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Powered by SunShot

2/3/2015

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The U.S. DOE SunShot Initiative announced yesterday that it would fund 15 Solar Market Pathways projects, investing a total of $15 million in significantly reducing solar soft costs and growing the market nationwide. This was no surprise to me, as I will be the program manager for one of those projects, focused on High-Value Integrated Community Solar. On behalf of Cliburn and Associates, I’m proud to working with Extensible Energy, the San Francisco Bay-area energy consulting and analytics firm that is directing the project, which also includes Navigant and Olivine, Inc., as well as two named utilities (Sacramento Municipal Utility District and New Mexico’s PNM) and others. It will be a 2.5-year effort, steady, but leaving some time for other facets of my work. I’m also pretty excited to be part of a new tribe of SunShot innovators, including respected friends and new colleagues. Check out that link above—really, we’re a handsome bunch. But let me say, first, you will want to keep this space bookmarked—at least until our project gets its own website up and running.

Thanks especially to our utility partners, we’re taking on some of the most important—and toughest challenges of our day. According to John Powers, Extensible Energy CEO, “This project will take solutions that utilities have proven on a limited scale and combine them in the most cost-effective, appealing, and replicable ways possible. We’re going to develop a playbook for more solar, faster, and with less risk to utility service reliability and overall customer satisfaction.”

Working first at SMUD and then in other markets, the project will present solid ways to prioritize community-shared solar sites, to design for greater solar value, and to incorporate companion measures, such as advanced load management (demand-response) and thermal or battery storage into the program design. Such measures can directly address solar variability, so more costly distribution-engineering solutions and the cost of regional-level grid-management services can be minimized.

Steve Jobs said that “Creativity is just connecting things.” That’s how we plan to work—in the unknown space between proven measures and new programs, on strategies that pull very different solar stakeholder interests together around the necessity more sustainable, universal clean energy services.

You can read the entire DOE press release here. With sleeves rolled up, our team will be focused on market and technology analyses, modeling, and SMUD program design elements for a while. I look forward to sharing more here—and eventually through other media—as we go. Meanwhile, don’t hesitate to contact me with questions or comments.

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The awardees for SunShot Market Pathways, including our team, received the tentative good news on the first day of the SPI convention last fall. It was a test of our ability to keep a secret and the start of a long season of preparations. Done with that, now. Let's get to work!
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Keeping the “Community” in Community Wind and Solar

11/10/2014

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Duck River EMCPhoto: Duck River EMC in Shelbyville, TN launches a community solar project near two local schools.
If you spend much time toiling in the clean energy field, I’m sure you have heard of community shared solar and community wind. Community renewables is an established and still-evolving segment of the renewable energy market, through which customers invest in a share of a project and receive production-based returns.

Early-on, these projects just gave customers a chance to “vote with their pocketbooks,” to subsidize premium-priced local wind and solar projects. Nobody talked about “payback” on the investment—in fact, one early community solar project in Oregon penciled out with a 70-year return on investment—but still it was fully subscribed. Today, renewable energy costs have greatly declined, so this is no longer mere charity. Project participants typically get a virtual net metering payment from the utility, calculated as if part of the project were up on their own roof. Sometimes they get a payment that more closely resembles a feed-in tariff (FIT) for the kWh output of their share, separate from the utility bill for their monthly energy use. These and a few other business models for community solar and wind create a win-win—a good payback for the individual participant and benefits for the community where the project is based. In some cases, these projects are sited on public buildings or on some other site that offers a distinct public benefit, such as saving on energy bills for a school or non-profit agency, offering equitable energy choices for renters or low-income participants, or driving technical innovations that may not save money right-off, but help the community reach long-term sustainability goals.

Make no mistake: there are a growing number of models for community renewables--more rightly called "shared solar"--that focus mostly on the benefits of the deal--from Mosaic's approach that look a bit like Kickstarter with a payback, to
one new community wind project in Texas, which plans to top 1 GW, with hundreds of turbines across a vast landscape. In the excitement over the prospect of big returns, some projects might inadvertently add risks and costs, or of divide communities between customers who can get in on the deal, versus those who cannot. These are all out there. But I am more interested in projects that follow the inclusive motto: “Making clean energy work for consumer-owned utilities and the communities they serve.”

When I had the chance to speak at
a Clean Energy Ambassadors webinar on Community Renewables on November 18, I tried to highlight primarily those projects that unite communities around clean energy. In fact, it was a fast-moving hour. We covered some of the most successful utility-based programs, which typically maintain an 85 to 88% subscription rate. And we looked at third party models that start out "going rogue," based on grassroots movements, before they usually settle on an agreement with the utility. We also looked at some of my favorite projects that ask the question, “How can we use community renewables to keep pushing innovation?" How can you—as a utility program sponsor or interested customer—gain the comfort of knowing that your investment in community renewables today is going to feel just as “right” in ten years or twenty years as it does today? I am about to start work on a demonstration project (ed. note: see January 29 blog) that brings community solar together in one program, with demand response, strategic battery storage, and other kinds of smart design, so the project will be affordable and way ahead of its time.

Clean Energy Ambassadors, which is a grant-funded NGO, has put its webinars on hiatus as of January 2015, so we've made it easy for you to find Jill's presentation on under our own "Our Work" tab.  Watch for many more resources related to community solar on this site in coming months, or contact us today.

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Join the 4 Cool Moves Webinar and Check Out These Resources

5/19/2014

 
How’s your weather? The sky outside my office window was filled with snowflakes yesterday—a doubly jarring springtime event. That’s because I moved some time ago from the Midwest to Sunny Santa Fe, New Mexico and also because I have been preparing to give the May webinar presentation for CEA, on hot weather energy saving tips. Think about sandals, sunhats, lemonade or cold beer, humidity, and utility customers worried about their cooling bills. It will happen sooner than we think—so I’m inviting everyone to join us for the free “4 Cool Moves” webinar, May 20 at noon Central time.
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So join us to find out about my 4 Cool Moves—I’m not telling, but you know I’ll be drawing on a campaign that comes at low cost (or no cost) to the utility, while providing significant savings and comfort for its customers. Plus, it will be fun. Aren’t you tired of energy-saving campaigns that give you a honey-do list of weekend spoilers? I will actually draw on some current marketing and behavioral science research, to underscore what we already know—for example, that “every journey begins with a single step,” and that researching new light bulbs online almost always winds up taking us to YouTube Amazing Cat Tricks.

Here are a few of the (more useful!) Web sites I recommend, to supplement the webinar presentation:

The gateway to Energy Star’s treasure trove of technical and market...

Alliance to Save Energy focuses on saving money and increasing comfort

California knows energy savings—you can dress that with or without ...

One good resource from the social marketing bookshelf

And, oh, how did I wind up on YouTube?! (Best efficient light ad, honest!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kocZ-j-o3I

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    Jill Cliburn is founder and leader of Cliburn and Associates, LLC. Here, she shares her views on the radical redesign of our energy system, which is at once brilliantly underway and continuously thwarted.

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