How to Cope With Power Shut-Offs

SAN RAFAEL, CA—Sage Energy Consulting will relocate to expanded headquarters next month due to a growing team, new service offerings and market growth. The firm’s move to 101 Lucas Valley Rd., space once occupied by the Grateful Dead, represents growth of 80% from Sage’s current office space.

This move has been driven in part by the addition of renewable energy industry veteran, Russell “Rusty” Schmit, Sage’s first COO, and David Seiler as director of business development. The firm provides renewable energy, energy efficiency, structuring financing, and industrial facility design and operation services.

Sage principal and CEO Tom Williard focuses on the development of technical and financial models that are widely used to assess renewable energy systems, and predict potential energy generation and financial performance. He recently shared insights about power shut-offs, current challenges and opportunities in this exclusive.

GlobeSt.com: How should electricity customers plan for more inevitable power shut-offs as a result of natural and manmade disasters?

Williard: The first step towards increased resiliency to power shut-offs is understanding these events and the impacts they have on your assets and clients. Then, clients need to be clearly educated about these events and have effective responses to them. A good place to start is to ask clients to bring energy efficiency and grid outage planning into their daily practice. By increasing the focus on electrical energy usage, clients will gain a deeper understanding of how they use energy and thus be better able to plan for and respond to outages. As a part of this process, clients should assess their businesses, and identify critical loads and the duration that these services must be maintained in the event of a grid outage. This might be critical IT infrastructure, elevators and refrigeration, and for residential facilities, life support services. Once the critical loads and durations are identified, it’s possible to consider various emergency power back-up strategies to meet those requirements. This can be a combination of traditional liquid or gas-fueled backup generators, battery energy storage and solar photovoltaic/PV systems. Backup energy capacity is expensive, so it’s critical to evaluate the value of resiliency these assets provide or the costs saved when the grid goes down, and whether energy cost savings can also be leveraged from these assets. i.e., battery energy storage and solar PV, to determine the overall financial impact of resiliency. This analysis is very challenging and we recommend having a reputable, independent energy consulting firm on your team to guide the process.

GlobeSt.com: What challenges are your clients facing in today’s renewable energy landscape?

Williard: Most energy consumers are not well-versed in the various energy generation, storage and microgrid products on the market or how they might be most effectively used to achieve their energy goals. Local renewable energy projects are complex and are typically long-term assets with usable lifetimes of 20 to 35 years. In addition, energy technologies are constantly evolving, and incentives and utility tariff structures are constantly in flux. This makes renewable energy projects particularly challenging to fully understand and effectively plan for most clients.

GlobeSt.com: What opportunities are on the horizon in 2020 for businesses and organizations looking towards renewable energy?

Williard: There are increasing opportunities for reducing energy cost and environmental footprint through renewable and advanced energy. These range from purchasing 100% renewable energy from a local utility to installing renewable generation and storage with enough capacity to weather extended grid outages. The cost of solar PV continues to decline while utility energy costs are escalating. This provides an increasing arbitrage opportunity to generate energy onsite and fix that energy cost at a low rate, hedging against future utility cost escalation. As costs decrease for solar PV and battery energy storage, typically lithium-ion batteries, the ability to generate zero-cost fuel power onsite and store that power for when you need it is becoming financially feasible in a number of states, California chief among them. Additionally, these renewable assets can also provide services to the grid in that you can sell some of your energy capacity to the local utility. This is in the trial stages in a number of states, but it’s coming. It holds the promise of both increased revenue for the asset owner while reducing transmission and distribution buildout as well as maintenance costs of the electrical utility. The energy market for electricity customers is changing quickly, presenting new opportunities to reduce energy costs, environmental footprint and reliance on the increasingly stressed utility grid.