Category: Research and program updates

The Schatz Energy Research Center is pleased to announce the Donald and Andrea Tuttle Fellowship for Clean Energy Studies at Humboldt State University. The Tuttles have established this annual fellowship as part of an effort to tackle the challenges posed by climate change, and to reduce its impacts on humanity and ecosystems. The fellowship will support graduate students in Environmental Systems who intend to research or conduct project work in renewable energy, energy efficiency, or related areas in the clean energy field.

The Tuttle Fellowship will provide $15,000 in financial support for one academic year. The recipient is also eligible to be employed on research projects at the Schatz Center (typically, quarter-time throughout the academic year). The fellowship may be renewed once, based on performance and at the discretion of Schatz Center directors and the selection committee, for a second year of study.

The Tuttle joins two fellowships already associated with the Schatz Center: the Blue Lake Rancheria Fellowship for Clean Energy Studies and the Schatz Energy Fellowship. Current year fellows are working with Center projects in off-grid energy access and smart grid technologies. Jimento Aikhuele and Anamika Singh are involved with the Center’s quality assurance project on solar system installations at public facilities in Nigeria and Niger; Aikhuele’s associated thesis is on the use of renewable energy technologies to prevent maternal and infant fatality. Steven Shoemaker is conducting a benefits analysis of the recently deployed Blue Lake Rancheria microgrid, which was recognized this fall by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency for energy resiliency, while Thalia Quinn is working on the Center’s new “Solar+” distributed generation project.

Hailing from around the globe, Schatz fellows cite the Center’s unique blend of technology and policy, and bring with them a commitment to social justice and environmental health. Before coming to the Schatz Center, Singh worked for the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, Ministry of Power, in India. “I want to contribute to providing energy access to those 1.2 billion people who are living a life without energy, through renewable energy technology… until you can provide them with basic facilities, development will not come.”

All graduate student applicants in the Environmental Resources Engineering (ERE) and Energy Technology and Policy (ETaP) pathways of the Environmental Systems program are eligible for fellowship consideration. February 1 is the annual application deadline for admission into the graduate program at Humboldt State. For more information, visit schatzcenter.org/fellowships, email serc@humboldt.edu, or call (707) 826-4345.

The Schatz Center and the ECOWAS Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE), with support from the World Bank through their Lighting Africa program, are working collaboratively with government partners in Nigeria and Niger to develop a new approach for the procurement, installation, and long-term maintenance of off-grid solar electricity systems at public facilities, such as health clinics, schools, police posts, public offices, and water pumps.

Off-grid solar systems offer the promise of clean, renewable electricity for public facilities. However, historically, there has been a high failure rate for these systems in many countries, often caused by poor quality design and installation, or lack of maintenance and good operational practices following installation even when initially high quality system components are installed.

The proposed new approach involves the innovative use of digital remote monitoring technology, along with quality standards for equipment, design, and installation, to ensure and verify the ongoing performance of off-grid solar electricity systems. Under such an approach, companies in the off-grid solar sector could enter lease agreements or extended service contracts with government agencies to provide an agreed-upon level of electricity service in return for guaranteed monthly payments. The payments could be designed to cover the capital costs of equipment and installation (or a percentage of these costs), along with the ongoing operation and maintenance costs over the projected system life. By digitally monitoring the performance of the systems, a third-party could verify that the service provider is delivering the agreed electrical service and instruct the government agency to pay the monthly fee. Spreading the cost of the systems over many years and keeping service providers engaged is expected to improve the long-term performance of the systems.

Over the next two years, the proposed approach will be developed, evaluated, and revised through research and deployment of approximately fifteen pilot systems in Nigeria and fifteen pilot systems in Niger. Our main role in this effort is to develop the quality assurance framework that serves as the basis for the approach. This includes determining a standard for service delivery that can be used to verify that the system’s performance matches contractually specified targets. Our staff will conduct site visits, provide technical designs for the thirty pilot systems, and verify system performance for the first six months. Support for this effort is provided by the World Bank Group’s Lighting Africa Program.

To kickoff the project this September, three team members visited sites in Niger and Nigeria to gather initial information about health clinics, schools and other public facilities. Chris Carlsen, a Center alumna and current consultant, met with officials in Niger and visited several communities to understand the country’s existing infrastructure. Jimento Aikhuele, a Schatz Energy graduate fellow originally from Nigeria, and Olakunle Owoeye, a Center consultant, met Chris in Nigeria to scope out potential sites for pilot installations and learn about the energy needs of the various facilities. The team also visited sites with existing solar installations to gain insight into why well-intentioned solar systems so often fail. Our initial work in the field was fruitful thanks to the indispensable support of ECREEE, the Ministries of Energy, Health and Secondary Education of Niger, and the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing of Nigeria.

Back at the Schatz Center, we have been hard at work reviewing existing standards and determining appropriate requirements to include in the quality assurance framework. This work dovetails with projects we’ve conducted in the past, including the ongoing development and co-management of the Lighting Global Quality Assurance program. We are looking forward to heading back into the field to gather more information before finalizing a draft of the framework and providing recommended designs for the pilot installations next spring.

This fall, we are kicking off a new “Solar Plus” (Solar+) project to investigate how real-time coordination between clean energy systems can yield performance improvements that benefit both building owners and utility operations. Research and development over the past decade has successfully reduced the cost of solar arrays, batteries, building controls, and electric vehicles. Many of the emerging challenges we now face are related to the large-scale deployment and integration of distributed clean energy components. For example, electrical distribution circuit capacity is limited (in order to prevent power lines from overheating), which in turn limits the downline capacity of distributed generation systems. This Solar+ project will develop control strategies to coordinate onsite resources to reduce their combined footprint on the power system, effectively increasing the capacity of the grid to host clean energy technology.

Our pilot site is a gas station and convenience store at the Blue Lake Rancheria (BLR) in Blue Lake, California. Convenience stores typically have sizable loads, including HVAC and refrigeration, which require backup power. Many of the sites also have significant potential to host rooftop solar. By working with a very common building type (there are 12,000 convenience stores in California alone), we can design with replication in mind.

Over the next two and a half years we will design and install a Solar+ system at the BLR and measure the value of distributed energy coordination. Our project will develop: (1) a hardware design guide for integrated Solar+ packages, (2) open-source software for controlling the technology, and (3) guidelines to determine the best locations for investment, given local insolation and onsite potential for system coordination. Our outcomes will be focused on integrating solar, batteries, and advanced building controls into packages that are market ready and can make positive impacts on the future trajectory of California’s built environment.

This project is funded by the California Energy Commission through the Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) program. Our key partners are the Blue Lake Rancheria, which owns the gas station, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where a team of researchers is developing open-source “Solar+ Optimizer” software.

Project partners also include Southern California Edison, whose refrigeration system test center data is helping us to develop algorithms, and Pacific Gas & Electric, the local energy utility.

From 1990 through 2016, a 9.2kW photovoltaic (PV) array located at the Humboldt State Telonicher Marine Laboratory in Trinidad, CA powered the Schatz Solar Hydrogen Project. This array provided the energy to aerate the Marine Laboratory aquaria either directly or indirectly through a Teledyne Energy Systems ALTUS™ 20 electrolyzer that produced hydrogen fuel for a proton exchange membrane fuel cell.

Located ~150 meters from the Pacific Ocean in a cool, marine climate, the array consisted of 192 ARCO M75 modules made with single-crystal silicon and rated at 48W. Prior to array installation in 1990, Jim Zoellick measured the current-voltage (I-V) curves for each module and discovered that even when new, the average peak power under full solar illumination at normal operating cell temperature was 39.9W – 14% below the 46.4W nameplate rating.

After 11 years of field exposure, Antonio Reis and Nate Coleman retested each module’s I-V curve in 2001 and found that the average peak power had fallen by 4.3% to 38.1W. They attributed the drop in performance to visually observable defects in the modules, especially the delamination of the modules’ ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) encapsulant, leading to shading and corrosion of the cells and the occurrence of localized hot spots.

After 20 years of service, Marc Marshall, Mark Rocheleau, and Scott Rommel again retested each module’s I-V curve in 2010, and found that the average peak power had fallen an additional 12.4% to 33.4W and that the variation among the modules had dramatically increased.

After over 26 years of field service, the array was decommissioned in 2016. All of the 192 modules were removed and tested one last time by Jacob Rada, a M.S. candidate working at SERC. He found that the average peak power had fallen 22% since 1990, with an average degradation rate of 0.85%/yr, and that the variation among the modules had increased further since 2010. Each original module was discolored and showed some degree of delamination.

Having now been individually tested four times over 26 years, these are some of the oldest carefully monitored solar modules from a working array. Of the original 192 models, 188 modules were still in service after 26 years. One module was damaged in 1996 and was replaced with a module of similar size and performance characteristics. Three other modules were later replaced due to physical damage.

In the coming year, we will be hanging seven of the modules with their corresponding I-V curve data in the staircase of our main building, as a celebration of our Center’s first project and as a teaching tool for university students and visitors.

The Blue Lake Rancheria (BLR) renewable energy microgrid received full permission to connect to the Pacific Gas & Electric grid on July 28, 2017. Designed and implemented by a team led by the Schatz Energy Research Center at Humboldt State University, this new microgrid powers critical infrastructure for the BLR tribal community and the Humboldt County region.

A microgrid is an independent power generation and management system which can operate both while connected to (parallel) or disconnected from (islanded) the electric power grid. In the event of a power outage, a microgrid enters islanded mode and balances all power generation and electrical loads independent of the utility.

The BLR microgrid breaks new ground in its seamless transition between grid-paralleled and grid-islanded states and by demonstrating stable islanded operation with a high percentage of renewable energy.

This project heralds the first deployment of the Siemens Spectrum 7 based microgrid management system (MGMS) and the first multi-inverter Tesla battery energy storage system (BESS) utilized in a microgrid application. The MGMS and the BESS were integrated using foundational relay control programming developed at the Schatz Center.

At 420 kWAC, the Rancheria’s PV array is also the largest installed in Humboldt County. The BLR microgrid has a total of 1.92 MW of generation capacity, including the PV array, a 500 kW, 950 kWh Lithium-ion Tesla battery, and a legacy 1.0 MW backup diesel generator.

The microgrid powers numerous building and facility loads, including heating, ventilation and cooling; lighting; water and wastewater systems; communications; food production and storage; and transportation. The BLR green commuter program and electric vehicle infrastructure for the tribal government fleet are supported by the microgrid.

The BLR campus has also been certified to serve as an American Red Cross emergency shelter. The microgrid can maintain stable electricity for the shelter during extreme natural events such as an earthquake, tsunami, flood or wildfire. During an extended grid outage, the Rancheria can designate and shed non-critical energy loads as needed.

By coupling renewable generation with battery storage, the BLR microgrid achieves significant reductions in both utility cost and greenhouse gas emissions. The microgrid is now saving the Blue Lake Rancheria $250,000 annually and has allowed the Rancheria to increase tribal employment by 10% with new clean energy jobs.

The Blue Lake Rancheria microgrid was developed through funding from the California Energy Commission’s EPIC program. Major partners on this project included Pacific Gas & Electric, Siemens, Tesla Energy, Idaho National Laboratory, GHD Inc., Colburn Electric, REC Solar, and Kernen Construction.

• For more information about the Blue Lake Rancheria microgrid and upcoming projects at the Schatz Energy Research Center, call (707) 822-4345 or email serc@humboldt.edu.

• For more information about Blue Lake Rancheria’s sustainability and green energy initiatives, please email info@bluelakerancheria-nsn.gov.

Construction of the Schatz Center’s new “West Wing” is nearing completion. The 1900 square foot single-story building was designed by Suarez Kuehne Architecture of San Francisco, and is being built by Adams Commercial General Contracting of Eureka. The new addition is located immediately west of the current Schatz office building and lab.

The $1.04M facility will include fourteen workstations for professional staff and student research assistants, two faculty offices, and a conference room that can accommodate 8-10 people. The West Wing matches our current building’s design, with features including a standing seam metal roof, redwood siding and stucco, and large windows to provide generous daylighting.

The exterior is complete. Inside, the wiring, lighting, drywall, and painting are done, and the carpet and Marmoleum™ flooring have been installed. Desks, cabinets, and other furnishings have been ordered. Schatz staff anticipate moving into the new space by early November.