 Good afternoon and good evening everyone. Welcome to today's microgrid webinar jointly presented by Stanford Energy Club and the Bits and Wads Initiative. Stanford Energy Club is Stanford's largest student led energy organization with more than 1200 active members and more than 2000 alumni. Bits and Wads is a Stanford University initiative bringing together multi-discipline research teams to develop technology, business, and policy innovation for the 21st century electrical power grid. And we have been through the last summer or summers which painted a clear picture of how the increased intensity and the frequency of the heat waves and the fires can really push the California power grid to its limits. Been through the rolling blackout, the PSPS. If prediction holds true, this phenomenon will continue on even worse and we will have a new norm of these kind of things. So microgrid could present a promising opportunity and avenue to increase resilience of a community in the state of California. Then people may have a question, what exactly are microgrids? And how can they play a role making the grid more resilient? What are the current technical business and the policy barriers of deploying microgrid in the state of California? Today we have a very interesting and distinguished panel put together by Stanford Energy Club and the Bits and Wads. The panel will be moderated by two students, Lizzie Coller, second year master students in the sustainable design and the construction program. Oluwashi Olaliya, he is a finishing senior major in mechanical engineering. Without further ado, I'd like to hand this to Lizzie and Oluwashi to start the panel. Thanks, Leanne. All right, I'm going to share my screen. Okay, let's get started. So thank you everyone for being here today for our panel discussion about microgrids. Today we're going to address the role of microgrids in adapting to the rapidly changing climate and we'll also address the obstacles that affect the deployment of these microgrids. And first I'd like to let my co-moderator introduce himself. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for today. At Leal, as I said, my name is Oluwashi, but most friends call me Olu. I am a finishing senior, graduated in two weeks, major in mechanical engineering here at Stanford University. I have microgrid experience. My senior at Capstone was working with a rural village in Alaska and helping deploy an indoor farmer system connected to microgrid. And I'm currently intern in what our climate as the national policy intern in their GT office. Great. And I'm Lizzie Kohler. I graduated from West Virginia University in 2015 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. I worked for a few years before coming to Stanford and one of my positions was as a project manager for a mini grade in Sierra Leone. So this summer, Oluwashi and I were two of eight interns in the bits and watts summer internship program. And the two of us spent our time conducting research to better understand the current landscape of microgrids within the US. And we wanted to determine the key challenges in the widespread deployment of microgrids. So within our research, we defined a microgrid as a localized group of electricity sources and sinks that typically operated connected to and synchronous with the traditional grid, but can disconnect and maintain operation autonomously as physical or economic conditions dictate. And this disconnected mode is often referred to as island mode. So after performing literature review and surveying several industry experts, we summarized our findings of the main challenges across three categories, technology, policy and economics. So the first technology barrier is the challenge of integrating various devices and technologies within a microgrid network. And the second technology barrier is successfully interfacing the microgrid with the main grid. And this is especially difficult when power consumers need the transition of grid power to microgrid power to be instantaneous. When it comes to policy barriers, net metering frameworks can impact the profitability of microgrids if they wish to sell excess power back to the main grid. And then zoning, permitting and compliance regulations are usually determined within local townships or municipalities. So it makes it difficult to copy and paste microgrid designs from one location to the next. And then the last policy barrier is government funding. So funding for microgrid projects has historically been catered to R&D, but it's difficult to come by in the go to market phase. And then for economic barriers, we identified capital costs. So microgrids have a very high upfront capital cost. They also have increasing project costs if there's a long time horizon related to the lengthy permitting times, which was addressed in the policy obstacles. And then there's uncertainty in revenue, especially when it comes to assigning a cost value to the resilience benefits that microgrids can provide. And I will pass it over to Olu. Thank you so much, Lizzie, for that wonderful introduction. Well, today we are joined and have this team pleasure being joined by three guest panelists who will take a talk and who will talk and give a deeper dive about some of these obstacles Lizzie mentioned. Our first speaker is Dr. Chang Tian. Dr. Chang has 15 years, has 15 years of engineering experience in energy and aerospace. He is currently over at the California Energy Commission, where he works with the energy systems currently supervising energy projects dealing with smart grid, microgrid, grid implementation and energy storage. Dr. Chen has his PhD in MS from Virginia Tech in aerospace engineering, BES in mechanical engineering, and has authored three publications. Our second speaker for today is Dr. Nikki Avala. Dr. Nikki Avala is a lead expert innovation engineer over at PG&E. She currently works with the microgrid technology group and is currently in charge of managing the Redwood Coast Airport Microgrid Project, which is the first multi-customer microgrid in PG&E's territory. This is very exciting. She has expertise and knowledge in climate policy in California. She has her PhD in MS from Berkeley and a BES in petroleum engineering. And last but not least, our third speaker, senior director of Stanford Energy Operations, Ron Gower. Ron started off his career in a nuclear engineering program with the U.S. Navy. He then shipped into the private sector where he worked on combined power plant hydro, biomass, and solar. In 2008, he moved to California where he helped to commission and operate the gateway generation for PG&E, a 60-megawatt microgrid combined cycle facility in Antioch, California. And finally, in 2014, he joined the Stanford Energy System Innovation Group where he's currently at right now. He has won many distinct awards for his contributions to the field, and he has a BES in nuclear engineers. But before we start, we would first like to thank our wonderful guest for joining us today. We truly appreciate it. We would also like to thank Bits and Watts for their work in coordinating and helping deliver this event which is being held today. And lastly, we'd like to thank our wonderful viewers for joining and viewing in today. In terms of the agenda for today, our speakers, in the order as introduced, will give a presentation 10 to 15 minutes long. And after each presentation, one to two questions will be posed engaging with the speaker. And from then on, we'll open to a larger Q&A with the audience. I'll be serving as a moderator, so please feel free to drop your questions and share through the chat. And please enjoy. Dr. Chang. Can you hear me? Okay. So good afternoon, everyone. This is Chang and from the California Energy Commission. Thank you, especially the organizer for the nice introduction. For today's presentation, I will provide us an overview of our microgrid research program with a few highlights. I will talk about the SB 1339, which is a scenario about the microgrid and also upcoming research opportunities for microgrid technology. And there are a lot of policies which are related to energy and climate in California. For some of the policies, current technology might not be ready to meet the policy requirement. And for example, back in 2018, we launched SB 100, which is about 100 percent zero carbon electricity by 2045. Clearly, we will need new technology to help us to reach to that point. But as the CEC, our program is about through the research and development to help inform and implement these policies. So we work closely with the CPUC, CAR-ISO utilities, and other stakeholders to address some of those challenges. As Liang mentioned earlier, in the last several years, our electrical grid has experienced a lot of challenges from wildfires, which are resulting in a great application of public safety power shutouts. Additionally, the extreme heat events result in rolling outages for a few days back in August and September. Microgrids offer a new opportunity. It has many potential benefits. It can be considered as one of the solutions to address the great challenges we are experiencing right now. And they can help decarbonize our grid by using zero carbon renewable energies in daily operation, as well as provide backup power when needed. Zero carbon energy microgrids are an opinion choice as an alternative to diesel backup generators. And also it offers energy savings and other benefits during normal operation. Our microgrid research program has gone through three different phases. We started to invest in microgrids about 10 years ago. In the first several years, we looked into hardware and software and make sure we have the right equipment and the controller for microgrid development. We also developed approaches to integrate multiple DERs. We demonstrated microgrid applications for critical facilities undersized with high penetration of solar. We further refined the microgrid controller. Our third phase is about business planning and commercialization pathways for microgrids in California. Our epic microgrid program has founded the largest collection of microgrids in the nation. The CEC has invested 140 million dollar grants to fund nearly 50 microgrids that distributed all over the California and within the three LU territories. This research program has demonstrated the resilience and cost savings to customers and also helped address technical challenges while informing policy development. Our microgrids have three different ownerships, such as customer owned, solar party owned, or utility owned. Most of our microgrids use solar and the overall generation capacity ranges from 30 kilowatt to more than 20 microwatts. The 30 kilowatt is a small scale microgrid for a fire station. The 20 microwatt is more like a utility scale microgrid. Most of them use energy storage. Most of them use lithium-ion batteries. Some of those microgrids include efficiency upgrades and including HVAC and LED lighting and retrofits. A few of them respond to CAISO and the utility divider response program through load management and ancillary services. Our microgrids projects include a diverse range of applications. Here is a portfolio of our microgrids that include residential, commercial, industry, conference, courts, military base, and community microgrids. These microgrids provide great lessons learned and help to overcome great challenges. For example, the microgrid at the break of spring community is actually a utility owned microgrid. This community in the past has experienced severe weather conditions which cause losing power frequently throughout the year. Because of that, the utility helped develop this microgrid to help the community so we can keep the operation going without so many outages. After the commissioning of the microgrid, the resilience has been improved for the community. This is the microgrid located at the Blue Lake Rancheria. It is a great example to show a microgrid can provide reliability as well as many other benefits to the community. During a PSPS event back in 2019, this microgrid operated and provided electricity to 10,000 local residents. It enabled individuals to use necessary medical equipment and it saved four lives. This microgrid helped the tribe reduce its energy cost by 30%. Another interesting project is the Redwood Coast Airport microgrid. This microgrid is jointly owned by PGE and a community choice aggregator. With the increase of CCEs, it's going to be critical for the state to develop opportunities for both utilities and CCEs. Niki from PGE will provide us a deep dive for this project later on. One thing I want to point out is the knowledge gained from this research microgrid has assisted the CPUC in developing the SB339 implementation plan. Speaking of SB1339, it requires the CPUC and CEC and California ISO to take action to help transition of microgrid from emerging technology to a successful commercial product so it can help California to meet our future energy goals. CPUC has established a proceeding to address the action required and also established three tracks in the room making. Back in June this year, CPUC completed track one and CPUC asked the utilities to streamline the interconnection process and maximized resilience by allowing storage charging prior to PSPS event and also removing the sizing limits for energy storage and net emittering tariffs. It also asked the utility to create a dedicated team to support local and tribal government microgrid projects. Even while making a lot of progress in microgrid technology and there are still barriers, especially when it comes to rapid deployment and also commercialization. So we need to develop technologies with longer duration backup capabilities and what I mean longer duration here is days instead of hours. Currently microgrids are complex and each has its own unique design. This makes it difficult to deploy microgrids at a large scale. Microgrids need to be designed in a simple and a modular manner which will reduce the development cost associated with design, permitting, interconnection, and the installation. We also need to find a better way to measure resilience. By identifying the value of the resilience, we can better evaluate the cost-effectiveness of microgrid investments. Yeah, this is my last slide and that concludes my presentation. The information below is my contact information. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. With that, I want to thank you for your attention. Thank you so very much, Dr. We actually do have a couple questions. Our first question has to do with the slide, a Decade of Research, specifically in developing commercial pathways. Of the barriers, the three barriers listed, one of the barriers fixed out the most is innovation. I'm sorry, the question is in developing commercial pathways, what are some of the barriers which must be overcome and what could be done to shorten that six-year time span? Because that time span or that barrier is the longest compared to the three other barriers. What could be done to shorten that six-year time span and deliver it and turn it into something outside of demonstrated proof into something that are commercialized in Indians? Yeah, that is a very good question. I think in my opinion, there are a number of ways we can improve the timing for the deployment. One thing I just mentioned, the modular design, we can leverage some pre-configured equipment. We can make sure most of the work can be done in the factory and we can just plug in play. I think that will help a lot of the additional work that has to be done at the site. Another thing from our experience, especially when we did our demonstration for critical facilities and we had some challenges on poor meeting and interconnection, it takes a long time to do so. I think this has been brought to the CQC and the utility attention, so that's why we're working on streamlines as the interconnection process. If I remember correctly, I think PUC come up with some sort of standard design with single line diagram. I'm hoping that it will help speed up the interconnection process. I think we have some policy and change. Also, when it comes to the interconnection, if you have microgrids, that's owned and operated by the tribe or government, local government. I think the utility has dedicated teams to help them to work through the process. In some way, I think it will help improve the deployment process also. There are a number of things I think we can improve. Thank you so very much. Last question, Tong asks, could you please share some light on how microgrids can enhance the resilience against natural disasters in current practice? Yes, of course. I'll just provide an example from the Blue Lake Venturea microgrid. That microgrid is a great example for the PSPS event. At that event, I think the basic need is connected to the grid. Also, the recently rolling outage and then when we reach to the we don't have enough supply of electricity. Actually, during those days, the microgrid has been islanded for a few days during those times. Another example I can give to you is the microgrids for hospitals and fire stations. I can use the fire stations as an example. With the microgrid, we are able to island the fire stations for about 10 hours. As you might know, fire stations require diesel backup for the operation. Normally, they need to store the diesel fuel. That must last for, if I remember correctly, 32 hours, three days. With the microgrids, I think we can extend the diesel backups instead of three days and we can extend them to six days even more because we offset some of the fuel consumption. Another thing is for the hospitals, I think especially under the pandemic, we see under certain conditions and we want a hospital stay operational, especially under those difficult conditions. Even with the PSPS, it can make sense even more difficult. Our microgrid at Richmond Kaiser Hospital, with that microgrid, we can help island the life safety branch. In case we have power outage or something, we can still keep the hospital operational. Folks can get, if they need a treatment, and they have a place to go. In that case, it can help the community. The challenge I say is, I mentioned earlier, the duration of the microgrid because a lot of those microgrids cannot power over me in three, four hours to 10 hours. But if you reach to, if for some reason, I look at the data, especially for the fire station, especially for the welfare case, it will take multiple days. In that case, I think that's why I felt like we need longer duration of storage. And also, as you know, diesel is not in environmental friendly. So we can find a way to replace diesel with cleaning and renewable energy. I think that will be very helpful to our environment also. Thank you so very much, Dr. We appreciate it. For our second guest speaker, we have Dr. Nikki. Thanks, Zulu. Can everyone hear me okay? Oh, I'm so sorry to interrupt Dr. Shane. Could you please stop sharing your screen? Thank you. Go ahead, Dr. Am I sharing the right thing here? Can everyone see my screen okay, the introduction slide? Okay, great. So I am Nikki Avila. As Zulu said, today I'll be talking to you about the Redwood Coast Airport Microgrid. This is the first renewable energy microgrid in California. That is, it's the first renewable energy community microgrid in California and for sure, of course, in PG&E's territory. I'll start by walking through different types of microgrids just to give everyone background and to understand what the different types of microgrids are and how they could impact resilience for the customer. So the first is the single customer and the way I like to categorize microgrids is thinking about the level of participation of the utility and the microgrid of the customer and the utility working together for the microgrid. So we have a single customer microgrid here and this is actually the category of microgrids that are very prevalent. When we talk about the Redwood Coast Airport Microgrid being the first microgrid in California, we're talking about community, but there are a lot of behind the meter single customer microgrids that are very prevalent and they've been prevalent for decades actually. This is what the military and other like critical facilities like hospitals use. We like to define this as you know behind a single meter so the utility does not have to get involved once the DRs are interconnected and of course you can consider this the drivers for this as customer resilience. If you have a critical facility, you're an airport, you're a hospital, you are a military base, you want extra resilience when the grid goes down and this is one of our kind of at least complex microgrids. The second which I'll be talking to about today is a multi-custom microgrid and this really requires the involvement of the utility because you have a bunch of customers on typically utility owned distribution lines and because of that ownership of the of the distribution system, the utility has to be a co-partner as you heard from Chang's presentation. Typically the motivation for this especially in the past five years has been increased community a desire for resilience so communities get together either through their local government through their CCA, the community choice aggregator or they can even get through like a home owners association and they desire to have a greater resilience and the question is you know how do we install this this system to work together with the grid and also how do we allocate the cost of benefits of the system to the rest of the grid owners. The final one here that I will not really be talking about today is the utility driven microgrid this is when the utility decides where to deploy a microgrid so if you think about the traditional planning system of the utility where they decide when to have the submission grid upgrades they decide when to build transmission lines the utility could have a different cost minimization model where they figure out that actually a microgrid would be a better situation than upgrading the existing system. Typically these are where the microgrid will have to be completely remote if not it wouldn't make sense for the utility to deploy it and you know we're seeing an increased number of this especially as wildfires are ravaging kind of more remote and rural areas of California. So a little bit about my project it's a redwood coast airport microgrid project it's located up in Humboldt's it's a rural isolated community at the end of the transmission line which makes it prone to more grid outages. It's very interesting this project had funding from the CC before public safety power shutoffs PSPS was an actual thing but it's actually now the model for how we would try to reduce the impacts of power shutoffs but if you really think about the initial motivation I you know kudos to PG&E and the CC thinking ahead almost for three to four years ago about how microgrids could be important in the future and they were exactly right. This microgrid is situated at the airport and it is the it is really the critical point of resilience and exit in the case of an extreme weather event like a tsunami, a wildfire or any event of an earthquake. What is unique about this microgrid is that it's actually being proposed by a community choice aggregator so they're combining their goals of local renewable energy. CCAs have to procure local renewable energy for their customers. They're combining that with the ability to island and trying to build a microgrid. So in this case you know the utility and the communities coming together for increased resilience. One of the key objectives of my work is not only to build this microgrid at the airport but to try to figure out how to scale and replicate this as change send for SP1339. We want microgrids to be commercial level. They need to be able to go off the shelf maybe not as plug-and-play as some people would hope but we need to not have such high soft cost in deploying microgrids and really my main objective for me to feel like my job has been done well is if I can create standards and replicable processes so that other people who are trying to deploy microgrids can do it quicker and faster and cheaper than this project. So this project is really unique again because of the established partnerships you know we have the utility working very closely with a community choice aggregator and also working very closely with the university at Humboldt State. We have SEC here on the right, the Sharks Energy Research Center. They are the prime engineer, owners engineer for this project. They are doing a majority of the engineering design in collaboration with my team. The funding that we got for this project is from the CEC as Tim said. The Redwood Coast Energy Authority is the CCA and then we have these manufacturers like SEO who will design and configure the microgrid controller. I'll speak a little bit more about what the DERs will be doing and that's where we have TRC working on the cyber security plans for the microgrid and the Energy Authority that will be thinking about market participation. So just a quick preview of where this funding is coming from. I think this project got about five million dollars from the California Energy Commission and also got a matching fund of two million dollars on the PG&E side from the CPUC. So you know microgrids are expensive and this would not be possible without EPIC. So EPIC is a California statewide program that enables PG&E to invest in novel emerging energy solutions to meet you know our energy goals and to drive innovation around the industry and we're currently on the third wave of third and final wave of EPIC and it's really fortunate that this project happens to be one of them. So here a few technical details about the project. Like I said it's the first hundred percent renewable energy microgrid. As Ching mentioned diesel is not the preferred choice of California and being able to depend only on solar and batteries is what's unique about this project. It's cited in Humboldt which you know when I mentioned that we're building a microgrid in Humboldt people look at me and they're like isn't that where it's foggy all the time. Yes and we're building a solar microgrid in a very foggy area but the other benefits of choosing that location is that it's located at an airport and coast guard and I believe that this is the safest and most secure point of exit for about 200 miles of the coast. It's a relatively large microgrid. It has two megawatts of PV that is DC coupled so that we're sharing an inverter with a 2 megawatt and 8.8 megawatt battery and these resources will participate in the Kaizo wholesale markets. If you think about it you know we have pretty high reliability in the United States pretty high reliability in California compared to the rest of the world. This microgrid will not be a microgrid for you know it hasn't gone into operation yet but I would say for 95% of its life it'll be connected to the grid so trying to find co-benefits co-value streams is exactly why this DRs are participating in the wholesale markets. It'll be serving 20 retail customers like I said one of the key objectives of this project is to figure out how to do this again and again cheaper and better and so we kind of made things more complicated for ourselves. We need to figure out how to determine the cost and benefit allocation of energy services to all the customers during grid connected and islanded mode and the microgrid had 19 unbounded customers. Unbounded means that they get their energy from a CCA and they get their grid services from the utility but in order to make our lives harder for ourselves we included a new customer which is a bundled customer that is fully bonded with PG&E that way whatever cost allocation and tariff that we figure out is applicable to any future microgrid that could have any combination of unbounded and bundled customers. One thing that I thought was an early decision for this product that I thought was very good and has now been replicated throughout a lot of the conversations at the CPUC and working on other projects such as the EcoBlock if anyone's familiar with that is trying to figure out what is the role of the utility what is the role of the microgrid applicant and as you see here we've tried to locate electrically the devices on the microgrid in such a way that the utility is on one side and the kind of microgrid applicants in this case the CCA is on the other side. This really allows for replicability so some microgrid applicant can kind of come with their own design and interconnect to our system in kind of a clean break and it allows really for us to have a clear understanding of operational responsibility. So let's see I have like two more slides and I want to maybe go through them quickly so that I leave time for questions but I think what's critical to explain here is really how to build a microgrid. Microgrids are this kind of esoteric thing that people don't really know how to design you know how does it operate and that's really what we're trying to figure out here and I'm still in learning mode even to yours into this project. So I like to think about microgrids in four distinct modes like I said grid connected mode where it's basically just DERs connected to the system you don't you don't actually know it's a microgrid you don't know it has the ability to island and then of course in the event of some outage or some other need to island the microgrid goes disconnects from the broader grid and goes to and energizes the the distribution system but it doesn't have the two the only two modes to consider you also have to consider the transitions between those two modes and that's actually where a lot of the electrical protection and safety challenges occur so if you think about these six work streams this is how we have organized this project the first is interconnection and service planning so you think about how DERs are currently interconnected to the system we we stick to that we try not to replicate anything that's already existing in terrorists and in processes of PGD and in the CPUC then we go into pretty detailed circuit and protection design because you know as the system has to island these are novel processes that most utilities have not worked on before so we have very clear design metrics on how to protect the system thirdly as you see in the yellow what I think is super important is operations integration so because it's a multi-custom microgrid we're going to typically the islanding when there's something wrong with the grid it's going to either be a natural disaster we want to have visibility and control of that microgrid to make sure that it's safe and is able to energize the customers on the grid the way we're doing that is by building really the state of the art microgrid testing testbed at PGD so we're building a very high fidelity microgrid testbed and when I say high fidelity it means that we're having the actual DERs that we will be installing on at the airport we're going to test those DERs in our in our lab the physical hardware so it's power hardware in the loop we're very high temporal simulation to understand really what are the operational scenarios of the microgrid and to ensure that they're safe and of course for comms and cybersecurity if your if your if your rest of your grid is done you want to make sure that maybe your your network system your comms did not go down as well and finally like I already already mentioned microgrid tariffs are super important that's what the SB 1339 is also talking about to make sure that we have a way to value resiliency and be able to allocate that cost to the microgrid applicants and the broader grid so this is my concluding slide I think the redwood coast airport microgrid really presents a lot of innovation there's technical innovation in the fact that it's the first renewable energy microgrid in the fact that we're building a state-of-the-art testbed but there's also really what is more important to me I think is a social innovation the ability for communities to participate in their own planning for for the utility to kind of open these doors and kind of have a more bottoms up planning approach a collaborative partnerships with the CCAs and other communities to participate in their own energy resilience and this is not a theoretical project you know we're learning by doing you know there's a lot of papers on microgrids but we wanted to actually figure out how to do this and and I think with every design with every test that we're doing we're learning we're learning what what not to do and you know how to inform standard and policy through action and so finally all of the work that we've done in RCAM I should have talked a little bit about the timeline we haven't even built yet we're going to start building next year it has already informed the community microgrid enablement program which is being proposed as a CPUC as a program where communities can come to PG&E and partner with us to build their own microgrids so with that I'll conclude and available for any questions thank you thank you so very much Dr. Nikki that was very informative um our first question comes in um regarding the Coast Guard microgrid is the four-hour discharge time typical for a microgrid BESS? four-hour discharge time no I think the size of the of the battery is um was chosen because it's going to participate in the wholesale market so the the size of the batteries are pretty oversized for the load and it was mostly because of participating in the wholesale market so there's it's not really contingent on it being a microgrid it's more contingent on the fact that they wanted to get revenues from TISO during grisky mode. Thank you thank you our second question is how was your experience in electricity access strategy in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia influence your current work with microgrids today? That's a great question um I think the way it influences my work is you know I'm really passionate about the dual learning um I think you know there's a lot of in electricity access there's a lot of learning from the global north thinking about our own um reliable systems here in in the United States and how that can translate to some countries in Southern Africa and Southeast Asia but I think that the opposite is also very true um and we're now seeing that with wildfires right you know no one could have imagined five ten years ago that they would have multiple days without power but those are the realities that uh countries in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa are just so used to so I think um translating learnings across the two regions is very important to me and and rethinking the electricity grid rethinking the participants of the electricity grid rethinking how we plan is really going to be critical if we're going to um address the issues here which are climate change and the issues there which is electricity access and I think what you can draw across those two regions as the tonality is just equity you know who gets to bear the cost of climate change who gets to bear the cost of energy poverty and trying to make sure that our innovation is really reaching everyone equally thank you that is a great idea you had mentioned the idea of equity I think someone who has been keeping track of like a lot of like new uh introductory like policies uh in congress many such as the environment justice act for all the energy resilience communities these are like bills they're really prioritizing and focusing equity uh for marginalized community uh yes thank you so much for that thoughts we really appreciate it thank you and for our third speaker last finale is uh senior director ron hi everybody um nick if you there we go let's see if I can all right hopefully hopefully you can see my slide is that my slide showing up there beautiful uh okay um this i'm ron gower and uh really I want to talk to you a little bit you know everybody else has talked about micro grids and uh larger communities I just want to talk about really stanford and where we've been where we are and where we're going uh so just a little quick journey here if you think about energy uh our our system stanford system is in fact a district energy system and it comprises all forms of energy everything from thermal electrical and we've also had steam for many many years so from 1987 to 2015 we we survived on a cogen that produced about 50 megawatts and provided all of the electricity uh except for during standby during uh during that period of time however you know we relied on 95 gas and uh it was a fairly inefficient system and furthermore um you know the the efficiency of putting steam throughout the entire campus it's about a 25 to 30 loss rate of energy by transmitting that around campus and then so that was the fact that the facility was coming to the end of life the fact that it was very unsustainable and we wanted to really green up stanford's campus and make a commitment to reducing our greenhouse gases that allowed us to think about what we call sesy stanford's energy systems innovation uh a large um large undertaking so we often talk about the greenhouse gas reduction when we came online it reduced our our greenhouse gases 68 percent the day that we started and and that's a big thing but um there was also a lot of other efficiencies that were gathered for instance we went from providing about 25 steam loss rate for an entire campus at about 550 000 m and b to use annually down to a four percent loss rate on almost that entire same amount about 520 000 m and b to use we still do have some steam that's used for sanitary purposes but for the most part we provide a hot heating thermal energy to the entire campus through low-temperature hot water and it was a big transition but it really allowed us to levelize our energy demand through the use of thermal storage and it's a key it's a key component of us converting into a true micro grid that includes energy storage um and just very quickly i'll show you that we have a long-range goal of which will come to fruition here in about a year and a half by the spring of 2022 we'll have a second solar generating station online and stanford's electricity will be 100 percent renewable through solar power in addition to that and this is kind of breaking news we haven't announced it to everybody yet so i'm telling you here first uh is that we're also implementing a 200 megawatt battery that's rated at 50 megawatt hours i'm sorry 50 megawatt battery that's rated 200 megawatt hours so um that'll be co-located with our solar stanford solar generating station number two um anyhow how does that get us to the campus and a micro grid well right now we have a state-of-the-art uh shield you know central energy facility that provides heating and cooling to the entire campus including the hospitals that are level one trauma centers and that's an important point that i'll i'll rely on here in a second but um the the some questions i were asked i was asked was uh earlier you know about curtailments and i'll get to that in the second but uh what i want to talk about is that we made that transition from steam to a combination of heating and cooling uh which has some substantial overlap and allows us to do heat recovery and supply 90 roughly 90 percent of the campus is heating uh through uh heat recovery so that's that really is phenomenal and allows us to use electricity to do that and so um we have gone from a reliance on gas to a reliance on electricity a completely clean electrified system we have still about 10 percent 10 to 15 percent uh reliance on gas and that's part of our long range goal is to eventually um you know go that last 10 percent um so let me change your hand saying there we go so uh the thing is we built this state-of-the-art central energy facility and uh uh you know we can meet a lot of needs and one of the things that i will say is we're in the middle of expanding that facility um as a result of the last summer not summer of 2020 but summer of 2019 we had a chill water curtailment and that curtailment was not because of a lack of uh reliability on the part of the facility but on the fact that heating loads throughout the campus that expanded and we experienced some of our highest uh heat storms on record 2019 was a very hot year uh i don't know if it was the hottest year but it was pretty in the top three hottest years uh on record and so that has substantially increased our need to improve our chilled water capacity and we're in the process right now spending roughly 90 million dollars expanding our chilled water plant uh that will um provide us a big number about 800,000 ton hours of chilled water per day uh for the entire campus um so but the greatest system in the world is useless if we don't have electricity because we've totally electrified it so how do we do that well we looked at just doing it with batteries which would be you know a very clean process but that's about one and a half billion dollars it was unreasonably sized and just wouldn't really work for us uh in addition let me get back to that we have a level one trauma center that's uh you know we we provide all the thermal energy to and that requires us under Oshpa which is the California um building code for hospitals essentially uh requires us to have 96 hours of energy production for those facilities so that that along with you know i i couldn't even put a number on the on the research going on at stanford uh makes it very critical to ensure that we have heating cooling and electricity for those loads so we've looked at uh several technologies we have not actually decided on what that technology will be yet it's going to the board here in the board meeting in december but if we project it'll be about 175 million dollars and we're going to put in a centralized emergency generator and that really kicks off our process to go down the road of fully uh i don't know if it's a a verb but micro griddings our our energy system um and uh so it'll be a 64 megawatt facility uh that'll handle the campus at a full load for the highest heat storm day uh plus a margin um and it'll also be a dispatchable resource if needed we're we're still having to decide on that but essentially it should be a kaiso uh host cell market resource if it's uh if it's installed that way um the real advantage here is that um let me go to the next slide is that when we we have we came with this really cool acronym segdes which is centralized emergency generation with distributed electricity storage it's essentially uh replacing 45 megawatts worth of emergency diesel generators we have around campus something like 83 generators uh and if you just do the math which we've done on just refueling and maintaining all of those units that's a lot of emissions on an annual basis by uh going to a centralized generator and distributing batteries throughout the entire campus um it does a lot of things for us one uh it uh it gives us it replaces those 80 emergency diesel generators with an inventory that we're allowed to then use for levelizing our demand and also providing a huge energy backup for the campus uh probably you know right in the once it's fully done about four hours and that four hours is an interesting number as nicky mentioned earlier so uh it could be very useful for us one of the things that we're we're having to look at is how do we utilize DES for building level quad level we say quad that's a group of buildings a feeder level we have many electric circuits that we feed throughout the campus and then also what happens when the power we have a product public safety power shutdown or you know some event um I don't know how many would remember but in 2010 an airplane flew into the uh Cooley landing uh transmission line and took out Palo Alto and incidentally uh uh took out uh Menlo Park and I think parts of river city fortunately for Stanford we come off of the Jefferson line we have both Jefferson and Cooley feeds but what happens if those feeds are out so the question is how can I uh the question to me was how can I ensure the energy resiliency of Stanford well the one way we can do that is through battery storage distributed to every building ensuring that as we move forward we we we make a facility design that says every facility will be based on battery storage for its life safety needs and also you know to meet some margin of beyond just life safety but meeting the electrical needs for those facilities and the other is is once it's in once it's done we'll be able to have a campus wide demand management of of that energy and it'll be centrally managed through our our control station a central control room back in the sea a long-term plan though I will tell you that there's a lot of money and a lot of work so just kind of quickly summarize we used to buy all of our electricity from the third party we converted into a direct access which allowed us to use pay PG&E for the transmission lines and produce and generate our own electricity as well as buy it from other customers as needed we invested or in the process investing greater than one billion dollars in our campus energy systems with the goals of lower cost zero GHG and uh some significant water savings that's something else we didn't really talk about but we've I could talk a great length about that we've reduced our water consumption substantially we have two solar plants a battery facility coming online and then we're continuously doing retrofits on our buildings with the goal of a district energy distributed storage system there's a lot of things I could talk about so I'm just going to stop there and it opens up for questions thank you so very much Ron we appreciate that yes there is a lot as you can definitely talk to you about especially when it's Stanford undertaking the one question we do have in terms of like project interface or specifically this project you mentioned in what are some like some like takeaways from like the project regarding like project interface implementation uh control logic uh that can be shared and like help scale outside of Stanford if that makes any sense so I need to know a little bit more what do you mean by project interface yeah um that's that was that was the question that I'm assuming they meant as in like uh wiring connection um yeah yeah okay I'll just go with that so you know we we actually sat down and said hey maybe we could take those 83 emergency diesel generators we have and grid those together uh and I would just say right up front um the idea of taking 80 small generators on a small grid and getting them to stay paralleled is a very difficult task um it's much easier to do on a larger rotating machine and I see nothing is head so but when you when you convert that to battery storage it's it's actually quite easy from a control state I mean it's it's SCADA PLC based logic and you just have distributed controls it's essentially if you know what a distributed control system is it's essentially SCADA throughout you know 14 square miles and then we bring that back to our control room I'm not sure if that answered the question because I'm not 100 sure what the question is I'm pretty sure it does okay good well that was like the only question we have but I think now it seems appropriate to like open up for a larger Q&A so I would like to first encourage our viewers if you have any questions please continue to drop them in a chat but we do have some questions we would love to propose our first question is as a regulated institution PG&E risk management is a top priority how does PG&E work to strategically push that envelope informant partnership utilizing hybrid models and really just going and yeah it just could be for any of our guest panelists I'll answer a bit about I think the question was about risk management yes I'm not I'm not a subject matter expert on that but I'll just speak a little bit to kind of the work that I learned about from some meetings I think you know PG&E has some risk models that you know they try to figure out which infrastructure are at high risk and then those those infrastructures are slated for kind of immediate upgrade or immediate repair and so how that links to microgrids then microgrids are a new thing for PG&E and so we're kind of a new product so you know if you're distribution planning engineer and you have your risk model and that model has identified some circuit or some system that needs to be upgraded you have your typical conventional list of products to go you know a new transformer a new bank a new resizing of the wire so what our team is trying to to push forward as pushing the envelope is to have a microgrid either as a grid connected or a completely off-grid microgrid as one of those products that a distribution engineer can say okay this is this is my lowest this cost option this is the cheapest way of solving this problem for my customers and to keep to keep their costs effectiveness good and this is this what I'm explaining now is already being done in Australia the you know they have a more distributed grid there and they really have microgrids as a standard product that the planning engineers can take off the shelf and use to solve any upgrade issues thank you for that oh well any other catalyst specifically Dr. King would you like to add or no I agree with Nikki and she did very well no addition from me thank you okay thank you our next question I think is for you Ron and it is posed what is the fuel for Stanford's new centralized backup generation sorry we haven't actually decided on we have several proposals on what that technology would be but there's there's several options for it one of course would be an obvious is natural gas there's biofuel and you know there's diesel fuel which we we likely would not do so we do have to have a 96-hour commitment to the to the campus it would likely be natural gas field and and then there'll be you know a field backup however I want to point out that generally that leads into the next question which is isn't that increasing our greenhouse gases and the answer is no because understand it's an emergency resource and if you compare that centralized emergency resource to 83 43 megawatts worth of diesel generators emissions are much lower the other is you know just simply we can you use biofuel if you wanted to for that commitment awesome thank you very much yeah that there's a lot and if somebody else can come up with another fuel that's even more sustainable I'll I'll I'll consider I haven't been able to run it on on on water yet so we're not there that would be a Nobel Prize although we did look at hydrogen I'm being totally honest we've looked at that so that is technically water for our next question this is like more for me so a quick background the energy resilience community act is a current of resolution and there is in congress right now and what this hope with the new income administration energy and climate policy will be a top priority the aim of this resolution is to like help dedicate federal dollars to help create in and help create in the use and the use and leverage of like different distributive energy resources specifically micro grids with the expectation of like more dollars going to flood the micro grid space um this is her panelists in what ways or the vision the current industry shifting in terms of life what is provided to the end user versus what type of like model and systems are like our framework are utilized versus net meter in front versus back of the end meter so this is for this is an open question to any of our panelists because I do know epic is like you know at least from our researches summer epic is a lead is one of the very few who are leading in terms of like throughout the states of like micro grid research and our dirt assets um I'm sorry I I can you read and reiterate is the question sorry yes the question is what the expectation of like more federal dollars expected to basically be dedicated specifically to renewable energy assets specifically micro grids and other dirt resources in what ways do you expect the energy field to like to change in like what dynamics do we expect changes in front of our back on the end meter in just whatever can like spark your interest yeah so um I'm not familiar with the federal but in in California we do have policies to help with the distributed energy resources for example if I remember correctly I think PUC and this year they renewed the SG program and they put additional funds for storage and especially you know for those areas are impacted by the the PSPS and also low income and disadvantaged communities so um um you know we we do have um you know the the government funds for that but one thing I also realized was you know because of the pandemic and there might be um you know this is just my personal view I think you know the availability for for for this kind of fund might might not be enough and also um speaking of the the how to and also you know I'm not sure you know about this you know California powering has the most of the DRs in the in the nation so um how to integrate this resources that's another challenge or so um um you know speaking of the program I think our epic program will will be continue and support the the deployment and also the commercialization of the microgrid and we hope you know that by by by creating good business models and also um um you know the um um you know the fund a more robust way to do the cost benefit and show the value of the the the resilience and we can provide a lot of interest from the venture capitals and we already see a lot of interest from the you know the the venture capitals and we have uh if I remember correctly we have a few projects and they've been working with the venture capital and trying to come up some sort of a PPA for the for the for the business model so um yeah I think you know we need to um I need to we need to work on multiple different fronts you know the creative and big business model and also leverage government funding and and also another thing I want to really address is you know the I mentioned the no income and this is an advantage community still you know the the high upfront cost for the for the microgrid is still a barrier and especially for those communities so how can we you know build a program and to help this community that's another focus area and if I remember correctly I think you know PUC is going to working on a microgrid program to to do some part of the projects on that area also I hope I address your question yeah thank you thank you oh we also have another question um are there any microgrid codes and standard developments discussions within technical communities such as IEEE 1547 and so please provide some examples of how these may impact the design of microgrids of the future and this is open to our panelists yeah so I can I can talk a little bit I know you know there were a few microgrid standards if I remember correctly it's a 2030.7 and 2030.8 well I don't know exactly which one is which one but one of them is for the control development and another one is for the test standard so we have been in incorporate some of those standards in our projects you know especially for those ones you know I mentioned you know our third phase is trying to come up with some sort of like business models and standardization of the microgrid you know when we after we issued the solicitation and the standard was released so we were able to incorporate some of some of those standards into our solicitation so we're actually we are looking forward to see the outcome of it and it's a very unfortunate you know the standards actually is a little bit behind the research because as I mentioned earlier you know our phase two we looked into the microgrid controller but at that time and I don't even have a standard in place so a lot of work is just you know the it's innovative but and also it's more side-specific that's why we are hoping like those kind of standards will help us to build a more general microgrid controller for broad application so another one I can talk about is you know 2030.5 it's more like some sort of a communication protocol and it will also either lay out the security requirement so yeah we have a few projects working on that and trying to do some sort of like you know testing on the demonstration and for that purpose. Thank you so very much. Our next question is dedicated to Niki. Since you have brought up the idea of equity what are some of what are specific recommendations that could be implemented on a rapidly replicating many of these types of microgrids specifically in low-income communities? Yeah I think I took a stab at answering that in the 15 Q&A. I think if you think about what made the Redwood Coast Airport microgrid feasible it was funding a large amount of funding from the commission so basically opening up either increased funding or just increased awareness of existing funding and making sure that there are no barriers of access to those funding opportunities. I think also having strong government and I think some low-income communities that may not be an advantage they have but having strong local governments to advocate for the communities to have increased resilience. One of the ways in which that would be helpful is through the community microgrid enablement program PG&E basically serves as consultants to communities to kind of design the microgrid or even kind of answer the question is a microgrid needed? Do they just want a battery? Sometimes people don't actually know what I guess hard way they need for the service that they require so that kind of matching consultation. PG&E has opened these doors to kind of consult the communities but you know I work with grid alternatives. I'm very aware of kind of even even these advantages that I'm listening out here may still not be easily accessible to low-income communities so I'm not going to discount that but I think these are some of the ways in which you know the high costs of the microgrid hardware and the design engineering expertise just increasing access of that to communities could be a big help. Thank you so much for that. Yeah I definitely agree. This is Shin and if I may and I want you know inject a little bit you know the our APIC program actually we have special policy for the for the low-income and disadvantaged community was so you know whenever we have a project we have a proposal if the site is located in the low-income and disadvantaged community we give a certain bonus point for those projects but also I think our funding I think you know I don't remember exactly what was the percentage I think probably 30 percent of the funding it goes to maybe even more goes to the low-income and disadvantaged community so yeah help yeah and an example of that is EcoBlock I just wanted to say change the that's funded like you said by by the your grant and that's in a low-income community EcoBlock microgrid projects. Our next question is dedicated to you Dr. Shin but I'm also curious what Nikki and efficiently Ron what you have to say the question is what are some different strategies that have been been proposed to better evaluate the value of resilience. I guess I can go ahead Ron I'll go after you. So go ahead go ahead. No go ahead please. All right I was just gonna say there's a paper. No you go first. I'm just gonna say there's a white paper about this I think my Schneider electric so that'll be a really good place to start but I think the value of resiliency and also I think LBL has some papers on you know value of loss load. I think Schneider electric is more about the value of microgrids. Lawrence Berkeley lab is more about the value of loss load if you combine those two I think there's a kind of helpful starting points but I think there's you know there's something to be said about the equalizing nature of the grid the different levels of load the different values of load even just thinking about Ron's presentation about you know the value of resiliency within Stanford campus he's talking about you know kind of life safety values which is not the same as you know someone's laptop going off during homework so the grid is kind of that equalizer and the microgrid microgrids don't have that attributes so I think the one of the key things about the value of resiliency is the location even if you remove the islanding capability a lot of people have tried to think about what is the value of a DER in a specific location so I think location would be the biggest contributor to defining what that value of resilience is and then once that's kind of been equalized or or at least estimated then you can start adding on kind of the value of those DERs not participating in activities that they would have ordered otherwise been participating in it and rather than providing energy to the island. Ron or Chen thank you so very much Nikki for that. So this is Chen yeah you know there was some study about the resilience I think you know from some you know national labs and also you know some universities from our for my point this is just my personal point of view I felt like you know the reason it's so challenging to do it because I can give you a few examples you know I mentioned the Blue Lake Venturea project you know during the islanding mode and we were able to provide you know the the electricity for medical equipment and also for for you know we even you know saved a few people's lives so how do you how do you measure that that's that's that's a question and when we when we value the I think it's always you know when we do the cost benefit analysis for micro grids it's it's easy to justify you know the equipment cost and the installation cost those kind of things that the most challenging part is the benefit so we see a lot of you know speaking out you know it it's easy to quantify you know how much load you have been shaped and also how much demand charge you you you've been reduced and those are things are measurable but the the resilience I am now quite sure if I remember correctly and FEMA has some sort of like standards for those but I haven't looked into the details you know I don't know how fluidity can be used because sometimes you know those kind of thing can be very side-specific and also you know that that's that's what we really wanted to do for our upcoming research was so you know trying to come up with some sort of a consistent way and to measure the resilience so as I mentioned earlier you know that probably will be one of the our research topic for the following year so my answer to the value of resiliency which I take that really to be the bigger question is you know as as she said it's it can be difficult to measure but I will say that one of the things that has driven us to where we're going with the centralized emergency generator and distributed electricity storage is well as as Nikki pointed out life safety that's probably our biggest is we have a level one trauma center that I don't know how you could put a value on having that not available that the second thing is and I'll share with you I don't I don't want to get in the exact numbers but when we have a chill water curtailment that lasts five days you know if the students can't have class hey we say hey go have fun right except right now during the pandemic don't do that but the loss of research you know we have literally and I'm trying to understate this billions of dollars in research going on and if that's lost what is the impact not just Stanford but to the future of those inventions those innovations so you know I can tell you that in 2019 we had insurance claims and risk management claims in the tens of millions of dollars so that really pushed us forward to saying you know what a little investment is worthwhile and so like I said we're going to the board here in December to get approval to move forward on a very expensive project but what is what is the impact of not doing that so I can tell you what it'll cost to do it but I would say that you know not just these reasons but also can somebody tell me how hot the climate's going to get I don't know so you know the question I was asked is how many chillers are we installing I'm like all of them everything I can and that's just you know it's finally come to a conclusion after doing a an extended survey and committee advisory committee on campus with faculty and some really smart people and we finally came to conclusion that we're just we just don't know where the limit is and so anything you can do to improve your resiliency and that's from reducing load to adding resources to me is worthwhile thank you so very much that is like food for thought defining productivity resiliency and like value on that note we'll like to like end but before we do we'd like to thank our esteemed guests and panelists for joining us today and dedicating that hour to like really dive it down to these topics also our viewers thank you so much for joining in and I'll now pass it to Lizzie for to remain a few words thank you so very much yes thank you to everyone for joining have a great rest of the evening hey folks before we jump off here because a lot of people have asked and sent me somebody sent me an email about tours of the plant and I think well he was set up put a link there I just want to point out that right now if you go to that link you're going to get a big thing that says we're not doing tours right now so until the pandemic is over our facilities are restricted so but do do look at that link and we'll be happy to entertain that as soon as soon as we get past this COVID thing so have a good evening yes thank you so very much again COVID has put a debt on our plans but like climate and policy just keeps on going right thank you also very much for joining us thank you thank you have a good one thank you bye