Wlliam Dinklage of SBCC

The Goleta Load Pocket is the segment of the Western grid between Gaviota and Lake Casitas, served mainly by two 220 kV transmission lines from Ventura that cross over the Santa Ynez Range into Goleta. Three big problems with this are that 1) the entire service region is vulnerable to power outage through natural disaster or Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS events); 2) while the City and County of Santa Barbara can obtain renewable generated electricity through the relevant Community Choice Aggregation service providers this does nothing to provide resilience in the event of widespread outage and doesn’t specifically advance local/rooftop residential or commercial solar installation and much of the Goleta Load Pocket is still reliant on non-locally generated electricity; 3) For SB to achieve carbon neutrality by its goal of 2035 it will have to have replaced its cars and trucks with electric vehicles, likely more than doubling its electricity consumption and putting more strain on the current transmission and distribution system to and within the Goleta Load Pocket. 

In this talk you will learn how solar microgrids, including behind-the-meter microgrids and larger, community microgrids can solve these problems. Two of the largest behind-the-meter microgrids in the Goleta Load Pocket are the rooftop solar array and battery storage system at Direct Relief and fourteen locations within the Santa Barbara Unified School District. The Energy and Natural Resources class at SBCC is currently examining the feasibility of building a solar microgrid on the SBCC campus. The City of Santa Barbara, with help from Electriq Power, has established Santa Barbara Home Power, which will help to finance low and moderate income residences to develop residential microgrids. Ultimately, a large community microgrid could serve the entire Goleta Load Pocket, but this will require communication among all the behind-the-meter microgrids, and the current regulatory framework does not support this. This talk will discuss some of these developments and their contributions to greening the energy supply in the Goleta Load Pocket and will illuminate some of the challenges in continuing to move forward.

Biography:

Bill Dinklage was raised in Burlington, Vermont by a career electrical engineer at IBM and a mother who supported creative thought and the arts. He earned a BA in physics at Carleton College, Minnesota, worked for a year in the Geophysics Branch of the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA, and earned his PhD in Geosciences at UCSB studying the structural and tectonic evolution of a belt of metamorphic rocks in the Brooks Range, Alaska, while doing side field work in Tibet and far eastern Russia. He taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wittenberg University, Ohio, for two years, then at Carleton College for one year before landing first permanent position at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. While teaching at Carleton and at UVU he got interested in renewable energy, green building, and energy efficiency. He helped in the effort to install the first wind turbine in the country dedicated to powering a college campus, in Northfield, Minnesota, became captivated by ground source heat pumps, and worked with chemistry and physics faculty members at UVU to develop and teach a class, “Energy Use on Earth.” Since 2012 he has worked at Santa Barbara City College where, for the last ten years he has taught the Energy and Natural Resources class and advised the Energy Club. At SBCC he has also chaired the Energy task force of the Sustainability Workgroup and is currently involved in exploring the development of a solar microgrid on campus. Through his teaching and advising of the Energy Club he has brought students to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, the El Estero Water Resource Center, the Coso Geothermal Field in southern Owens Valley, the Mojave Solar solar thermal power plant, and the site of the future advanced compressed air energy storage facility in Rosamond, CA. He wishes for your collaboration in decarbonizing our energy economy and reducing the magnitude of global climate change.

Address:United States

Stephen Honikman of Electriq Power

Biography:

Stephen is a technology and sustainability executive with a career that spans internet development, engineering consulting, and energy and clean-tech innovation, commercialization and finance. Stephen began his career in the Silicon Valley’s late ‘90’s boom, participating in early internet growth and commercialization; witnessing first hand the transformative power highly networked technology brings to various business and social activities. These networks, and the opportunities and challenges they create as they spread represent a throughline of Stephen’s personal interest and professional pursuits. In 2010 Stephen began third-party financing commercial solar projects, eventually resulting in the founding of an underwriting and financing platform to accelerate capital flows into this market. In 2018 Stephen founded Emergent Microgrid in response to several (climate change exacerbated) prolonged and community wide blackouts. Emergent sprareness of, and simplified access to, microgrids; seeking accelerated and wide-spread adoption and,eventually,  utilization as an aggregated networked asset by a local distribution network. In 2020 Emergent merged with Electriq Power to scale-up deployment of these networked energy assets. Today Stephen is VP of Business Development at Electriq, where he and the Electriq team, is working to simplify deployment of microgrids to support the grid’s transition to a Distributed Energy Resource rich, and climate resilient, infrastructural network. Stephen is currently focused on expanding Electriq’s innovative Sustainable Community Networks offering that includes expanded access to residential solar microgrids by under-resourced and disadvantaged communities so that no one is left out of the clean energy transition.Beyond sustainable energy technologies, Stephen’s interests include International Relations and Economics, which he studied as an undergrad at Boston University. Stephen also received a JD, and MS in Technology and Human Affairs, from Washington University in St. Louis.