment
after our research,
which we think is a very strong sign that
we're looking at technologies
that have commercial viability.
Those technologies are making their way into the market.
The other statistic that I want to point out
is relative to one of my earlier slides,
is this desire to do
more in low-income and disadvantaged communities.
So 65 percent of
our technology demonstrations are being conducted
in low-income disadvantaged communities
to really look at that nexus
of where they can provide
the greatest value in those communities.
We're going to continue to have
a focus on that moving forward.
This is a very important part of
our state goals to help those communities.
Now what I'm going to do is go through
some examples of research that's either been complete
and funded or is in
the process of the design and build-out phase to show
you some of the diversity of the technologies and
the solutions that we have funded.
One of our most well-known and
award-winning projects is the Blue Lake Rancheria
which was developed by the Schatz Energy Center at
Humboldt State at the Boolean
wrench area up in Humboldt area.
This wrench area has a casino.
That casino is a Red Cross shelter.
They wanted to design the microgrid to be able to
provide renewable backup and
storage for that microgrid to
support the community shelter in the event of an outage.
There are many potential environmental challenges that
can happen up in the Northwest not only the wildfires,
but also they're prone to potential for tsunamis.
Having backup power for the community was critical.
As of last year,
they had a great demonstration
of this micrograph which is up and running.
During the recent PSPS event up there,
they were able to support about 10 thousand
of the local residents either
providing power at the community shelter,
providing rooms at the hotel
for those who have medical equipment where they
need to have that operational while the grid is out.
They have associated with
this a gas station with a convenience mart.
They was able to provide food, ice,
and fuel to those who needed
it during those power outages.
That was a multi-day outage up in
Arcata and Eureka . Very phenomenal example
of the value that a microgrid can
provide and the integration that
has to happen when you're combining
large amounts of solar with storage,
building loads, and distributing that,
and controlling that in a way
that can provide the backup power.
We've had a lot of conversation so
far this morning about demand response.
I think, most people are familiar with OhmConnect,
one of our earlier funded projects.
They've done very well in rolling this solution out.
In fact, during the most recent blackouts
or potential blackouts that were
occurring earlier this summer,
they were able to go into operation and
be able to save quite a bit of energy
for the state to take the load off
and make it easier for us
to ride through those potential problems.
I will also note that,
open ADR, which [inaudible] mentioned
earlier had some CEC funding.
She also has been involved in
driving a number of our demand response
and what I consider aggregation of DER solutions,
bringing those to the markets.
When she was at Stanford,
did quite a bit for research in this area and made
some really successful projects that were funded.
Next one I want to talk about is
one that's in the design phase,
which is pretty interesting.
We're very excited about it.
This is also the Schatz Energy
Center up at Humboldt State.
They took the lessons learned from
Lake Rancheria and they combined forces with
Redwood Coast Energy authority who
wanted to build a large solar array,
2.2 megawatt solar array that they could
provide and participate in the CAISO market.
But they want to be able to use that for other purposes,
including supporting the local airport,
which is not only important for their accessibility,
but also helps to support
the Coast Guard and their emergency operations.
This is the first joint IOU end user microgrid.
The front end of the microgrid,
the front of the meter portion will be owned and
operated by PG&E and behind
the meter portion will be owned and operated by
the Redwood Coast Energy Authority.
They will be providing support to
multiple customers during a grid outage.
As part of that,
they're looking at trying to create
some creative tariffs that can be
possibly a template for joint efforts
between the utilities and CCAs in the future.
This one is being watched very closely as part of the
PUCs current proceeding related
to micro grids and resilience.
The interest in having solutions that
can provide multiple customers
and deal with the challenges associated
with multiple customers.
As folks may or may not know,
there are some challenges in the state,
legally and regulatory around
providing power to multiple customers,
particularly if you're not a utility,
you have to be a utility to do that.
Either create your own utility or
partner with an existing utility to make that happen.
The regulatory and legal aspects
of this make these challenging.
This is one project that's getting past that.
There are other projects that are struggling a bit
because of the desire to create
community microgrids and the ability
to share power among different customers.
This is one of those,
the Lancaster Advanced Energy Community,
which is really interesting in the sense that
they're wanting to create a virtual power plant approach,
which has connected multiple microgrids,
whether it be municipal facilities
or Zero Net Energy
affording housing developments that are new construction.
Looking to deploy different kinds
of energy storage to each of the different communities.
To be able to evaluate the value of
different kinds of energy storage,
whether it's lithium ion or fly wheel,
to support those communities.
There will be new construction meeting
Title 24 requirements with solar
and also with aggregated energy storage.
This is going to be a very interesting one that is really
a big picture approach and this is
in collaboration with Lancaster Choice Energy.
I want to briefly
mention our Vehicle/Grid Integration projects.
We have a number of projects
in this area and I won't go into detail,
but I wanted to make sure we touched on it,
since there are others that mentioned
vehicle grid integration,
where we have projects that are not just looking at
smart charging and controlling the charges in say,
parking garage or in fleets,
but also looking at
bidirectional charging and the opportunities
and challenges associated with that.
As well as the combination of
different distributed energy resources whether
solar storage and vehicle
charging combined to see what
the right nexus is either at a residential sector or
in a public transit forum.
We have a number of different projects here and I just
want to make sure I talked about that.
I didn't include a slide here,
but I did want to mention that we
have a large portfolio that
we have funded just this year on energy storage.
That energy storage technologies are
both developing new types of technologies
that are non-lithium ion as well
as demonstrating long-duration energy storage.
For this solicitation,
the long-duration energy storage
is focused on at least ten hours or more.
A number of the recipients actually
combined different types of non-lithium ion technology,
whether it be flow or fly wheel or someone just chose
large flow batteries to produce
this long duration storage.
We're very excited about
these new projects because I think that,
they're going to bring great learning
and capability building for
advancing the duration that we can have on
energy storage and providing
greater resilience for the state.
What's next for EPIC?
What's next is a lot of different types
of research areas that
we think are critical to the state.
On this slide, you can take a look at,
they are expanding upon our current portfolio.
But I want to point out while I'm on
this slide a couple of things and that is,
with the current renewal of the EPIC program.
We will be in the process next year of
developing our next five-year investment plan.
That plan will be developed with stakeholder input.
If you are interested
in being engaged in the development of
that research portfolio and interested in identifying and
helping us craft the most critical priorities
to focus on over the next five years,
I recommend that you stay engaged.
Check on our website for
the CEC's EPIC website and we'll have
information in there as
we move into the early part of next year.
We'll probably starting to announce
stakeholder workshops in the January time frame
that will engage the public to get
feedback on the research priorities for moving forward.
With that, I will wrap up.
[MUSIC]