James Jenson:            Welcome, to everyone. I'm James Jenson, a contractor supporting Western Area Power Administration and the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs Tribal Energy Webinar Series. I'm filling in for Randy Manion, as today's webinar chair. Today's webinar, titled "Distributed Energy Technology Trends and Costs," is the tenth webinar of the 2018 DOE tribal Energy Webinar Series. Let's go over some event details.

Today's webinar is being recorded and will be made available on DOE's Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs website, along with copies of today's PowerPoint presentation. These will be available in about one week. Everyone will receive a post-webinar e-mail with the link to the page where _____ _____ and recording will be located. Because we are recording this webinar, all phones have been muted. We will answer your written questions at the end of all the presentations, however, you can submit a question at any time, by clicking on the question button located in the webinar control box on your screen, and typing your question. Let's get started with the opening remarks from Lizana Pierce.

Miss Pierce is a senior engineer and deployment supervisor in the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs, duty stationed in Golden, Colorado. Lizana is responsible for managing technical assistance and education and outreach activities on behalf of the office, implementing national funding opportunities, and administrating the resultant Tribal Energy project grants and agreements. She has 25 years of experience in project development and management, and has been assisting tribes in developing their energy resources, for nearly 20 years. She holds a bachelor's of science degree in mechanical engineering, from Colorado State University, and pursued a master's in business administration, through the University of Northern Colorado.

Lizana, the virtual floor is yours.

Lizana Pierce:            Thank you, James, and hello, everyone. I join James in welcoming you to the tenth webinar of the 2018 series. This webinar series is sponsored by two US Department of Energy organizations, the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs – otherwise referred to as the Office of Indian Energy, for short – and the Western Area Power Administration, or WAPA. The Office of Indian Energy directs, fosters, coordinates, and implements energy planning, education, management, and programs that assist tribes with energy development, capacity-building, energy infrastructure, energy costs, and electrification of Indian lands and homes. To provide this assistance, the deployment program works within the Department of Energy, across government agencies, _____ Indian tribes and organizations, to help tribes and Alaska Native villages overcome the barriers to energy development.

Our deployment program is composed of a three-prong approach consisting of financial assistance, technical assistance, and education and capacity-building. This Tribal Energy Webinar Series is just one example of our education and capacity-building efforts. This series is part of the Office of Indian Energy's efforts to support fiscally responsible energy business and economic development decision-making and information-sharing among tribes is intended to provide its attendees with information on tools and resources, to develop and implement tribal energy plans, programs, and projects. To highlight tribal energy case studies, and to identify business strategies tribes can use to expand their energy options. And to develop sustainable local economies.

In today's webinar, we will focus on distributed energy technologies, and the evolving opportunities that these technologies present. Many tribes have opportunities to utilize distributed energy technology, but without familiarity with the various technologies, it could be hard to identify those. Today's presentations will try and address this challenge, by providing attendees with knowledge related to the applicability of costs of some of the more common distributed energy technologies.

And I want to thank Gil and Robi, in advance, for your time and experience and agreed to present. And I welcome anyone, on the webinar now, to provide feedback. We're always hopeful that the webinar series is useful, but we do welcome your feedback. So, with that, I will turn the virtual floor back over to James. Thanks.

James Jenson:            Thank you, Lizana. On today's agenda, we have two presentations. I will introduce both of those speakers now.

Our first speaker is Robi Robichaud. Robi currently leads federal wind and water activities in the wind and water technology deployment programs at the National Wind Technology Center. He supports federal agencies, tribes, and other clients, by conducting wind and solar resource assessments, economic feasibility, analyses, technology training workshops, and providing technical assistance and advice. In recent years, he has branched into _____ hydro and marine hydrokinetics. He has worked at NREL since 1999, and prior to joining NREL, Robi worked for _____ Energy, installing PV systems at schools and residences throughout Colorado.
 
Following Robi, we will hear from Gil McCoy. Gil has worked as an energy systems engineer, for the Washington State Energy Office and the Washington State University Energy Program, for over 35 years. He currently provides technical support to the US Department of Energy-funded Northwest Combined Heat and Power _____ systems partnership. Mr. McCoy has been involved with combined heat and power screening technical assistance and feasibility studies, at a wide range of industrial and _____ and commercial sector facilities. He holds a BS in metallurgical engineering from the University of Washington, and a master's of science and engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

So, with that, we'll pause a moment and I'll bring up Robi's slides.

Robi Robichaud:         Cool, thank you very much, James and Lizana – I appreciate being invited to talk to everyone today, and I look forward to your questions at the end. I'm gonna cover a lot of the distributed technologies with an overview, and then, dive a little bit deeper into the resource and current state of the technologies. And at the end, we'll have Q&A.

Okay, next?

So, just to frame things, I'm gonna look at the bigger picture of where we are now, and then, get into the individual technologies, looking at the resource available, and resources available to help you find out your renewable energy resource. And then, look at some of the applications and the cost structure within those. We'll be covering, in order, solar, wind, biomass, micro-hydro, and then batteries. These are slightly out of order, here.

Next?

So, where are we now?

And next slide?

When we look at our larger energy picture, we know we have multiple sources: we have oil and petroleum, natural gas, coal, nuclear, and renewable energy. And you can see, from this slide, renewables makes up 11 percent of the total energy. Now, this is covering all sectors, so this is electric power and transportation, industrial, commercial, residential. And we feel like we see wind turbines all over the place, and everyone's installing solar panels everywhere, and in spite of that, really, they still make up a relatively small portion of our total energy consumption, which should help make us all realize just how much energy we do consume and how critical all the resources are. But as we're moving towards more renewables, we'll talk, today, about some of the factors that help make that more possible.

Next?

Just like to focus, for a minute, on the electric power sector. Renewables do apply to all the sectors, but looking at one, renewables provide about 17 percent of our electricity. And hydro is the larger players, there, but wind and solar have been catching up a lot, over the last few years. And will continue to do so over the next few years, because, as we'll see with some of the costs, they're in their favor. Hydropower has been the largest renewable energy source over the last 70 or 80 years, in our country, and yet, most of those plants are, you know, 50 to 70 years old. There's not been a lot of new hydro, and in fact, in the last couple decades, we've seen some of the hydro plants dismantled.

There are still new opportunities within the hydropower realm, and DOE is looking at a lot of those – we'll talk about them, a little bit later on. _____ the DOE's Wind Vision, the vision _____ having a target of maybe 20 percent of our electricity from wind by 2030, and that equates to about 287 gigawatts by 2030. Today, we're at about 89 or 90 gigawatts, 6.2 percent, so we've got a long ways to go to get there. _____ _____ what that Wind Vision is focused on. Another program at DOE, called SunShot, is focused more on the cost. _____ _____ if we get the cost to be competitive enough, then we don't have to worry about who's adopting it. People will have the choice: if they wanna have solar on their roofs, if it's cost-competitive with the grid, they will, and likewise for commercial or even industrial. And we can see the cost targets are very low, very competitive with today's energy pricings.

Okay, next?

So, this is taking a look – and I apologize, there's an awful lot of information on here, but – this is tables put out, annually, by _____, where they take a look at these unsubsidized localized costs [audio cuts out]. On the bottom we have the more conventional technologies that we know make up the lion's share of our current energy production. We have coal, nuclear, gas, to some extent diesel, in certain parts of the country, combined cycle. And we can see the cost range, there. On the top graph, we can see how renewables are competing.

And, you know, when you look at, halfway down, solar PV, utility scale, thin film, or crystalline, you know, you can see that that cost is below just about everything down below, except for combined cycle gas. And if you look at wind, at least at the low end of the wind spectrum, $30.00 to $60.00 per megawatt hour, the low end is below even combined cycle gas. So, renewables, at the utility scale today, are very, very competitive with all the energy sources out there. However, today in our webinar, we're really talking about distributed energy. And so, the distributed energy costs are, typically, quite a bit higher.

And if you just look at those first two magenta bars, with rooftop solar PV and community solar, you can see that the cost structures are pretty wide, and they are more expensive than some of your utility scale energy sources. And then, likewise, with biomass, a little bit more depends on the application and your fuel source, as to how competitive they are. But distributed, by and large, is going to be more expensive, and distributed wind isn't shown on _____ chart, here.

Okay, next?

Again, a lot of information, here, but this first total renewables graph, on the upper-left, characterizes the renewable energy technologies that contribute to our energy picture, currently. The dark blue at the bottom is hydroelectric, the lighter blue above is wind, the yellow is solar, and then the grey is all the other renewables. And then, in this chart, at the bottom-left, it's also got it broken up by region. So, as we move to the graphs on the right, these colors, sort of a dark navy blue for the left, and orange for the South, brown for the Midwest, and red for the Northeast will give us an idea of how the different regions are contributing to each of these renewable energy technologies.

So now, we look at the middle-upper graph, that's hydroelectric. And so, you can see that navy blue indicates, yeah, most of the hydroelectric is really coming from the West. And this an annual approach, so you can also see most of it comes in the winter months, January through maybe May, and then it tails off significantly in the summer. And the orange tells you how much hydro we have in the southern part of the country, and red is the Northeast. The next graph looks at wind, and again, the blue is West, and the orange, which is now the dominant sector in here, is the South, including Texas, Oklahoma, and some very windy areas in that part of the country. And then, another significant contributor is the Midwest, and so that's the brown, as we can see.

And one thing to notice, generally speaking, the wind tails off during the summer months, a little bit, July, August, and September, on a nationwide basis. And that actually coincides with when the hydroelectric is tailing off, also. We look down below at the solar, and it looks quite a bit smaller than hydro and wind, but we know from the percentages we saw earlier, it currently is, though it's very cost-competitive and we'll continue to see this grow – we'll learn more about that in a little bit. And then the other technologies, because they involve things like biomass, _____, and thermal, biomass which is dispatchable, _____ and thermal which are steady, they had a much more steady annual profile than the others. But the other thing to notice with the solar, it does have a significant contribution in the spring and summer months, and into the fall. And in the winter, that's when it's the lowest, but that's when wind and hydro are pretty high.

Okay, next?

Now, we'll dive into solar, we'll look at what's going on in the marketplace, and then solar resource, and then just a little bit about the panels themselves, modules.

Okay, next?

So, I remember a time, I used to work in solar, a time when _____ used to say, "Well, in five or ten years, if we can get demand up enough, then solar will be cost-effective." And that five years began in the late-'70s, and continued through the '80s, '90s, and into the 2000s. But all of a sudden, in the mid-2000s, that 5 years became a lot more real, due, largely, to the Chinese and Asian markets, where they're able to produce modules more cheaply than they could in the US. With that increased production, the costs have continued to come down, and it's now been, you know, 15 years or so where we've seen very dramatic reductions in cost and prices, retail prices, in all sectors. So, even the residential costs, you can see that green band is kind of the upper and lower 20th to 80th percentile range, but the black line is the median price.

And today, it's currently a little bit below $4.00 a watt, installed. And for larger systems, nonresidential, moving to the middle graph, it is even lower than that. And then, the one on the far-right is utility scale, and that's where, you know, the costs are the lowest. You have economies of scale in a major way, you're purchasing a lot more, you're installing a lot more at one time, so those economies of scale bring the cost down to about half of those residential systems. Nonetheless, residential systems are so much cheaper than they were just a few years ago.

Okay, next?

This is taking a look at a tool that can help you evaluate the solar resource at your facility or at your reservation, and this is the solar atlas, part of the renewable energy atlas online. An NREL website's given below, and you can see, it gives you an idea of the solar resource in different parts of the country. And it has an annual amount of solar resource, classified as kilowatt hours per square meter per day. Another term I like to use to describe that is sun hours per day. But it gives you an idea of the intensity of the sun, over the course of a full day and through the full year.

Okay, next?

This is zooming in on that tool, to a particular location, and now you can see direct normal means we're really talking about facing directly at the sun, perpendicular to the sun, all day long. And here, it shows the difference in the resource across this small region. This is probably about 30 or 40 miles across, and we can see there's parts of that region that aren't quite as rich in _____ solar resource as right in the middle, where it's about 5 to 5.5 kilowatt hours per day per square meter, per square meter per day. In other words, about 5 to 5.5 sun hours, per day.

Next slide?

When we talk about the sun, there's just a few things _____ wanna help clarify. We know that, you know, the length of a day is much longer in the northern hemisphere, during the summer than in the winter. If we start on the left, it shows what we call the declination angle. It's actually the earth's axis going right the North and South Pole; it's tilted a little bit, it is not vertical. And so, it tilts the earth towards the sun, and in the summer months, that's why we have the long days, and the Southern Hemisphere has very short days and long nights. As you go following the seasons, we'll go to the bottom graph _____ _____ the fall equinox when the day and nights are equal, _____ actually everything looks dark here 'cause we're looking at the dark side. The sun is actually shining on the other side of the earth, in this graph.

But then we go to the winter and we see, now, where the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the sun, we're gonna have short days, long nights; Southern Hemisphere, just the opposite: long days, short nights. And then, spring equinox, now that part of the globe is facing the sun, that's why it's all in the sun. But this tilt angle really affects our solar resource, and when we're designing systems, we wanna take into account the fact that the solar resource is different in the summer and winter. We wanna equate that with your loads and what you're using to power _____ _____ power.

Next?

This is just looking, in a little more granular detail, of that solar resource, and we have two different lines shown. One is green, it's called global horizontal radiation, if I were to put my solar panel flat, horizontal, a building roof or something. And then, the other is fixed tilt, and that's where we tilt it usually at our altitude angle, and that equates to our latitude. So, our latitude here in Colorado, in Golden, it's about 38 degrees, so if I were to put a solar panel on my roof and wanted to maximize my annual production, I would tilt my panel up about 38 degrees. _____ _____ showing there's a slight difference between the two. But those jagged up-and-downs on the left really indicate that clouds are passing by, so the sun is not shining through onto that solar panel. On the right, it's a clear sunny day, all day.

In-between, where it goes down to zero, that's nighttime, so the sun shines all day and not at all at night. Down below is the same sort of thing, just a different time of the year. In the middle, it's a very smooth sunny day; on the left and the right, we have a fair amount of clouds interfering with the radiation.

Okay, next slide?

Often, when we're trying to do simple just assessments of is solar gonna be worthwhile, we like to look at larger pictures. Those are individual days showing the solar resource. Looking at the annual picture helps us do at least a quick assessment of how viable a solar PV system might be. So the annual, you can see on the top, it's very, very smooth and consistent, _____ it's showing, you know, peaking at about 800 watts per square meter, at solar noon. Down below, it's just showing the same thing, but it's the monthly profile of each of these. So you can see, during some of the months, having the solar panels tilt will give you more energy production than having that flat point horizontal. In the winter months, when you're flat on the roof, the sun's at low angles, you're not gonna get an awful lot of energy production out of solar panels, so that's why it's a little bit lower. But we use these larger increments, the monthly or annual solar resource figures, to be able to do estimates on how well a solar system will perform.

Go on to the next slide?

So, we'll typically purchase solar modules based on their rate of power. Let me just use a 100-watt module as an example, or 1 kilowatt. If we are _____ solar _____ and we have a bright sunny day, it will produce 100 watts. The graph on the left shows that solar resource, and we can see, you know, the sun is not out before 8:00 in the morning, then the sun comes out, and it shines real brightly around the noon hours, and then it goes down in the afternoon and sets. _____ to do our calculations, we go back to a lesson from calculus, _____ _____ _____ the area under that curve. And so, we take that figure on the left and we translate it to the one on the right, and now this is what we call the sun hours, that we saw on some of those earlier maps. So it's kilowatt hours per square meter per day, and it just gives us an easy metric to be able to compare one site to another, okay? But the one on the right is what we typically use. When we're looking at our solar _____ and you're seeing the resource, that's what it will talk about.

Okay, I'm sorry, I think I jumped ahead of the graphics, here, a little bit. Okay, so, this is the slide I was just describing. I'm sorry, my manual system, here, is slightly _____.

So, on the left, we have a typical solar resource that we see, and we can see, you know, the sun is not shining at midnight or 6:00 AM, but it comes up and it's peaking at noon, and then sets in the afternoon. We want the area under that curve; we look to the right, and here we've done that integration exercise, then we come up with a much more convenient and easy-to-use figure that's sun hours per day. In this case, about 4.5 kilowatt hours per square meter per day is, you know, what we see from our solar maps.

Okay, next?

So, we have choices when we go and install a system. We can have our PV system just be fixed, fixed tilt. Usually when we do that, we're facing directly south, unless there's a reason not to, maybe because of your roof angle or something like that. Also, you take a look at, well, what are you trying to maximize? If you're operating a forest service guard station, and you only have the forest service guard station open in the summer, you might wanna maximize your summer resource, so that you would maybe tilt your solar panels a little bit flatter on the roof. But if you really want maximum winter gain, because of how you use a particular facility, and you'd would wanna tilt it more vertical when you have the sun at more angles, during the day, you'd be able to maximize your solar production. So, advantages of a fixed system are: you never have to go out and adjust it; it will stay fixed; there's no moving parts.

And, actually, with PV in general, there's no moving parts, and so, it's very robust and simple. We have the choice, though, to have tracking. With tracking, we can increase the production. I'll show a graphic of that in a minute, _____ with a tracking system, it tilts, it rotates towards the east in the morning, when the sun rises, and it follows the sun as it makes its way across the sky during the course of the day, and then is facing west late in the day, and then resets. Those types of systems will increase your annual energy production significantly, over the fixed tilt system, but now you'll introduce moving parts that have the potential to fail. And then, down below, we have the two-axis tracking. So, we know the sun is at a higher angle _____ the summer than in the winter, so it accounts for that as well as the sun path through the day.

Again, if you wanna maximize energy production, that's exactly why you'd want a two axis tracking system, but now you have two different mechanical mechanisms that can wear out, and maybe at some point fail. So, you like to analyze your needs and how much time and energy you have _____ _____ O&M and to keep track of your system. In general, the simplest, easiest, not pay any attention, is the top one, fixed tilt. There's an awful lot of one axis tracking systems out there, these days, and they have really improved in terms of their long-term productivity. So, it seems to be, in many of the larger applications, the most common for individual homeowners _____ _____ not so much. Two axis tracking, they're more specialty items, when you really need to maximize production.

Okay, next?

So, this is a graph that just shows some of the differences between these different types of systems that we've talked about. So, the red line that you see is if we just lay our panels horizontal on the roof, and we don't touch them at all. And that's giving you a sense of their annual production, through the whole year. Next, we have the yellow, and that's where we tilt it _____ fix it at the latitude angle. And we can see doing that increases the production quite a bit in the winter months, but due to high sun angles in the middle of the summer, it doesn't produce quite as much as that horizontal one does in the summer months, June, July, and August. The next one is if we put it vertical on our roof or put it vertical on a wall, and vertical do well in the winter months when the sun's at low angles, but not well at all in the summer, as we see it's at its lowest in the summer months.

So for, you know, building integrated PV, it could make sense, but for most other applications, you might not do that, because of the low production. And then, in the light blue, turquoise, we have single-axis tracking, and you can see that is quite a bit better than the fixed-tilt at latitude. And then, the dual-axis tracking, even better still, not by a large amount, and, you know, adding a significant amount more complexity to the system, it might not be the best way to go. Maybe the single-axis tracking will give you significant added production, without the _____ _____.

Okay, next?

This is just a representation of solar cells and how they work. We have a solar set up, made, typically, of silicone. It has four valence electrons, which make it a very stable _____ structure. And then, we built that silicone with phosphorous and boron, and boron has only three valence electrons _____ _____ sort of like there's a hole, and there's availability to accept electrons. And phosphorous has five valence electrons, and almost has one extra compared to the silicone that it's interspersed with. So, the light comes in, represented by that yellow squiggly line; a photon will hit one of the electrons and knock it out, and it will go following the electric circuit, there, and go and charge the light operate the light. And then come back in on the other side and fill in a hole with the boron.

And this process can continue indefinitely; we have solar panels that have been out there for over 30 years, and still producing. Not quite as well as they did when they were new, but still pretty amazing to be still making energy 30 years later. And the nice part about this thing is, you know, there are no moving parts, only moving electrons.

Okay, next slide?

So, this is what a single cell looks like, or a representation of one. And typically, they're maybe one to three volts; it depends on the exact type of material, they vary. You take a cell, you put it together _____ a series of other cells, to make a module. And then, you'll take that module, hook it together with a whole series of modules, to make an array. And then put all the arrays together, and you have a whole solar system. The nice thing with solar is, it is very modular. If you know exactly what your loads are, you can design _____ _____ system that is really targeted to your loads, whether you try to meet your average load or your maximum load, you know, whatever your target is. But you have a lot of choice and flexibility; you can get inverters that take the DC electricity which solar cells make, and convert it into AC, again, sized to your system or your loads.

Okay, and next?

Incentives often play a big part in _____ renewable energy systems. They have been a big driver, to date, for some of the costs and increased deployment that we've seen. One of the ones that is currently available for solar is the Investment Tax Credit, and it's available till the end of 2019, at 30 percent of the cost of the system. It will go down to 26 percent in 2020, 20 percent in 2021, and then 10 percent thereafter. It does apply to solar, wind, small wind, and biomass combined heat and power, and then other renewable technologies. There's also accelerated depreciation feature that really helps with the economics. You can fully appreciate your system over five years. Normally, for such long-lived assets, you would do a little bit over 20 years. The accelerated depreciation really helps with making things a little more attractive to investors, and it will be in place up through the start of 2023.

Okay, next?

Taking a look at a tribal project, this project was installed down in Picuris Pueblo, of New Mexico. As you can see, it takes up a significant amount of land, but it is a megawatt-worth PV, so it's a very large system. It's a community project _____ generate about 2.6 million kilowatt hours a year. They were able to work with their electric co-op, to get a 25-year power purchase agreement. They partnered with the Northern Pueblos Housing Authority, and did a cost share with DOE _____ _____ and were able to get a DOE grant. Put that all together, and they were able to do a very large and significant solar project, that will serve them well for many years to come. It was just installed a little less than a year ago. I haven't been in touch with them to see how it's working. But, again, no moving parts; this looks like a fixed-tilt system, so, it should be pretty simple and robust.

Next?

And then this is just a tool you can use online, through NREL, if you wanna just get an estimate of your system. It's called PV Watts. You go and you can actually draw this rectangle and say, "Well, I'd like to put in a system here." It will tell you roughly how large that system is.

If we go on to the next slide –

– there are things you fill out as to what the closest weather data is, what angle you wanna tilt your array at, what type of array, what type of module, how large the system, _____ _____ facing south _____. And there's default values for these, which you are familiar with, and you can put all these inputs in and then put in your average cost of electricity. And then, it will go and do all the calculations for you, that we see on the next slide.

And in this particular case, it'll tell, you can make, you know, 14.8 million kilowatt hours a year, and the value of that electricity in your region will be about $1.1 million. So, again, it's a nice tool just for an assessment, to see what would work. You can actually go and draw those _____ to be right on a roof of an existing building, so it's a pretty convenient and handy tool.

Okay, next?

Now, we'll take a look at wind. This is actually a picture of where I work, the National Wind Technology Center, in Colorado, a little bit south of Boulder.

Okay, next?

So, this slide describes different parts of the county, and the amount of wind installations they have had, on an annual basis, over the last 20 years. And as you can see, if you look at the left _____ and bottom, that's the years, 1998, '99, 2000, 2001, you know, _____ _____ all 1-2 gigawatts 1 year, and then almost none the next. This is largely due to policy and the Production Tax Credit. In those days, congress passed it for a year, and then let it expire and then not do anything till halfway through the next year, or even later, and then put it back in place. But developers didn't want to invest, because the Production Tax Credit made such a huge difference in their economics, so they wouldn't, you know, install a system until it was in place. They put it in place for three years, in 2005, and then actually extended it several times, _____ _____ actually was in place more or less continuously through 2012. And you can see what a huge difference it made in installations _____ _____ realize, in all of these installation periods, 2007 is when we began the Great Recession, and it hit a lot of industries really hard in 2008 and '09.

And wind was still just catching up to back orders, because once that Production Tax Credit was in place, there was a huge influx of people wanting large wind systems. And there were, you know, other policy drivers; the production Tax Credit was one, but the Accelerated Depreciation Renewable Portfolio Standards _____ _____ made a huge difference. And then, in the height of the Great Recession, congress gave an alternative to the Production Tax Credit, which was the Investment Tax Credit, and that's where capital was scarce. If you got _____ system installed, rather than waiting ten years to collect all of your Production Tax Credit, it – I might not have mentioned, you know, at the time, it was about 1.5 cents a kilowatt hour, for every kilowatt hour produced over the first 10 years of a system.

So it was great to have that tax credit, but it took a long time to realize the benefit of it. The Investment Tax Credit said, "Okay, let's go and take the _____ value of money and move it to the present, and we'll pay you cash for that value of that Production Tax Credit, over ten years." So, that was a way to get capital back into the system, and you did a lot of groundwork before the Recession, doing the wind assessment, getting your permits, and all that, and suddenly cash was in short supply. The Investment Tax Credit helped a lot of projects get to the finish line when they otherwise might not have.

Okay, next?

I mentioned, before, the Wind Vision, which is talking about getting to 20 percent electricity from wind by 2030. And then, there's even _____ _____ enhanced one looking at 2050. So, these are the targets that you can see that we are going to be trying to get to, and right now, we're at about 90,000 megawatts, or 90 gigawatts, in 2018. And to get to 20 percent by 2030, we still have quite a ways to go, and then, to get to 35 percent by 2050. As you can see, that blue ledge represents offshore wind. So far, we only have one offshore wind farm in the US, but there's a lot of them underway, currently, and over the next decade, I think we'll start seeing offshore contribute a lot to the overall wind picture. But you should also know, the green is land-based, and there's going to be, for as much wind as we have out there, even more over the coming decades.

Okay, next?

Another complex graph, but we'll break it down into pieces. And first, this is talking about the change in the technology, over time. So, the rotor diameters, that's the green balls, the circles. We can see the scale for them is on the right; that's how many meters the rotor diameter is. And back in 1998, the average rotor diameter was maybe about 50 meters, and over time, they are now up to about 110-112 meters. Significantly larger, and that really makes a huge difference in how much energy you can capture. And that rend is probably going to continue. What has happened, over these years, our controls on the turbines have improved dramatically. So, we couldn't have such large rotos years ago, because we would overspeed the generators, and have too many issues where we would get caught in a storm with turbulent wind.

And now, with much better controls, we can get things safely and out of the way of those turbulent winds, very rapidly. The other thing that we have is the nameplate capacity of turbines, and that's on the axis on the left, has increased dramatically. Again, when we look at 1999, the average turbine was about 700 kilowatts, or .7 megawatts. And now we get to 2017, and the average is about 2.3 megawatts. So, they have increased dramatically, they increase with the rotor size, so it's made a huge difference. There was a time, back in the 1990s to 2005 _____, where the towers were getting much taller very quickly. But over the next decade or so, they haven't been ramping up quite so much. A lot of that is because we've been putting wind turbines in places where they're very windy, and there's not a lot of advantage to going above, say, 80 meters.

If you're in Texas or Wyoming or, you know, Minnesota, there is great resource; at 80 meters, you don't have to go higher. If you're in other parts of the country, maybe Georgia or North Carolina, you are gonna have to start going higher to get into the better winds; maybe 100, 120, 140 meters. So, as we expand wind into more parts of the country, we'll see the tower heights beginning to increase, most likely.

Okay, next?

Again, just briefly, the tax credits and incentives make a big difference. The accelerated depreciation helps all technologies, but with wind, for our utility scale and for the smaller turbines, it does make a difference. And then, the tax credit for small turbines up to 100 kilowatts in size had been capped at $4,000.00, to the end of this year. But then, once we get into 2019, there will be no limit, and will be based on the cost of the system, 30 percent Investment Tax Credit. And then, the bottom one is talking about the Product Tax Credit, which applies, really, to the utility scale turbines, but it's being phased out, so it's at – it had been 2.3 cents, about 4 years ago; now, it's at 1.3 cents, or .0138; next year, it'll be .009. And then, after that, there won't be a Production Tax Credit, anymore, for the wind turbines.

Okay, next slide?

As you might expect, as systems get larger, there's economies of scale. So as we look across the horizontal axis on the bottom, the systems are getting larger, going from less than 5 megawatts up to 5 to 20, 20 to 50, 50 to 100. And the blue bars represent the median cost, and we can see this median cost consistently go down. The orange circles represent individual project cost. If we look at the far-right, we can see they're all pretty close together, when we're doing wind farms over 200 megawatts. They do vary, still, from maybe about $1,300.00 the kilowatt, up to $1,900.00 a kilowatt, but it's still within a fairly tight range. As we move to the left across this graph, generally speaking, that range gets wider.

As we're talking about distributed wind, these are gonna be single, maybe utility scale turbines, one or two of them, less than five megawatts total. And you can see the prices, one, are higher, and, two, they vary by a lot. So, $2,000.00 per kilowatt, up to $4,500.00 per kilowatt. So, wind, in these kind of instances, is very _____ specific, you know, installing one or two turbines is often a lot of logistics, whether it's transportation, digging foundations, bringing in cranes to install, getting the environmental permits, all of those are expensive for any wind project. But if you can spread that cost over 100 wind turbines, it's much more affordable than spreading it over 1 wind turbine. And that's why we see such a high individual cost, there.

Okay, next slide?

This is a slide that talks about the distributed wind industry, you know, similar timeframe to what we saw in the utility scale, a couple slides ago. And everything was booming even through the Great Recession, and then things tailed off significantly. To a degree, a lot of these turbines are really the single one- to two-megawatt turbines; they represent the bulk of the installed capacity, and so that's why they follow that pattern so well. But for the distributed scale, there's about 1,000 megawatts installed today, or one gigawatt, but it represents 81,000 turbines. Compared to the utility scale that we looked at, we have 91 gigawatts and 54,000 turbines _____ across the country, delivering that.

Okay, next slide?

Okay, this is a little bit of a busy slide, but if we just take it in pieces, the green diamonds represent project costs, installed costs, for small wind turbines, in 2015. And the blue bars represent the same, but for 2016. And so, as we look here, we can see that a lot of these costs are lined up on a single, you know, axis, yeah, a 10-kilowatt turbine, you know, my guess is that might be a _____ 10-kilowatt turbine, and you can see the range of cost, here. To kind of get a little more to the heart of the matter, just scaling, and ignoring the outliers, looking at where the bulk of them are, you can see that they go from roughly $6,000.00 a kilowatt up to maybe $13,000.00 or so [audio cuts out] $5,500.00 to $11,000.00 – sorry, that's what I have there on the graph.

The next size up, 30 kilowatts, and you can see the range from $4,600.00 to $8,100.00. And then, the next, 50-kilowatt, there's not so many turbines there, but again, the range, $6,800.00 to $9,500.00. And then, far-right, we have 100-kilowatt turbines, and there, other than that one outlier, the range is pretty tight, $4,400.00 to $5,500.00. So, this is _____ over a couple years' time; I don't think there's any real trends toward cost decreasing. These are very typically one-off costs; every site, because you're done one turbine, maybe two in some instances, has a lot of costs associated with it that are individualized. And so, it's not just a commodity, quite like _____ _____ economies of scale, not a commodity like buying apples or something like that.

Okay, next slide?

When we go to look at wind for a particular project, there's a lot of questions we wanna know, 'cause it makes a difference in where you put your wind turbine and how well the wind turbine will produce. At the end of the day, we generally wanna get as many kilowatt hours out of our site as possible. The first question we ask is, you know, what is the main wind speed at that site? Is this a windy location? Most people who are considering wind always think it's windy, but often, it's good to take a look at, you know, what time of day, what time of year you're outside thinking it's windy. Because, one, it's nice if you have wind that blows when you need the electricity, and, two, it's nice if you have wind that, you know, blows throughout the whole year.

Okay, we can scroll down, next?

Other questions we'd wanna know: How much does the wind speed change as we go higher above the ground? That informs how tall of a tower do I need. Again, if I don't need to put it on a 60-foot tower, if I've got good wind at 40 feet, then, save the money and do the 40-foot. That's what makes sense. If you have a lot of trees and everything that are 30 feet tall, 40 feet may not be enough to clear those trees. And in those instances, we might wanna consider a 60-foot tower, to get as much clearance above the obstructions as you can.

Next?

It's helpful to know what time of day is the windiest, and does that coincide with your loads? You know, if it's windiest in the middle of the night when you're never using any electricity, then that might speak to the need to have a battery system, to charge batteries when the wind is blowing, _____ you can use that energy later when you need it.

Next?

_____ _____ _____ what directions does the wind blow from, and do we have any buildings, trees, or _____, or other things interfering with the wind from the directions where it is typically the strongest. It's a term we call "good fetch." "Fetch" would mean you maybe have a lake in front of you, nothing interfering with your wind.

Next?

Other things we like to know is, what times of the year is it windy? And when do I need the electricity the most? We know we use a lot of electricity in the summer months, for air-conditioning, in many parts of our country. But oftentimes, that's when it's not so windy, so it may not be a good match. But finding out when you can expect your wind to blow and how it matches with your loads might be a determining factor in doing a system.

Next?

Knowing how many hours a year the wind blows at certain speeds is also [audio cuts out] weigh into your decision about is it worthwhile to do wind, will you get wind when you need it. Or must you have a battery system to help out, or a battery and a PV system to help out, because, you know, they all work at different times. And then, lastly, maybe how turbulent is your wind. Turbulence is something that increases your O&M expenditures; it sometimes _____ _____ unplanned repairs. First of all, distributed wind, if you can avoid the turbulence, that's good, and it might be more related to the obstructions nearby. If you have a very turbulent site, well, then, you'll have to weigh that against expected repair cycles.

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Okay, the equation on all of this is just, when we look at the energy we get from the wind, it comes from kinetic energy, 1/2 mv-squared from physics. But the thing with the wind system is that mass is actually air, it's wind, it's air that's moving, and so, that mass becomes another velocity turn. _____ instead of just velocity-squared, we now have velocity-cubed, and when we go and add in all the other factors, the windswept area of the rotor _____ _____ the density of the air _____, the velocity and the wind, we see that it will really make a huge difference in our power available from the wind, based on that wind speed, because we're cubing it. If the wind speed increases by 25 percent, we get double the power out of the wind resource. If we double the wind resource, we get increased power by a factor of 8. So, it's huge, and that's why _____ wind developers look for the windiest sites possible, and it really does make a huge difference.

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There's a couple things we do to maximize our wind speed. One, in many parts of the country, the higher above the ground you go, the windier it gets. Close to the ground, there's a lot of surface clutter and things that interfere with the wind and slow it down, whether it's cars, buildings, trees, or the topology. But as you go higher, winds tend to smooth out and be faster. Again, we talked, before, about, well, how tall of a tower do you need? And it depended upon, you know, multiple factors, what makes it worthwhile, but taking a look at how much it would increase your energy production is, you know, what you'd wanna do.

Next?

Another important factor is the size of the rotors. We have seen the graph that showed how industry is going larger and larger. They're doing that because it makes a huge difference in how much energy they can capture from the wind. So, here, we can see just these seven circles showing different rotor diameters, and on the right, we show what it does to the swept area, okay? And the swept area _____ _____ from geometry, Pi times diameter-squared divided by 4, that's the area of a circle. And you can see that the swept area increases as an exponential function, here. And so, that drives people to say, "Let's go bigger and bigger, because I can capture a lot more energy from this site, with larger and larger rotors." So, it drives the entire industry in that direction.

Okay, next?

And there you can see that exponential curve. This is what we call a power curve for a wind turbine. You might have a 100-kilowatt wind turbine, but it's only gonna produce 100 kilowatts at certain wind speeds. If there's no wind, it's not making any electricity. Here, we can see if there's 9 miles per hour of wind, it's gonna produce about 5 kilowatts or 5 percent of its maximum. At 13 miles an hour, it'll produce 22 kilowatts. At 18 miles an hour, 50 kilowatts. And, you know, you start getting to 22 miles an hour or 10 meters per second, that seems like a pretty windy site, and a 100-kilowatt turbine is still not at its rated power. So that's important to remember, when we're buying wind turbines, we're not _____ buying them based on their rated power. We're buying them based on how much energy they will produce on an annual basis, at our site, with the windy source that we have.

It's quite a bit different than PV; if you buy a 100-watt PV panel, you're expected to produce 100 watts on a sunny day at noon, facing the sun directly. That's not so with a wind turbine, I mean, you do expect it to produce 100 kilowatts, in this case, but only if you have winds blowing at about 33-34 miles an hour, so that doesn't happen every day, or as we would expect a solar panel to produce 100 watts about every day _____ _____ in many parts of the country. I live in sunny Colorado.

Okay, next?

This is another online tool that can be very useful. It's called the Wind Prospector. And the thing to notice is, on the left, you can add or filter out or in lots of different types of data that can help you narrow down a particular site. It has things like, if there are any [distortion interferes with audio] critical habitats, airports nearby, things like that, that you might wanna take into consideration. And you can zoom in to, you know, as small an area as you want; this is just a macro view to give you a sense for it. But it's an interesting tool to play with, and it just helps you get a better sense of the possibilities of your wind, early on before you, you know, start spending any money.

Okay, next slide?

And this is a slide just focusing on the wind portion of that Wind Prospector tool. So, across the country, we can see by the scale that they have here, you know, the red and the orange and yellow, it's really good and we can see [audio cuts out] country where we do have that, especially the middle of the country. Great Plains, it's pretty flat, the winds come over the Rockies. The Rockies have a lot of mixed wind: in certain locations it's very windy, lots of valleys it's not windy at all. And the wind comes over the Rockies, comes back down on the ground, and we have _____ _____ all across the middle of our country. This is all at 80 meters. Of course, it varies, depending upon what height you are above the ground.

Okay, next?

And then, this is just a demonstration of what the zoom-in will do for you. So, now we're looking at an area that's maybe a 20 or 30 miles by 30 miles, and you get to high resolution of the wind resource. And again, looking at the scale, here, I think _____ _____ looking at the scale, we have green _____ 6 to 6.5 meters per second. That's a good wind resource, but compared to the yellow going to tan going to red, we see this place has access to some really tremendous wind resources. So, this tool just gives you a pretty good quick high-level view of, if you're looking at your reservation, what parts of the reservation might be a better place to start than others. Of course, there's other factors, like what else you use the wind for, how far from transmission or how far from _____ _____, if you're doing community wind, but the tool is good _____ get started.

Next?

And then, here's an example of a large installed project. The Seneca Nation of Indians installed a 1.7-megawatt turbine, last year. And they have a geographically dispersed tribe, so that three sections of the tribe are actually in different utility territories, so they pay very different rates for their electricity. One is tied to Niagara Falls, so they get very cheap hydro, and others have much more expensive, you know, mix of coal and nuclear and all that. And so, one of the goals of this project is to help equalize the cost for electricity, amongst all of the tribal members. _____ _____ the things they did when they formed the LCC is to put an emphasis on training their old energy workforce, and securing their energy infrastructure, and promoting self-sufficiency, and preserving the environment. So, a very good project with a lot of benefits besides the energy itself, and then the cost savings _____ _____ _____ saved about $360,000.00 a year.

Okay, next?

James Jenson:            Are you able to continue, Robi, or do you wanna – ?

Robi Robichaud:         Yeah.

James Jenson:            Okay, we'll move on to your next presentation. Hold on one moment.

Robi Robichaud:         Okay, thanks. So, now we'll switch gears, a little bit, towards biomass. And when we look at biomass, we're really talking about biomass systems for heating. Biomass and bioenergy is a very large area, and it includes all sorts of alternative fuels; it can include combined heat and power. And we're just going to focus on one aspect of it, which is biomass for heating.

Okay, excuse me –

[Side conversation]

As we take a look at biomass, there's a lot of different types of biomass stocks available to us. One of the primary ones is what's leftover from harvesting timber. We harvest timber, sometimes, for making houses, furniture, paper, pulp. And when you do that, there's a lot of waste that comes along with it. And taking this forest residue, you can leave some of it in the forest, but you can't leave all of it, because it's too much of a fire hazard, because things are so dry. And taking it to a landfill is really cost prohibitive, and it fills up our landfills quickly. So, finding alternative use is a really good thing. And what we have found is, taking those forest residues, depending on what they are, how big they are, what the quality is, you could, at times, burn, you know, small wood. Other times, _____ it all up and make it into wood pellets, and burn it that way. But it's a very good fuel source for being relatively cheap, because it's a waste product, really, from the forestry industry.

Next?

A lot of the timber does go to mills for different purposes, whether it's for the housing or construction industries, or furniture and things like that. But when they do make those products, there's a lot of waste, sawdust, and _____, and the things that come off of the edges of the bark where they're looking for nice square or rectangular planks, and all that. The advantage, here, is there's a little bit greater control _____ that _____, and so, when you start making wood pellets from mill residues, it's usually a little bit better than from whole tree residues. And so, a little bit more value to those wood pellets made from this type of resource.

Okay, next?

There's a lot of benefits when you're trying to use this biomass. One, you end up with a local renewable energy fuel source. Typically, it varies a little bit where you are, but 50 miles or so is considered a maximum distance to ship your woody biomass. Two, you already use a boiler or a furnace, you know, at your reservation. The larger-scale systems _____ _____ think of campfires, it's very dirty, a lot of smoke and soot, even fireplaces _____ _____, even an individual woodstove, it depends on the quality of the woodstove, but there can be a lot of emissions that come out of them. When we get to these larger-scale systems, they burn so much hotter that they really burn clean, all of the gasses end up getting burned, the ash gets burned, and just minerals being left. And typically, there's no visible emissions or odors.

Again, we've talked about the different sources that it can come from, but the nice thing is it's really a low-grade waste product that you turn into a cost-saving fuel, so it's a win-win. Somebody has to sometimes pay to get rid of that waste product, and instead, you know, you wanna take it and use it for burning. It diverts things from the landfill, while making an economical heating source. Here's just one example: a school, 200,000 square feet, their annual emissions for their system is equivalent to about 5 residential wood-burning stoves. If we consider the average residence to be 2,000 square feet, it's really 20 to 1 reduction in emissions. So, those larger systems make a huge difference in terms of efficiency, clean burning, and, you know, high temperatures where you can either spread the heat throughout your facility, or heat water and then spread the heat throughout your system with a water-based system.

Okay, next?

And this is a graphic that just shows, you know, a number of places across the country that are burning biomass to heat their facilities. So, you see much more concentration in the East; there's a lot more forest in the East. Just in general, if we are not cutting the forest back it takes over and grows, you know, most everywhere. So there's always, you know, residential byproducts when people are just thinning things off of their property, or you even get damage from storms. But then, there's also thinning the forest itself, and the timber industry, and all that. So there's a lot of sources of biomass. You know that part of the country that was so-so windy, looking from North Dakota down to Texas? Well, because of that wind, it's not actually so great for the biomass, and so we can see there's not so many systems there.

But biomass is pretty local, so you can be in a dry desert state, but you have some mountains with a significant amount of wood or forest on those mountains, and you can have a sustainable system. Maybe you can't have it sustainable for 80 percent of the residents of the state, but for a half-a-dozen or so, you can. So, that's what this map represents.

Okay, next?

So, some of the benefits: it keeps your energy local and recirculating in your local economy, versus spending for, in some cases, you know, natural gas, which is being imported from afar, or oil. So, that makes it something that helps support different parts of your local economy, even those who work in the forest products industry. There's always concern about, you know, the carbon circle. Well, _____ burning biomass from trees, it's part of the natural carbon cycle. They are taking carbon out of the soil, to grow and put it into the park, into the wood, and then when you burn it, it releases it, but then it goes back into the soil as the next tree grows. It's a little bit different _____ _____ burning fossil fuels, which takes carbon that had been put underground, you know, millions of years ago, and went from being _____ woody biomass, a deciduous biomass, to becoming oil or coal.

But that carbon has been stored for millions of years and not been in the atmosphere. When we burn it, we release it into the atmosphere, and we release millions of years' worth of CO2 into the atmosphere. So, it's a big difference in terms of the _____ carbon cycle, between burning wood versus fossil fuels. And example, here, from Townsend, Montana School District. They put in a system, back in 2007, they replaced a fuel oil system. _____ to heat a boiler _____ hot water that goes to their school, they'd burn about 200-300 tons per year. And they were able to get funding from a bunch of different sources, and took out [distortion interferes with audio] loan.

They were initially thinking – I don't have the payback, there, but the payback would be about 15 years. But back when they put that system in, we were going through the Great Recession, and there was a lot of volatility in fossil fuel prices, and especially oil. And so, they were thinking that they would shorten that payback to maybe 10 to 12 years. So, one of the things that, you know, it's important to realize, with these systems, part of the economics is always based on what are you replacing. Generally speaking, in many parts of the country, if you're replacing electric heat, these biomass systems can be, typically, quite a bit cheaper than that.

_____ _____ maybe more from the, you know, East to Northeast, where part of the electric heat is nuclear and coal. And then, it could be a little more cost-effective, I think, as you're out in some of the Western regions where you have electric from hydro, and electric from wind, those could be very low cost. So, you can still heat with electricity and be low-cost, and it would be a little more challenging to have savings from biomass. One of the lessons learned in Townsend, at times, when they were installing the system the first couple of years, they were just looking to get wood pellets from wherever they could. A few times, they got the whole tree pellets, and they found that it wasn't as consistently ground and size was a little bit different.

Sometimes, something would get stuck in the _____, and then someone would have to go manually intervene to loosen it. And that was, you know, slowed everything down, required someone to go find out, "How come we're not getting our heat, right now?" So, they started paying a little bit more for sawmill pellets, and solved that problem.

Okay, next?

Looking at some of the plusses, if you're doing biomass feedstock for heating, generally, it doesn't have to be quite as clean as if you're trying to make electricity, or biofuels, or combined heat and power. And those applications, you know, the heat temperatures for the other uses are very important, or the cleanliness of the fuel for biofuels is very important, so you have to have much more strict control over that feedstock. If you're just burning for heat, to heat water, it can vary a little bit and it's not a problem. The problem raised in the last slide was due to the _____ getting caught, and not really due to the heat quality. But that's something that makes just heating – using biomass for heating easier to do.

Over the years, they have created these automatic loading systems; that also makes it much easier. And, you know, most heating systems of any kind, you always have some maintenance, people have to keep an eye on things. What they have found with the manual systems, it could be anywhere from two to four hours a day, but with the automatic ones, it's much less, maybe a half-hour to an hour a day. Some of the negatives, you have to have your biomass stored onsite, and you have to have enough for at least a few weeks, until your next load gets delivered. So, you need to have enough space to store it, and, you know, gets delivered in five- and ten-ton quantities, so it can be a significant amount of space.

You also wanna make sure that the fuel stock gets rotated, because you don't want it to start rotting onsite, or anything like that. So, you have to sequence how you use it. And then even, you know, automatic systems sometimes do run into some problems; you do have to have some manual oversight. Caveats, the economics _____ biomass heating really does depend on what you're replacing. So, if you're replacing something that is kind of expensive or is very volatile in its pricing, biomass can provide a pretty stable, longer-term, lower-cost, in many cases, alternative. It depends, really, on parts of the country. I know I have looked in the Northeast, replacing electric heat _____ _____ _____ biomass systems _____ _____ the '80s, '90s, and 2000s were fuel oil.

Those were both pretty expensive in the East, in those days _____ _____ _____. By and large, our gas prices, for the last seven or eight, nine years have been very low, so it's a little more challenging to try to find applications, if you're heating with gas, to make it cost-effective.

Okay, next?

And then, just –

James Jenson:            We've just got a couple of minutes left for your time [crosstalk] try to go fast on micro-hydro _____ _____. Thank you.

Robi Robichaud:         Okay. _____ micro-hydro, we'll just take a look at a few of the maps.

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There's a lot of information, out there, to help you quantify a little bit what you see. So here's one showing all the nonpowered dams; _____ got 80,000 dams in the US, but only about 2,400 produce power. So we can look to use existing dams to add to our hydropower capacity, nationwide.

Okay, next?

And then, this graph, you can tell by the information on the right, has a lot of different kinds of information. In it, again, if you zoom in to a particular location, that's when you can start finding out different characteristics of the hydraulic resource, and how it might affect a potential project.

Okay, next?

Again, different types of information that people catalogue, that can be useful as you're looking at your resource and trying to figure out how best to use it.

Next?

And then, this one tells, you know, existing dams how they're being used _____ provide peak power, are they a run-of-river application or _____ storage for multiple purposes.

Next?

And then, a new thing that DOE has started to look at is, you know, small streams that haven't been developed before, is there some potential for putting in any small _____ river type of things, where you don't dam up the river, but still are able to extract some energy from it. So, there's a lot of potential, estimated at maybe 85 gigawatts or so _____. It's still in the early phases of trying to figure out how it works, because you have to include the ecological and social sustainability issues, as well. So, this is only looking at the resource part of this, when they did this study.

Next?

And then, just to give you an example of what hydro looks like. So, you can see, we're talking about micro-hydro, less than 10 kilowatts, so very small. You have a power canal, and one of the key issues _____ _____ how much vertical distance do I have for that water to drop. Gravity makes a big difference; the water will slow down _____ penstock, so the quantity of water that's flowing makes a difference. You have intake valves, in this case, that control that waterflow, as it goes to the penstock and comes down to go into a turbine. The water spins the turbine, which is connected to a generator, which will make electricity.

And then, you just have the water exit through your _____ and draft tube, and a small little system can make a lot of electricity, typically, in many cases, 24/7, all year-round. Some places have seasonal flow, so it might only be eight or nine months of the year, but still, even with a small system, the fact that, unlike wind and solar, there's often no downtime on a daily cycle, it can make a huge amount of energy.

Next?

And then, this is an example of run-of-river. So, it's a beautiful river and no one would want to dam it up, but if we have a little bit of an intake that goes underground, water flows into that and goes into a penstock, and all of this is kind of removed from view, underground, comes to the water outlet, and that's where you have your generator. So it makes it a pretty less visible but still powerful potential source for hydropower.

Next?

_____ talk about batteries, just briefly.

Next?

With batteries, we're talking, really, about, you know, residential, or maybe community, but small-scale, supporting your home use. You might have an electric vehicle, you might have solar panels, but that's the type of batteries we're talking about. There's all kinds of batteries out there, serving the grid, the greater grid, the utility, but we're on the smaller scale. And if you think of a car application, you really want your stored energy to last four to eight hours, when you're driving the car. That's the scale that would also be very useful if you need to charge it; you have excess wind at night, you have excess solar during the day, you can charge that battery system so it serves your car.

Next?

And this is just a graph of some of the types of batteries, and we're talking _____ bottom scale and the horizontal axis, we have the smaller range, 1 to 10 or maybe 20 kilowatts. So, not all the batteries are suitable for the small range. And then, on the left axis, the vertical one, it's how long you can use those batteries for, seconds to minutes to hours. So, lithium _____ is a very energy-dense battery source and resource, and _____ _____ are thinking it may be best for car applications, and best for a lot of other applications – home energy, and maybe even, you know, small-grid support.

Next?

So, this graph, on the lower-left, says if you have these kinds of energy systems, you need even more and more volume. So, post-storage hydro and compressed-air systems are on that lower-left corner, and then in the upper-left _____ smaller and smaller size. And we can see lithium-ion has high energy density and high power density, on these two axes, and pretty small in size. That's why a lot of people are looking for lithium as being maybe the battery of the future. It is the battery of today, also, but it's still somewhat expensive for residential systems, but maybe in five to ten years, it will be something that most people will have. I know Tesla is sort of counting that with his battery bank.

Okay, next?

Okay, and then, this is just looking at the types of services battery systems can provide, and we're really focused on the right side, you know, either for off-grid _____ batteries, as we develop'em for the transport sector, there will also be benefits for the residential sector. So, it might mean that you use _____ batteries to shift your retail use. If it's, you know, high electricity prices in the middle of the day, or some other time of the day, you can use your solar system, wind system, and battery system, to try to minimize those prices.

Okay, and next?

And again, just, I think I've mentioned already, you know, it seems like lithium-ion has got a lot of people's attention because of its multiple uses – its high energy density, high power density, and relatively small size. And I think we'll see costs come down as we get continued R&D on that technology.

Okay, I think that's about it. Thank you [crosstalk].

James Jenson:            Thank you, Robi. No problem, Robi. Thank you for the presentation; a lot of good information, there.

Just a reminder to the audience, we will hopefully have time for some questions at the end, and we may run a few minutes over the hour, to do that. So, please submit questions in written format.

With that, I'm gonna move on to Gil's presentation – just hold on a moment while I bring it up. All right, Gil, I got it ready – you should be ready to go.

Gil McCoy:                 Okay, we'll just go to the next slide?

What we're going to cover, today, are, first, what is the Department of Energy's combined heat and power technical assistance partnership. We'll talk a little bit about what services we provide. And these are free services, by the way. We'll also get an overview of CHP. We'll talk about different CHP technologies and their performance applications and costs. We'll give you some snapshots or looks at successful projects. And then we'll talk about how the CHP TAP can help you to screen sites for their possible cost-effectiveness, and move a project along the development pathway.

What we're really talking about, today, both the renewables talk and this CHP presentation, is about potential opportunities for the tribe to basically reduce their energy and operating costs. I wanna point out that CHP is very different than the renewables; it can be either centralized or decentralized. With CHP, you're looking at not only producing electrical energy, but also, meeting thermal loads. CHP is not intermittent and dependent upon a solar or wind resource. CHP can be continuously operated, or you can operate it to follow electric loads, with thermal energy as a byproduct. Or you can operate your CHP project to meet thermal loads, with electricity as the byproduct.

Next, please?

A little bit about the CHP TAPs. There are ten of them located throughout the US; every state has coverage. And our responsibility is to provide what we call fact-based unbiased information, to potential project hosts or developers. And we work with industry, with commercial facilities, with institutional sites, like colleges, universities, correction centers. We also work with military bases, and we work with tribes and smaller commercial sectors like the hospitality industry, and the like.

Next, please?

This just gives contact information for the directors of each of the ten CHP TAPs. So, if any of you want additional information about CHP, or a screening assessment of CHP at your site, simply call the appropriate person. Or give me a call, and I can refer you to the person that will be working with you.

Next, please?

And next?

Well, combined heat and power is basically sequential production, usually of electrical energy first, with waste heat then converted into usable thermal energy. So, instead of purchasing electrical energy from a utility, and producing thermal energy from an onsite boiler, which combined would have, perhaps, a 50 percent efficiency, by using a CHP system, and sequentially producing electrical energy, and then harnessing the waste heat and the heat recovery, steam generated or hot water heat exchanger, you can obtain a 75 percent efficiency, or higher. And of course, this type of integrated system with a higher efficiency uses less fuel, produces less pollution and carbon dioxide releases into the atmosphere.

But the CHP project does have to be located at or near a thermal host. It's best if you have coincident demands for electrical and thermal energy. And of course, the thermal energy can be used for space heating and cooling, domestic water heating or process heating or cooling. And finally, sometimes, for dehumidification. Or up in Alaska, where a health clinic might be taking in a lot of cold dry air, they actually use steam for humidification.

Next, please?

So, bottom line, CHP can produce clean and affordable energy. Now, this example shows a powerplant ultimately delivering 30 units of energy to a customer or host. Ninety-four units of fuel, at a 32 percent efficiency, would be required to provide those 30 units of electrical energy. The onsite boiler might have an 80 percent efficiency, and require 56 units of fuel energy, to produce 45 units of thermal energy. The CHP, with its higher efficiency, would require 100 units of fuel, not 150 units, to meet the same electrical and thermal loads. So, that's a benefit of higher efficiency: you use a lot less fuel, and by doing so, you produce a lot less in the way of greenhouse gas emissions.

Next, please?

So, what do you have in a CHP project? You have a fuel supplier source – it could be natural gas, propane, biogas, biogas produced from wastewater treatment plants or from dairy manure, it could be landfill gas, coal. The fuel could be processed steam, or it could be biomass or other waste products. Then you have a prime mover – could be a reciprocating engine, gas turbine, microturbine, steam turbine, even a fuel cell or organic _____ cycle. The prime mover turns the generator to produce electricity. The electricity can either be sold to the local utility or used onsite.

The waste heat from the prime mover – usually, the water jacket cooling water, which is heated, or the exhaust heat – is used to produce thermal energy, either in the form, generally, of steam or hot water. And that can be, again, used for space heating and domestic hot water heating, space cooling and process cooling, et cetera. You can't have a CHP project where you don't produce electrical energy. In that case, you would be using the prime mover shaft output to, say, turn a compressor for a refrigeration system, or a compressor on an interstate natural gas pipeline.

Next, please?

So, what are the benefits of CHP? It's more efficient, and generally, the higher efficiency translates into lower operating cost. But, of course, it does require a large capital or upfront investment, similar to renewables, from that standpoint. Higher efficiency reduces emissions. CHP can also increase energy reliability or provide resiliency, in the event of storm events like hurricanes. And then, finally, onsite generation can help reduce grid congestion, and avoid transmission and distribution system costs and losses.

Next, please?

Uses for thermal energy? Again, it could be space heating at a single facility, or you could have space heating for an entire campus, or a district heating system that is comprised of many buildings. _____ I mentioned domestic water heating, process hot water or steam production at an industrial facility. At hospitals, a lot of times you use steam for additional process loads like sterilization and humidification; you admit the steam into an autoclave for sterilization. You can have pool or spa heating at hotels, schools, recreation centers, or casinos. And lastly, you can take steam or hot water, and use it in absorption chillers, to actually offset electrical loads from mechanical chillers.

Next, please?

Lately, there's a real trend towards resiliency. Hospitals, healthcare centers, have emergency backup generation, but their reliability is increased even further if they install CHP systems in, to also provide power under normal conditions as well as power under emergency conditions. Water and wastewater plants are other examples of critical facilities, as is public safety, centers of refuge which are often at schools or universities. The military certainly has mission critical requirements, and so, CHP adds a reliability and redundancy aspect to their sites. Telecommunications and datacenters, again, are other examples of sites that can benefit, from a resiliency standpoint, from incorporating combined heat and power.

Next, please?

Well, now we're gonna talk, a little bit, about different technologies and their performance characteristics. On the upper-left, you're looking at a gas turbine. In the smaller sizes, these are basically aeroderivative in nature. They're the same jet engines, you know, that propel commercial and military aircraft. A reciprocating engine is the same type of engine that you're liable to see in a truck or driving a locomotive. They come in a great variety of size ranges, and are great providers of hot water or low-pressure steam for a host site.

On the lower-left, we're looking at microturbines; I believe these are 65-kilowatt units, and they can be stacked. They're modular, they can be stacked to provide whatever a site calls for, in terms of either thermal energy requirements or electrical energy requirements. On the lower-right, you have a steam turbine, and usually, a steam turbine is retrofit onto a site that has an existing boiler producing medium- or high-pressure steam. There are three types of steam turbines; there is a back-pressure steam turbine where you take high-pressure steam, run all the steam through the turbine, the lower pressure steam is exhausted, and then goes out, usually, to an industrial site.

A condensing turbine takes all the steam and produces electrical energy with it. And an extraction condensing turbine basically does both. You run through the high-pressure stages of the turbine, low-pressure steam is exhausted to meet, perhaps, variable process loads, and then the remaining steam goes through additional turbine blades, is condensed, and produces additional electrical energy.

Next slide, please?

Well, here we're looking at reciprocating engines, and you can see there's quite a difference in size. The upper one is probably a couple of megawatts in terms of rated electrical output. The lower one is what we call packaged CHP. This is a 19-kilowatt engine, and this small type of unit can be installed in applications like hotels, motels, you know, at a fire station, a police station, and is basically sized to meet loads from that client. Well, reciprocating engines basically come from 10 kilowatts to 10 megawatts in size. Again, they can produce hot water or steam.

They're good for load following, in that they have high part load operating efficiencies, and they have fast startup. Generally, reciprocating engines are used for emergency or backup power, at critical facilities. They can come online in something like ten seconds, or less. Typical applications for reciprocating engines are universities, hospitals, water treatment facilities, commercial buildings, multifamily dwellings, et cetera. Now, I added the packaged unit, because I did wanna briefly mention trends.

The original CHP projects mainly were installed in industries, like gas and oil industry, pulp and paper, and whatnot. Lately, there's been a real trend and push towards moving CHP into the commercial sector. A lot of the remaining potential is within that sector, and so, we're seeing a lot of manufacturers of equipment that's sized maybe between 10 and 100 or 250 kilowatts. Besides packaged units, additional trends with respect to CHP, I mentioned resiliency, the ability to island a project. And islanding means, in the best sense of the term, flicker-free transition from an electric utility supply to your CHP unit. So, if you lose utility power, the facility continues operation, with the occupants almost not knowing that the loss of power has occurred.

In the extreme event, you go from islanding to what's called microgrids. These are CHP-powered, grid-independent, perhaps, communities. And, of course, you talk about microgrids up in Alaska where they have village power, it's no big deal, they've been doing that since forever. Another area where CHP is finding a greater utilization is in conjunction with greenhouses as the thermal host. So, in this case, the CHP unit provides electricity for grow lights, for whatever crop is under consideration; it provides thermal energy for greenhouse heating, and even provides CO2 that can be injected into the greenhouse enclosure to enhance plant growth. And these types of greenhouses can be located up in Canada. So, with CHP, you're not limited by conventional growing seasons.

Next, please?

Here, we're looking at microturbines as a prime mover. The units we're looking at, now, are 200-kilowatt capstone units, and these can be stacked. You can put up to 5 200-kilowatt modules in a shipping container, ship it to a remote site, and the container's all prewired and pre-plumbed. So you basically simply have to plug into the fuel supply, you know, complete the electrical interconnection, and the facility is what they call plug-and-play. With packaged units, there's a lot of effort to try and make units so that the cost of installing the unit is minimized. And that's extremely important in areas like Alaska, you know, where bringing something in and having ease of hookup, you don't have a lot of construction time, you basically ship the unit in, connect it, and you're up and generating power.

Now, microturbines, individual units are available from 30 to 330 kilowatts. Of course, these are modular, so you can stack numbers of units; I've seen microturbine projects as large as 4 megawatts, or, 4,000 kilowatts. That would be 5 shipping containers with five 200-kilowatt microturbines in each. Microturbines are best for producing hot water. You can produce steam, but to boost the electrical efficiency of these units, they use what they call the recuperator, which is a combustion air preheater. So, microturbines have maybe a 550-degree Fahrenheit exhaust, whereas, a gas turbine might be 850 to 1,150 degrees Fahrenheit.

So, if you want a lot of steam, a gas turbine makes sense; if you want a lot of hot water, a microturbine might be your best bet. Again, examples of these are multifamily housing, hotels, nursing homes, wastewater treatment plants, and you tend to find microturbines in remote areas where they have gas and oil production activities.

Next, please?

Here's a shot of a gas turbine. Basically, they have a compressor end, they bring air into a combustor, they inject the pressurized air and pressurized fuel, and then the hot exhaust goes through a power turbine, with the turbine turning a generator, and the hot exhaust then is sent to your heat recovery steam generator. A possibility, if you have very high steam loads with this type of equipment, is you can incorporate duct burners to inject natural gas into the hot exhaust, to boost the temperature of the exhaust, and produce additional steam, very efficiently.

So, you can produce high-quality high-pressure steam, which can then go into industrial process loads, or be circulated, say, to a university campus. These come in a wide range of capacities and configurations, but generally, the size range is from, I would even say, 1.8 megawatts to 300 megawatts. In the large-size range, combined cycle units are purchased and operated by utilities. Of course, example applications include hospitals, universities, chemical plants, refineries, and military bases.

Next, please?

Well, here are some kind of a comparison of characteristics of the different CHP technologies. We covered size range; the next is electrical, energy efficiency. And this is based upon what's called higher heating value. A lot of times, you'll see efficiencies of units expressed in lower heating values, which is the standard for Europe, and a lot of European equipment comes into the US, a lot of US equipment goes overseas. And so, even US equipment manufacturers tend to give efficiency in terms of lower heating value. If I took the HHV sufficiencies and divided by .9, that would give you a good proximate, when running on natural gas, of a lower heating value efficiency.

Total installed cost, you'll see, for reciprocating engines, it's $1,430.00 to about $2,900.00 or even $3,500.00 per kilowatt. And the higher values are for the smaller projects, for the 10-kilowatt-size projects; the lower value is for the larger projects. And much like we talked about with renewable energy, there's a strong economy of scale, with respect to CHP installations. Gas turbines go from about $1,300.00 to $3,300.00 per installed kilowatts. Microturbines, because they're modular, the price range is narrower; they go from about $2,500.00 to $3,200.00. And fuel cells, I haven't talked about them a lot, they tend to have a higher efficiency, but a much higher cost, as well as a higher maintenance cost.

The thermal output, this is the Btus, the thermal energy available per kilowatt hour produced, basically, is equivalent to greater. So, with CHP, you get a lot of thermal energy, compared to the amount of energy in the form of electrical output.

Next slide, please?

The one thing I wanna point out, here, is for natural gas units, fuel pressure is important. Generally, reciprocating engines will accept low-pressure gas, that's natural gas, available in the distribution pipelines. You're talking about a requirement of maybe 4 psig; gas turbines might take 200 to 300 psig. What that means is you need a fuel compressor, which has an additional initial cost, plus, an additional, you know, a parasitic load or operating cost. Microturbines generally require about 75 psig; fuel cells, again, can take fairly low-pressure natural gas.

Next slide, please?

So, economy of scale advantages, you get them in total installed costs. Heat rate, which is how many Btus you have to combust per kilowatt hour produced. You get better generation efficiency for the larger units. Maintenance costs tend to be lower for the large units. A lot of times, larger units can buy transport gas and have access to lower-cost fuel. And sometimes, you have advantages in terms of permitting and even project financing.

Next slide, please?

CHP is not a new technology; in fact, before the grid came into play in the '20s and before, CHP was the way industries provided electricity for their processes. There are more than 81,300 megawatts installed, at 4,400 sites throughout the US. And this map shows – I haven't counted the dots, but it shows the major CHP projects.

Next slide, please?

And keep going?

Let's look at photos of some of the CHP projects that we have in a Department of Energy database. This one is at a community hospital. The hospital had 4.6 megawatts of natural gas-fired reciprocating engines. This is one of multiple engines, and of course, having multiple engines increases reliability, because when one is down for maintenance, the others are available to meet thermal and electrical energy loads.

Next, please?

This is a project at the Oregon Health Science University, in Portland, Oregon. And here, they have 5 65-kilowatt microturbines that provide about 300 kilowatts of electrical energy for the hospital, plus, hot water for hospital loads. And one of the big things that played a role in installing these units were the building developer got LEED points, and so, they achieved LEED Platinum certification for their health facility. Again, it's a factor that's important for some developers, less so for other applications.

Next, please?

Here's a project at a resort. Here, we're looking at one of those packages of 5 200-kilowatt microturbines. They're basically at the top of the unit converting exhaust waste heat into hot water, that they then use for absorption cooling and cool heating at this hotel site.

Next, please?

I put this unit in because it's a little bit different: it does involve a tribal casino, but the project actually involves collecting food processor wastes, putting them into an anaerobic digestor, with the biogas produced then going into a CHP project where the electrical energy is sold to the local utility, and the thermal energy is provided to the casino for their, you know, heat and hot water loads.

Next slide, please?

And to cover the range of technologies, this project is up in Tok, Alaska. This woodfire boiler burns shredded biomass, produces steam that then goes through a steam turbine, and the steam turbine produces about 120 kilowatts of electrical energy, back pressure exhaust from the steam turbine provides space heat for the school and for a greenhouse. The benefits of this project include a diesel fuel offset of about 59,000 gallons a year. And in Alaska, in many of the remote villages, they have to fly fuel in, and fuel oil can have a price _____ $5.00 a gallon. So that's a considerable benefit, from producing wood chips from a local resource.

Next, please?

And again – we've got a few minutes left – I'm gonna go through this fairly quickly – what is the CHP TAP's role? When you call us, we can provide information; we can also provide technical assistance, initially, in the form that we call a screening technical assistance. We'll ask you questions, we wanna understand your energy costs both for thermal energy and electrical energy. And then, we go through a calculator, to estimate what size of CHP project would be a best fit for your facility. We use typical installation cost, come up with a simple payback, and the screening analysis basically is designed to help you decide if you want to invest more money to do a detailed feasibility analysis for your site, maybe looking at different sizes, you know, different prime mover technologies, different methods of operation for the unit installed.

The CHP TAP will also perform a third-party review of a feasibility study, to kind of give you some comments on the assumptions used in the study, the quality of the study, whatever. And we'll even review specifications and bids, as the project moves through the development process.

Next slide, please?

Screening questions we ask, we wanna know how much you pay for electrical energy. We want to know about the impact of current or future energy costs on your operations. We wanna know about reliability and what the reliability benefits of a CH project might be. Projects are best when you have coincident use of electric and thermal energy, and if your facility operates more than 3,000 hours per year. Benefits are proportional to operating hours, so, facilities with continuous operation, like military bases, score high in that regard. Do your thermal loads exist throughout the year? Well, in the Northwest, we have a lot of natural gas use for space heating, but then in the summer, the space heating loads drop off, and the natural gas heating load for water, you know, might be fairly small. So, when we look at a project like that, we might wanna consider absorption chillers, to build up a thermal load that can be met with the CHP project output during the summer.

Next slide, please?

Does your facility have an existing central plant, and is there space in it to locate a CHP project? Are you looking at equipment upgrade, maybe in the next three to five years, or equipment replacement? A lot of times, the CHP project can offset some costs of the replacement, which, in essence, buys down the cost of the CHP project. Have you already implemented energy efficiency measures? Sometimes, low-cost efficiency measures are attractive, but they might bring down the thermal load that we're going to look at.

Are you interested in reducing your facility's impact on the environment? Do you have a CO2 management plan with goals? Again, the CHP project can help you meet that. And sometimes, you get access to onsite or nearby biomass resources, like that tribal casino; maybe you can take landfill gas, dairy form manure, you know, put the manure in a digestor, produce biogas fuel for your CHP project. And there is specialized CHP reciprocating engines designed to operate with biogas, and the heating value of biogas.

Next, please.

This just shows a screen from the type of assessment we do. The bottom line is, we want to look at the fuel cost savings, we wanna compute simple payback, and down at the bottom, we show the total operating cost to generate, using your CHP project. And that cost should be less than your purchase price or sellback rate to an electrical utility, for you to have a cost-effective project.

Next slide, please?

Advanced technical assistance, we also offer. If you want to understand the emissions benefits from your CHP project, we can do that type of analysis. We can profile your electrical or thermal loads. We can estimate installed cost. We can do lifecycle costing for your determined levelized cost of electrical energy generation. And, of course, we can review CHP proposals.

Next slide, please?

Finding the best candidates, we like to see these characteristics: high in constant thermal load; a favorable spark spread, which basically means high electrical rates relative to fuel process. A typical electrical energy cost might be on the order of $30.00 per million Btus. Fuel costs, expressed in the same metric, range between maybe $3.00 and $8.00 or $9.00 per million Btus; $3.00 per million Btu if you have access to high-pressure interstate gas transmission pipeline, pipeline gas. We wanna know about your need for reliability, reducing the environmental impact, and, again, if new construction or planned expansions are planned for the future.

Next, please?

Involve the local electric utility early on: find out what your interconnection requirements are going to be and the cost, find out what studies you're going to be required on the part of the utility, find out what their avoided costs are. Don't wait until late in the game until you really understand what the utility will pay for your electrical output. Sometimes, you want to – you'll find utilities that might even partner with a CHP developer. In other words, the utility will maybe locate a generating resourced at a host facility site, they'll take the electrical energy, and either give or sell at a discount thermal energy to the host. Sometimes, a district heating loop might make sense; bringing in additional load and capturing economies of scale can provide a more attractive simple payback. And sometimes, the CHP project might simply mean adding waste heat recovery to existing reciprocating engines, say, used in a remote village.

Next, please?

So, summary: CHP is a proven technology, it can provide multiple benefits. Sometimes, utilities have renewable mandates, which creates a market for renewable energy credits, which is applicable to biomass-powered or biogas-powered CHP. There is lots of opportunities to do site visits and learn from facilities that have already incorporated CHP into their design. And definitely, engage with the Northwest CHP TAP or your regional TAP, to learn more about what they can provide for you in terms of technical assistance.

I think that's my last slide. Again, to learn more about a project, when you're in the very initial stage, definitely call the CHP TAP. And we know what resources are out there, and we'll be happy to provide them to you at no charge.

Well, thank you.

James Jenson:            Thanks, Gil – excellent presentation, and those CHP TAPs sound like a really valuable resource for individuals. At this time, we do have an opportunity to ask questions. You know, we've gone well over the hour – not well over but a little bit over – so, a lot of the audience has had to move on. But please do submit written questions, if you have any. At the current time, I don't see any, but as we wrap up here, I'll ask any questions that show up, so, please ask your questions.

But with that, Gil and Robi, thanks so much for your excellent presentations; a lot of great information, there. And these slides are available, or will be available, on the Web, you know, in a week or so, and so, people will have access to all the _____ information you guys provided.

I'm gonna bring up my closing slides, here, just to share the final webinar of this season. So, this is going to the webinar slides and audio that will be available in about a week. You can also google "doe tribal energy webinar series," and it shows up.

Questions – we're waiting for.

And then, this is the upcoming webinar, or the final webinar, in the 2018 series, the fourth Wednesday in November, Tribal Microgrid Case Studies. So, please do register for that, if that's of interest.

I still do not see any questions that have come in, so I think we'll end the webinar at this time. So, thanks to both of our presenters and the audience for your interest, and we look forward to having you join us again in the future.

Lizana Pierce:            Thanks, Robi. Thanks, Gil. Good night.

Robi Robichaud:         Thank you very much.

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