With a focus on the San Diego region’s job growth, smarter technology development, solar energy storage integration and increased electric vehicle infrastructure and deployment, Smart City San Diego is delivering results. The collaborative is made up of City of San Diego, GE, UC San Diego, CleanTECH San Diego and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E).  It formed to leverage each entity’s strengths to create and implement initiatives to improve the region’s energy independence, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and assert San Diego as a clean energy leader.

“Over the past year, Smart City San Diego has been forward-thinking about creating opportunities for a more sustainable region,” said San Diego Mayor Sanders. “Moving into 2012, our collaborative will continue to build on those results and develop and launch even more initiatives to drive economic growth for our region.”

These results include:

Car2Go: The City of San Diego and SDG&E worked with Daimler’s Car2Go to make San Diego’s launch of its plug-in electric vehicle car sharing pilot a big success. The City continues to work with SDG&E to increase the number of public-access charging stations throughout the Car2Go targeted region. The team is working collectively to educate the community about the benefits of the pilot program and expects to increase public interest in electric vehicles and encourage the growth of the plug-in electric vehicle industry in San Diego. Data gained from Car2Go will provide information on where charging stations are most needed. Smart City San Diego also continues to work to streamline the permitting process for deploying charging stations.

Smart Appliances: SDG&E and GE are working together to test the communication links between GE’s smart appliances and SDG&E’s smart meters to ensure consumers are empowered with the best technologies to manage energy use and costs. GE’s Appliances business is supplying SDG&E with a smart dishwasher, washer and dryer along with a GE Nucleus energy manager and Programmable Control Thermostat to expedite the testing process. SDG&E’s team is currently testing the communication between these assets prior to consumer deployment.

Economic Development and Job Growth: CleanTECH San Diego – working with the City of San Diego, SDG&E, UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and its private sector member companies – is quantifying and categorizing regional clean tech companies that touch smart grid technology development. Categories include solar energy, energy storage, energy efficiency, clean transportation and other technology companies. CleanTECH San Diego has also created a baseline analysis of the direct and indirect economic impacts of the named clusters. This baseline analysis can help quantify year-over-year job growth and other economic impacts of the regional smart grid sector. This will be particularly helpful in measuring the economic impact of the over 180 solar companies and over 20 storage companies that call San Diego home.

Solar Integrated Energy Storage: UC San Diego and SDG&E have submitted a grant application to test, demonstrate and evaluate a variety of solar integrated energy storage projects over a 12 to 24 month period. If funded, this initiative will test multiple applications at multiple sites and provide analysis for the benefit of utilities, grid planners, regulators, solar inverter manufacturers, system integrators, business modelers, energy storage manufacturers and other early adopters. CleanTECH San Diego supports this initiative as part of efforts to advance the region as an Innovation Hub (IHub).  In August 2010, the California Governor’s Office of Economic Development designated the greater San Diego region as an IHub for solar energy storage.  The purpose of the IHub is to build on the region’s existing innovation infrastructure and strong culture of collaboration to accelerate the convergence of solar energy and energy storage.

Policy Leadership: In July 2010, Smart City San Diego hosted California Public Utilities Commissioner Mark Ferron for a day long briefing on San Diego’s smart grid initiatives.  The Commissioner met with industry representatives from the solar, energy efficiency, smart grid and technology sectors and toured UC San Diego’s world renowned microgrid.  The collaborative held a roundtable with the Commissioner to brief him on the vision and work of Smart City San Diego.

Solar Decathlon 2013 Finalist: The City of San Diego and UC San Diego worked with the Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon Committee to make San Diego one of two finalists for the location of the 2013 Solar Decathlon. The event promotes the outreach, education, and economic benefits of energy security, renewable energy and energy efficiency.  If early projections bear out, attendance at the event has the potential to be larger than the San Diego Convention Center’s highest attended conference and create a positive economic impact for the region.

Economic Development and Job Growth: GE worked with CleanTech San Diego and SDG&E to host a GE Sourcing Supplier Diversity event for the first time in San Diego.  Over 50 diverse local suppliers participated in one-on-one sessions with GE buyers to learn how best to work with GE and be considered for future projects.

“GE is proud to bring our grid modernization technology and expertise to Smart City San Diego,” said Mark Hura, global smart grid commercial Leader for GE’s Digital Energy business.  ”An efficient, reliable and sustainable electric infrastructure is essential to powering economic growth and supporting business, industry and the dynamic lifestyles of a skilled workforce.  We applaud all the successes over the past year and look forward to many more to come.”

Formed in January 2011, Smart City San Diego was charged with bringing together leading organizations from government, business, education and non-profit to maximize synergies to drive sustainability programs forward, identify new opportunities, embrace additional collaborators, and move the San Diego region beyond today’s boundaries of sustainability.  This model will be able to be duplicated in other regions.

The collaborative leverages its strengths and resources as a partnership to develop and implement local initiatives that will empower consumers, improve environmental quality, drive economic growth, and reduce the San Diego region’s reliance on oil.  The collaborative is working toward a more consumer-focused, environmentally conscious energy future by addressing San Diegan’s 21st century energy needs.

Click here for the Smart City San Diego website

A microgrid is a localized grouping of electricity generation, energy storage, and loads that normally operate connected to a traditional centralized grid.  The microgrid at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) is one of the best examples of an electricity network that provides local control yet is interconnected with the larger electricity grid.

Recently the Rocky Mountain Institute visited UCSD to study and document the microgrid that controls and integrates electricity supply and demand on the campus.  One result of their visit was a six minute video that spotlights the groundbreaking work being done on the La Jolla campus

At UCSD, the microgrid provides the ability to manage 42 megawatts of generating capacity, including a central cogeneration plant, an array of solar photovoltaic installations and a fuel cell that operates on natural gas reclaimed from a landfill site. The central microgrid control allows operators to manage the diverse portfolio of energy generation and storage resources on the campus to minimize costs. In addition, the campus can “island” from the larger grid to maintain power supply in an emergency, as in the case of the power blackout that struck parts of Southern California, Arizona and Mexico in September 2011.

The microgrid at UCSD provides a living laboratory to experiment with integration and management of local resources and to optimize the use of these resources in interaction with market signals from the larger grid.

Click here to watch the video.

Articles of Interest
Solar forecasting and microgrids
Understanding the Role of Buildings
UC San Diego is a campus-wide living laboratory for sustainable energy

On Thursday I participated in the latest CleanTECH San Diego SCRUB session.  SCRUB is an opportunity for early stage cleantech companies to present their business plans to a panel of CleanTECH San Diego members.  Three local emerging cleantech ventures made their case to twenty-one CleanTECH San Diego members representing a mix of venture capitalists, engineers, marketing specialists, intellectual property attorneys as well as local leaders from industry, research and government.  The objective of SCRUB is to provide feedback and assistance to take each company to the next stage. 

This quarter’s SCRUB showcased three distinctly different cleantech businesses.  TransPower seeks to become a leading supplier of power generation, energy storage and power control technologies. Principal product areas include an advanced electric propulsion system for heavy-duty vehicles and a modular energy storage system for use with EV technology.  Interra Energy’s core process revolves around using waste biomass to create biochar through pyrolysis for use within sustainable agriculture practices, which can create waste biomass and thus a sustainable loop. NuLEDs aims to be a leader in LED lighting and control for commercial environments. Their primary product is a networked digital controller technology that can provide flexible dimming and tailoring of specific colors, correlated color temperatures (CCT) and color rendering index (CRI).

In the past nine quarterly SCRUB sessions CleanTECH San Diego has provided advice, introductions and critical evaluations to 32 future cleantech stars.  If you have a cleantech enterprise that would benefit from a good SCRUB you should forward your business summary to Jason Anderson at jasona@cleantechsandiego.org  

CleanTECH San Diego SCRUB Graduates 2008-2012
(Click on name to link to website)

TransPower

Interra Energy

NuLEDs, Inc.

MultiSpark LLC.

TourEngine Inc.

Lightwave Photonics LLC.

Home Town Farms

Butler Sun Solutions

350 Green

WaterSmart Software   

Shrink Nanotechnologies  

Eco ReBox   

Vari-Ro

Marine Power Partners 

OnRamp Wireless

New Leaf Biofuel 

TransPacificEnergy, Inc. 

Balboa Pacific 

EcoDog

Malama Composites

Pyron Solar

Kai BioEnergy

Community Fuels

ISE Corporation

Chlorofill

Sustainable Green Technologies

California Wind Systems

ECOR (Noble Environmental Technologies)  

Strategic Enzyme Applications  

SleepServer

This quarter’s SCRUB was hosted by CleanTECH San Diego member, Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps LLP. 

As California is poised to adopt a new round of car standards designed to cut emissions and expand the market for electric vehicles (EV), a new report provides insight into California’s emerging leadership role in this fast-growing economic sector.  New data reveals that California took in $467 million in global EV venture capital (VC) investment (69 percent of total dollars) in the first half of 2011 and, along with Michigan, is the top patent holder for new EV technology in the United States.  Powering Innovation: California is Leading the Shift to Electric Vehicles from R&D to Early Adoption, from the nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization Next 10, tracks key indicators to assess opportunities and obstacles for California in the EV sector.

Click here for the 32 page report and here for the Key Findings.

San Diego’s contribution to the growth of EV was featured in the report.  (Page 22) “The San Diego Region more than tripled its EV workforce between 2004 and 2010.  The largest contributions to growth have been Motor Vehicle Components, composing 52 percent of the region’s EV employment in 2010, and Advanced Batteries with 42 percent of regional EV employment.”  (Page 22) “The San Diego Region boasts the highest employment concentrations in both Advanced Battery and Motor Vehicle Components.”  (Page 24) “In Research and Development, San Diego represents 60 percent of EV related employment statewide, equal to roughly 150 jobs of the more than 280 EV jobs in the region.”

Of particular value in the report are the observations on Page 26 which summarize the realities of EV, “Why Electric Vehicles?  Benefits and challenges to powering innovation.”

You can drill down to the company level of the transportation technology sector in the San Diego region via the cleantech cluster database on CleanTECH San Diego’s website.  Click here.

The Future of the Electric Grid was published this week by the MIT Energy Initiative.  The 268 page report aims to provide a comprehensive, objective portrait of the U.S. electric grid and the challenges and opportunities it is likely to face over the next two decades.  It also highlights a number of areas in which policy changes, focused research and demonstration, and the collection and sharing of important data can facilitate meeting the challenges and seizing the opportunities that the grid will face.  The report shows that with new policies, the electric grid in the United States could handle the expected influx of electric cars and wind and solar generation.

Much of the report relates directly to developments in the San Diego region.  Chapter 5 is about The Impact of Distributed Generation and Electric Vehicles.  Chapter 8: Utility Regulation touches on the current challenge in San Diego to have a rate structure for distributed generation which is equitable for all parties.

(From page 182 of the report), “The distortions caused by these implicit subsidies rise with the penetration of distributed generation and with energy conservation more generally.  Consider, for example, proposed “zero net energy” buildings: if network costs continue to be recovered on a per-kWh basis, these customers could in theory receive all the benefits of being connected to the grid, drawing and injecting power on demand, while paying little or nothing toward the cost of the system or the option to use the network.”  Of course, the opposite side of the issue is also compelling.

Click here for the complete report and here for the abstract.

The multidisciplinary effort of the MIT Energy Initiative to generate The Future of the Electric Grid included economists, engineers and, of course, graduate students from MIT and from without.  Click here for an excellent video of the introductory presentation by the study c-chairs of the report. 

The last two sections of the report include a useful Glossary plus a list of Acronyms and Abbreviations.

El Cajon-based Nuvve Corporation has chosen Denmark to launch a new technology allowing electric cars to sell energy from batteries back to the grid. A solution which helps solve peak hour demand, uses excess wind energy and financially compensates the car owner.

An Electric Vehicle (EV) is typically parked 95 percent of the time. The most expensive component in the car is the battery, so why not put it to work making EVs not just environmentally but also financially appealing? That’s the idea behind Nuvve’s new V2G (Vehicle to Grid) technology; a solution having gone through 10 years of development in the US and now ready to be commercially launched in Europe with Denmark as the first test market.

Electrical car batteries as energy storage solution
An increasing amount of EVs today come with bidirectional drive trains able to both charge and discharge power into the grid. Nuvve’s innovation is a server connecting the EVs to the grid operator, a technology unmatched in the market.

The EV owner makes the battery available to Nuvve during a given period and, depending on supply and demand in the grid, the company uses the car as a short time energy storage solution in order to help regulate the power frequency of the grid. The value of providing these regulation services is very high.
Nuvve’s calculations show their business model compensating each individual EV owner $10,000 over the life of a vehicle depending on market price and owner commitment.

Danish smart grid perfect for new technology
The US company is in the process of opening a head quarter in Denmark. Nuvve will start out by hiring eight Danish employees for departments in Horsens and Copenhagen, but is planning to quickly scale up both staffing and the scope of the pilot project targeted to start in September depending on project financing.
CEO of Nuvve, Gregory Poilasne, says that one of the reasons the company chose Denmark is due to the large amount of renewable energy in the Danish grid resulting in significant power fluctuations from sources such as wind.

“As opposed to countries like Sweden and France where the power supply is fairly constant as a result of large nuclear and hydropower production, the dynamic Danish grid is an optimal choice for our technology. We offer the most economic and ecologic solution to (more…)

The Graduate.  It’s 1967 and Ben Braddock gets career advice.

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you.  Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

Dustin Hoffman as Ben spent the rest of the movie being distracted by the archetypical cougar and never got around to seeking gainful employment.  A current-day sequel would find a 65 year-old Ben advising his grandson to seek his fame and fortune in the ripe opportunity of energy storage. 

The certainty of long-term expansion of energy storage as an industry segment is driven by huge needs which exist on both the supply and demand side of the equation.  Giant utility companies are mandated to dramatically increase the production of electrical power from alternative sources of energy.  The two largest sources, solar and wind, share the problem of intermittency.  Unlike coal and natural gas generated power, solar and wind have an uneven output which is to varying degrees challenging to forecast.  Until recently this was of manageable consequence for most utilities because wind and solar were a small percentage of their total input.  But what happens when these uneven sources move towards 20% as mandated in California?  For many utilities the peaks of need are satisfied by natural gas “peaker plants” which are fired up to meet demand on the electric grid.  During periods of low demand wind turbines can be idled to avoid excess power into the grid.  Both of these alternatives underutilize the production capacity of the capital equipment.  With efficient energy storage a higher portion of power produced can be utilized and production capacity can be designed to more closely approximate average demand rather than peak demand.  Just these two important needs present a life-time of opportunity for the development of energy storage. 

Ben Braddock’s grandson will also find a target rich environment of opportunities for energy storage on the demand side of electrical consumption.  As smart grids are installed, electrical utilities will be able to flatten out consumption using technology to influence consumption behaviors via pricing and information.  The Nissan Leaf automobile in our garages will be used as a reserve of electrical power to be sold back to the utility.  Excess electricity from PV solar panels on the roofs of our homes will flow into energy storage for future use or to sell into the grid.  Energy storage systems in cars, homes, businesses, substations and in the field become a stabilizing buffer to smooth out the variations of both production and consumption.  It’s a business proposition as compelling as plastics were 43 years ago.

Energy storage systems are as big as Lake Meade and as small as a AAA battery.  Included are:

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity
Superconducting magnetic energy storage
Flow batteries
Conventional batteries (e.g. rechargeable electricity storage system)
Gas holder
Grid energy storage
Fuel cell and hydrogen technology
Gravitational mass
Capacitors (e.g. rechargeable electricity storage system)
Electromagnetic mass
Mainspring
Thermal energy storage
Solar chimney
Compressed fluids (e.g. compressed air)
Flywheels
Vacuum storage (in rush generation technology)

CleanTECH San Diego’s database of cleantech companies lists nine companies in the energy storage sector.  Sempra has stated their interest in compressed air as a large capacity energy storage system for wind and solar.  San Diego is one of only five cities in the U.S. selected to participate in the EV Project.  1000 Nissan Leaf automobiles owned by San Diego business and individuals will be driven and monitored in the best possible test lab, the real world.  Maxwell Technologies is a leading producer of ultracapacitors and power systems for consumer and industrial electronics, transportation, telecommunications, and electricity generation industries.

The wealth of opportunity in energy storage which young Ben Braddock III faces is supported by a simple but enormous truth.  The amount of electricity produced by any utility is substantially greater than what is ultimately consumed.  Some is lost in transmission.  A greater amount is wasted because of the mismatch in time of supply and demand.  Energy storage addresses the mismatch.  As the cost of electricity escalates the economic advantage of “waste not” becomes more compelling.

There are frequent meetings in San Diego about smart grid, smart meters, energy storage, etc.  On April 22^_nd the San Diego EDC and CleanTECH San Diego will present, Earth Day Brilliance Found in Smart Meter Opportunities.  Click here for details.