“Promoting Microgrid Development in California: State of the Policy” was held on on July 14 at 12:00pm PDT. The webinar was hosted by Rehana Aziz, MS in Energy Systems Management second year student and Fulbright Scholar. Our webinar panelists included:
Paul De Martini | Managing Partner, Newport Consulting
Peter Asmus | Research Director, Guidehouse Insights
Chris Marnay | Senior Scientific Fellow, LBNL and Principal, Microgrid Design of Mendocino
Please see a recording of the event here.
Please read more about our panelists here:
Paul De Martini | Managing Partner, Newport Consulting
Paul De Martini provides advisory services regarding the integration of distributed energy resources, market designs and related business models. He has supported over a dozen utilities’ business planning, grid modernization strategies and TSO-DSO development. Paul is co-lead of the DOE’s DSPx Modern Grid initiative and principal author of the Modern Distribution Grid Report, Volumes 1-4, used in over 20 states.
Paul is a visiting scholar at Caltech and adjunct faculty at the University of San Francisco. He is also an advisor to several clean tech start-ups. He was previously chief technology & strategy officer for Cisco’s global Energy Internet of Things business unit and vice president, Advanced Technology at Southern California Edison where he led their grid modernization, distributed energy resource, smart meter and transportation electrification efforts. Paul earlier led North American sales and marketing for one of the largest competitive integrated energy services firms. He began his career at PG&E in electric system operations, T&D engineering and construction, and power marketing.
Peter Asmus | Research Director, Guidehouse Insights
Peter Asmus has emerged as a leading global expert on microgrids and virtual power plants. With 25 years experience, Peter is author of four books on energy and environmental issues, and has served as a consultant to many leading corporations (General Electric, Sunpower, Clipper Wind), government agencies (California Energy Commission, California Air Resources Board) and non-profit agencies (Center for Energy Efficiency & Renewable Technologies, Governor’s Wind Energy Coalition, Independent Energy Producers, Center For Resource Solutions.) His prime expertise is integration of renewable energy to the grid, public policy analysis, writing and public speaking.
Chris Marnay | Senior Scientific Fellow, LBNL and Principal, Microgrid Design of Mendocino
Chris Marnay is a retired Staff Scientist currently affiliated with the China Energy Group. He worked at Berkeley Lab for 29 years. He models economic-environmental problems related to likely future adoption patterns of small-scale distributed energy resources (DER), especially when clustered in microgrids exercising local semiautonomous control and able to island. He was a member of the Consortium of Electric Reliability Solutions (CERTS) team that proposed the CERTS Microgrid concept, and has published a large body of research on microgrid principles, economics, and applications. His work on DER led to development of the DER Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM), which finds optimum technology neutral combinations of equipment and operating schedules, given prevailing economic circumstances and available equipment descriptions, including multiple generation options, energy storage, and electric vehicles. DER-CAM has been used for numerous analyses and scheduling problems, including storage charging and discharging at the University of New Mexico Mechanical Engineering in Albuquerque. He has lectured widely on microgrid principles, economics, and demonstrations, chairs the annual International Microgrids Symposiums, and served as Convenor of CIGRÉ Working Group 6.22, Microgrid Evolution Roadmap. He has worked at the University of Texas at Austin, was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow at the University of Kitakyushu in 2006, and is an affiliate faculty member in U.C. Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group.