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Note: Conference is in Central Standard Time (CST, UTC -6)
9:00 - 9:45 am CST
A New Approach to Strategic Planning in a High Distributed Resource Environment: Distributed Solar as a Case Study
Penetration of distributed technologies, especially rooftop solar, has been rising steadily across many parts of the country. Many states and cities have announced clean energy goals and targets, which involve meeting certain percentage of their load by renewable energy resources in the next several decades. In order to improve equitable renewable energy access to all customers, other utilities have introduced community scale solar programs or pilots. These efforts underscore the importance of understanding distributed solar penetration in a region and its impact on utility operations, planning and financials. In this presentation, we will discuss a new strategic planning framework based on systems dynamics that enables:
- i) projecting distributed solar penetration by taking into account the feedback loops between increased adoption and ratemaking practices
- ii) identifying inflection points in the penetration levels
- iii) interactions between rooftop and community solar adoption
- iv) assessment of potential to meet clean energy goals through various distributed solar strategies
- v) implications of alternative strategies for utility earnings
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9:45 - 10:15 am CST Break
10:15 - 11:00 am CST
Today, Tomorrow and Beyond: How Grid Modernization Delivers Community Resilience, Can Drive Economic Recovery, and Will Enable Our Clean Energy Future
How each of us has experienced the COVID 19 pandemic has been deeply influenced by our ability to work, study and socialize from home. Foundational work done by utilities in the past decade has allowed the grid to seamlessly shift power delivery from where we were yesterday to where we are today and to withstand storms and other events while keeping utility workers and communities safe. As the pandemic eases, robust grid modernization can and should be a key element in economic recovery. Continued investment in the grid will not only deliver good jobs and strong economic growth but also create an infrastructure able to support the ambitious renewable energy, decarbonization and electrification goals set by the communities we have the honor to serve.
This session will discuss the essential investments in grid resilience that are needed to ensure the grid can continue to respond to future challenges. We will also detail stimulus priorities that can both drive economic recovery for our communities and value for the DERs essential to combatting climate change.
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11:00 - 11:30 am CST Break
11:30 - 12:15 pm CST
Why VPPs Will Become the Glue Holding Together Our Future Grid
Virtual power plants (VPPs) have evolved dramatically over the past decade. Once largely experiments and pilot programs, VPPs are becoming mainstream business opportunities, particularly in Europe, where the emphasis is on renewable integration and market trading. This sessions will cover the following topics:
- What is a VPP - and how does this platform differ from DERMS?
- How has the evolution of VPPs differed between North America and Europe?
- Why has the market shifted to a mixed asset approach, optimizing generation, load and forms of storage?
- In what ways are business models changing for VPPs as the market matures?
- What are some of the cutting edge VPP projects around the world?
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12:15 - 1:15 pm CST Lunch Break
1:15 - 2:00 pm CST
SCE's Pathway to Advancing Deeper Integration of Distributed Energy Resources
Southern California Edison's (SCE) Pathway 2045 white paper provides a blueprint for reaching California's ambitious greenhouse gas reduction and carbon neutrality goals through a profound transformation of the way energy is produced and used in California. To get there, SCE continues to modernize the grid and harness the full potential of distributed energy resources (DERs) through several pilot and demonstration projects. The pilot projects include integration of lithium-ion battery energy storage systems in distribution operations. While the demonstration projects, supported by the Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC), address topics including optimizing dispatch of large numbers of DERs, control and protection in community-scale microgrids, smart inverter integration dynamics, system black start with inverter-based resources and novel battery energy storage applications. During this session, SCE will present preliminary results and plans for future work.
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2:00 - 2:30 pm CST Break
2:30 - 3:15 pm
Leveraging DERMS to Deliver Net-Zero Energy
For countries to quickly realize the ambition of a carbon-free electric supply future, renewable and distributed energy resources must be able to compete on price - without subsidy - with traditional, already-installed carbon-based sources. Dean Weng will examine how we can achieve greater utilization of the available electric infrastructure to avoid some of the costs of integrating additional renewable resources, and how, through the optimization and close-to-real time control and synchronization of DER assets via DERMS systems, we can drive "stacked values" from them and simultaneously solve the intermittency problem to help make net-zero energy a truly economic proposition.
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3:15 - 3:45 pm CST Break
3:45 - 4:30 pm CST
Smart Grid Technology: The Convergence of Mobility and Renewable Energy
Extensive collaboration between technology innovators, governments and utilities is building momentum toward decarbonizing electricity and transportation systems. As a result, this dual decarbonation effort inspires greater clean energy use, but increased renewable penetration puts pressure on utility providers and local grid operators as renewables are inherently less flexible in comparison to other forms of generation. Smart grid technology limits these pressures by intelligently balancing energy on the grid in real-time and shifting loads by charging electric vehicles (EVs) dynamically, in effect utilizing them as "virtual batteries." As a result, smart charging solutions enable cheaper energy storage compared to stationary methods and can be called upon to incentivize grid use via IoT when excess renewable energy is available.
Join Karen Hsu from Enel X, a subsidiary of the world's largest producer of renewable energy and Europe's biggest utility, Enel, to learn how smart grid technologies are driving a more sustainable future. Key Takeaways:
- How smart EV charging exists at the nexus of decarbonization of transportation and electric production
- How smart grid technologies reduce grid load and lower costs for both utilities and consumers
- How smart grids and other grid services facilitate real-time grid balancing
- How the smart grid and charging technology leverages IoT to incentivize EV drivers to charge at certain times (such as when excess renewable energy exists on the grid)
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