Community-Scale Microgrids with Craig Lewis, Clean Coalition | EP160

Clean Power Hour

Today on the Clean Power Hour, we’re joined by Craig Lewis, founder and executive director of the Clean Coalition, to discuss the advent of community-scale microgrids. These microgrids are a great way to provide resiliency to power outages at the scale of tens of thousands of users and typically provide off-grid operation for key infrastructure like hospitals, community centers, and schools.

The Clean Coalition was established in 2009 following the Enron scandal that rocked California grids. “The Clean Coalition has had a significant impact shaping policies and programs that enable the deployment of clean local energy to address climate change and secure economic, environmental, and resilience benefits for communities."

The Coalition has many accomplishments including:

• Designed and implemented Feed-In Tariff (FIT) programs across the United States, from California to Indiana to Vermont, bringing hundreds of megawatts (MW) of local renewable energy online.
• Established precedent-setting interconnection policy in California, which was adopted by federal energy regulators as a new national standard, making it quicker and cheaper to connect clean local energy projects to the grid.
• Issued studies that influenced major decisions under California regulatory bodies to stall and stop construction in Southern California of gas plants in favor of solar+storage solutions.
• Led the creation of California’s innovative Distribution Resources Planning proceeding, which requires the state’s largest utilities to proactively plan for — and deploy — distributed energy resources (DER), such as local renewables and energy storage.
• Shaped New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision proceeding and received one of the first five NY Prize Community Microgrid Competition grants for our Long Island Community Microgrid Project.

Craig provides unique insight into transitioning our energy system. He shares details on the Clean Coalition’s solar microgrid projects across the country.

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