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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC. And we are gonna be talking about how we can increase renewables locally on our grid with the new feed-in tariff program from the Redwood Coast Energy Authority. And joining me are Jocelyn Gwynn of the Redwood Coast Energy Authority. Hey, Jocelyn, welcome to the show.

JOCELYN GWYNN:

Hey Tom, thanks for having me today.

WHEELER:

And we also have a representative from one of the first customers, producers, for the Feed-in Energy Tariff Program. And that's Kendra Kallevig of EDP Renewables. Hey, Kendra. All right, so Jocelyn, let's talk about RCEA, the Redwood Coast Energy Authority. I think a lot of folks probably don't, well, they know RCEA exists, but there's a lot of confusion about what RCEA does and how it's different than PG&E and how this kind of system works. So let's just do a quick primer. Tell me about RCEA.

GWYNN:

Yeah, so Redwood Coast Energy Authority is a local government agency that does energy efficiency, energy procurement, and various energy planning efforts here in Humboldt County. So the agency's been around since 2003, and for a long part of our history, we were primarily working as a local government partner of PG&E, using ratepayer dollars to fund energy efficiency programs, and then got into transportation electrification. We own an electric vehicle charging fleet. And then flash forward to 2017, we launched a community choice energy program, and that fundamentally changed our business because we started buying and selling power on behalf of Humboldt County consumers. And so that is something that is legal in California and certain other states in the US, where local governments can actually take over the generation service that the utility provides typically. And the utility actually, so PG&E in this case, continues to provide transmission and delivery service. So they deliver that power, we're just the ones doing the buying and ensuring that that power gets, you know, scheduled onto the grid, and our customer demand is met.

WHEELER:

So RCEA, the Redwood Coast Energy Authority is a local joint powers authority. It is a project or a product of multiple governments coming together to do this energy purchasing. And so one thing that's cool about RCEA is that we have the ability then to choose what kind of power we want to buy. Instead of just having PG&E big corporate behemoth choose our power, we get to figure out the sort of values that resonate in our local community. And a couple of the main charges that RCEA staff have been given is trying to get local power, local renewable power because we don't want to have tax dollars leaving our community. We want to have projects built locally. We want to also have a more resilient grid system. We want to be less dependent on big sources of energy generation. So this, this will lead me into the feed-in tariff program. So Jocelyn, what is the feed-in tariff program and how does it relate to the structure and this idea of RCEA choosing its own adventure with power purchases and, and having power purchases reflect community values?

GWYNN:

Yeah, so you spoke about our strategic goals. We do have a goal that our board has set to have a fully renewable electricity portfolio on an annual basis by 2030. And they have charged us with seeking as much of that power from local sources as possible. We don't have as many options locally, of course, and they do come at a bit of a premium compared to non-local sources. And so we are building that portfolio with a mix of local and non-local power projects. So the Feed-in Tariff Program, when the Community Choice Energy Program, which was the program I spoke about that started in 2017, when that first launched, they set a goal of 15 megawatts of local distributed solar. We started working toward that goal with the microgrid at the airport. It's a 2.3 megawatt system. But then on top of that, we had the Feed-in Tariff Program. So this program has been around for a number of years now, and we have contracted a few projects, the North Coast Highway Solar Project that we're going to be talking about included. But recently, we redesigned the program to update the terms and hopefully make it more attractive for more projects to get off the ground. What this program does, essentially, is it offers a above-market price that we put out to the market. And developers can identify projects. They can connect with landowners, or landowners, conversely, can say, I have a suitable site for a renewable energy project and go out and find a developer to work with. And then that developer can submit an application to us. And so it's a first-come, first-served program. As opposed to our other power procurement processes that we do are competitive. So we run solicitations, and we're getting offers from various developers, and we're comparing the prices that they give us and different qualitative criteria. The Feed-in Tariff, conversely, is a first-come, first-served application. So we put that pricing out there. We put out a form contract. And it's a more streamlined process. So if we take that project to our board and they approve it, then we sign a 20-year agreement. There's no negotiation of the power purchase agreement. So that's the benefit and the difference, how it fits in with the rest of our portfolio.

WHEELER:

And so we have a, a first or not, maybe a first project, as you said, we have other projects in this, in this program already, but we have, we have a new project, which is exciting.

GWYNN:

It will be the first to come online. Okay.

WHEELER:

First come online. There we go. So we have a new project out by Hydesville. So folks who've been paying attention to the news may have seen that this came before the planning commission and there was some amount of talk locally about this project. So let's turn to the developer, Kendra from EDP Renewables. What, what is being proposed at this Hydesville project? And I know Jocelyn, you had a fun name for it. The, the something highway project, which I don't remember. Yeah. Coast highway, solar North coast highway, solar. All right. Kendra, tell me about the North Coast Highway Solar Project.

KENDRA KALLEVIG:

All right, so the North Coast Highway Solar Project is a 2.8 megawatt project, which will cover about 11 acres of land, land that's been formerly used as pasture land.

WHEELER:

So 2.8 megawatts, can you give kind of a perspective of how much energy that might be for someone who is unfamiliar with megawatts, kilowatts, whatever watts?

KALLEVIG:

So a 2.8 megawatt project has the ability to power about 1,000 average American homes.

WHEELER:

Okay. So this is, this is pretty considerable for a place like Humboldt, right? We don't have that many homes in Humboldt County. So it is a, a good size project, but it's not, it's not when the mega desert solar projects that come up in the news either. Right. We're not talking about gigawatts of power. A gigawatt is a thousand megawatts. We're, we're talking about something a lot smaller and kind of a better fit in the community. 11 total acres.

KALLEVIG:

Yeah, so this is a 2.8 megawatts on 11 acres. As you mentioned, you know, this is a great size project for this community, but it is much smaller than what we see in a lot of our other utility scale projects, which are in the hundreds of megawatts up to about a thousand acres for a typical project.

WHEELER:

So why is a project like this attractive to EDP renewables? It is not a huge project. I imagine that there's a significant amount of time and investment that needs to go into project planning and siting and working with RCA or other power purchasers on a project like this. What makes a project like this work?

KALLEVIG:

Sure. Yeah, you know, as you mentioned, these smaller projects can be more challenging, they can be more costly, but we really like to see projects that work well in the community approached by another developer who had an interested landowner. So we're always looking for those sort of landowner and community projects, folks who are interested in working with us to have a project on their land, also projects that fit in well with other aspects of the community and with, in this case, this project works really well with the other agricultural uses on this landowner's property.

WHEELER:

So this project in particular, one of the things that was important in the public discussion of this project was this is land that was zoned for agricultural use. I don't believe that it most immediately was being used for agriculture, but it's zoned for ag. And there was concern that if we start doing more solar type projects like these, we're going to start to erode our agricultural land base, which is a great and valid concern and one that a lot of folks share. So a way to moderate or mitigate those concerns is something called agri-voltaics, agriculture and voltaics. Smash them together. You get the one word. Can you talk about agri-voltaics as kind of a movement, what that means and how we can incorporate agriculture with solar panels?

KALLEVIG:

Yeah, absolutely. AgriVoltaics, or AgriPV for short, is gaining a lot of traction in the industry around the country and for projects of all sizes. It's a conversation we're having all across North America on our sites trying to figure out how best to support agricultural communities and allow for dual use of agricultural land with solar. So this can look like a lot of things. I think the thing that people think about a lot is sheep grazing. That's become very popular. The sheep are an agricultural use and also are able to manage the vegetation on site without the use of mowing or other means that would use chemicals or have additional carbon emissions. There's a lot of other opportunities as well. Apiaries, so siting bees with solar, provides great opportunities to beekeepers and pollinator plantings. That's something we do at a lot of our sites is looking at the use of appropriate pollinator and native plant species, which provide a lot of direct and indirect benefits to agriculture through, obviously, pollination. Also, those species tend to support soil health and water retention, which are things that provide benefits to the surrounding ag community and prepare the land to be used for direct agriculture in the future.

WHEELER:

So projects like these, we will always run into some degree of nimby opposition, right? And that's, that's one of the sad realities of trying to confront our energy crisis, our renewable energy crisis, or climate crisis is that even things that are good are going to run into, let's say, well-meaning opposition, right? Folks who live near the property, who might become attached to a way that the property once was, and are scared about the way that change can happen. Kendra, as a project developer, can you talk about how you try to work through these concerns and how you, you as a developer, try to bring projects that fit the community in which they sit?

KALLEVIG:

Sure, absolutely. I mean, EDP has decades of experience working in primarily agricultural communities all over. We were primarily building wind farms for many years and are moving into solar. Now have, I think, 18 utility scale solar projects in operation along with hundreds of smaller projects like this that we call distributed generation. So we work really closely in the communities where we operate. We often support a lot of local agricultural organizations including FFA and 4-H programs for students. As a company, AgriPV and in looking at other environmental benefits of solar falls in line with our larger sustainability strategy. So when we're looking at a solar project and how can we best use the land under and around our solar panels, we're also taking a look at what we call an ecosystem services approach.

So what ways can we provide environmental benefits? Is it through sheep grazing? Is it through pollinator plantings? Is it through native plants? Sort of holistically, what's the best dual use of this land? And what is the community looking for? A lot of our sites where we've piloted grazing, it's because there are local partners and sheep ranchers and people who come to us and say, hey, I'd like to graze your state. Hey, I have experience in this area. I was up in Canada a couple of weeks ago in the province of Alberta at a community open house and a woman approached us and said, hey, I'm a rancher. I raise sheep very close to here. I understand how to run sheep in this environment and what sort of vegetation works best. And I work on solar sites and other energy facilities. And those are the sort of partnerships we're often looking for because we want to do what works best for both the environment and works best for the communities in which we're operating.

GWYNN:

And I wanted to just jump in, as Kendra just alluded to, it can go the opposite direction of NIMBY from the neighbors. We've had neighbors contact us saying like, hey, I saw that solar project going in down the road. I want to do something like that. So, you know, it can go both ways for sure. We see both.

KALLEVIG:

I just wanted to mention, too, in talking to farmers and ranchers, ag is a tough business to be in. It's a really tough way to make a living. And what we hear from a lot of our landowners around the country is a lot of times hosting renewable energy allows them to maintain their traditional livelihoods and provides for income diversification. And that's really important. Additionally, we're seeing a whole new generation of ranchers who may have access to agriculture through renewable energy. There are folks starting grazing businesses to work in vegetation management. And these are people who may or may not have had the land access to work in agriculture previously.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. We are talking about a local renewable energy project coming to Hydesville and how that fits in with the Redwood Coast Energy Authority. So I know a lot of people are nervous after the election results about the pace and scale of renewable development. We have a federal, incoming federal administration that has been overtly hostile to at least some forms of renewable energy development, particularly offshore wind. And yet here, we also still have a way to choose our local future, right? We have the Redwood Coast Energy Authority being able to purchase energy, being able to continue to support renewable energy development. I know that renewables have massively dropped in price and are now cost competitive with other forms of energy generation. Kendra, how are you feeling? How is EDP Renewables feeling after the election about the future and the pace of growth for renewables?

KALLEVIG:

Yeah, that's a great question and there's certainly going to be some uncertainty coming into the new administration, but EVP as a whole feels really optimistic. We've been operating in the U.S. for many years now across many presidential administrations from both parties. Typically, renewable energy provides a lot of benefits to rural communities who are typically red communities, so we see support across the political spectrum for what we do and we also see the importance of local in-state policy that supports renewables developments regardless of what's happening at the national level.

WHEELER:

Jocelyn, any reflections from RCEA about the importance of RCEA for moments like these?

GWYNN:

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely uncertainty for us on just how many projects will continue to be viable with maybe uncertainty around the Inflation Reduction Act incentives that the Biden administration passed, and many are well underway to trying to claim those incentives and factoring those into their project economics. But a lot of that is already in the tax code, and so we're hoping that there's still a path forward for some of those projects. But yeah, it's an uncertain time, especially locally, like you said, for offshore wind.

WHEELER:

Well, if there's, if there's something that the IRA did well, it is distributing money across the United States in red and blue counties, particularly in red counties. I believe that Republican leaning counties have been the largest beneficiary of IRA funds. So I've seen, and I'm sure others have seen these as well, Republican congresspeople who have voted against the IRA going out and celebrating at a photo op, the construction of a new project funded by IRA funds. So there's, there's hope to that, that there's a recognition that this works well, and this is benefiting rural communities. As Kendra said, Kendra, when we're thinking about the economics of a project like this, fit has a, a good, a good payout for, for projects like these, because we want to see the development of small renewables in our community. How does the ability to work with Redwood Energy Authority and this preferential pricing, how does that make a project like this pencil out?

KALLEVIG:

Yeah, these sort of local partnerships and incentives can be really essential to projects like this, especially really small projects. As you imagine, the larger the project, sort of, the cheaper the project can be built on a per watt cost.

WHEELER:

Yeah, Jocelyn, please. Yeah.

GWYNN:

Yeah, well, just to speak to the economies of scale here, the projects that we procure that are non-local obviously can take advantage of much better purchasing finances and financing costs, whereas local projects are going to be smaller and they're not going to have that economy of scale. And so I think our board early on knew that we're going to have to subsidize local procurement because we're just not going to see those 100 megawatt projects here in Humboldt. We have a much more hilly terrain and we don't have a lot of low value flat land on which to develop solar farms. So that's one of the purposes of the Feed-in Tariff Program.

WHEELER:

So Jocelyn, from RCEA's perspective, as kind of like an energy grid nerd, which I assume you are, are there values to projects like these in kind of like the health of the total grid, especially thinking here locally where we have kind of a constrained import and export capacity because of our undersized transmission lines. Like why are local projects perhaps that important?

GWYNN:

Yeah, well, this project in particular, North Coast Highway Solar out in Hydesville is going to be solar only. So it's not going to have battery storage paired with it. However, our new feed-in tariff redesigned program does offer incentives for adding battery storage. So we do hope to see more of those paired projects. And we do have another project on Foster Avenue in the Arcata area that's being developed by Renewable America under contract, and that will be solar plus battery storage.

So I would say there's a lot more resiliency value in projects with storage because you can store that power for later use when it's most needed. Solar only projects such as this one don't have as much grid benefit. They're generating during times where we already have a lot of solar on the grid. But just more indirectly, it's important that we start building up our renewable energy infrastructure here locally with a lot of diverse array of different technologies. We have the biomass facility in Southern Humboldt that RCA procures from. Hopefully one day we'll have offshore wind. We have some small hydro plants out in the eastern side of the county. And then now we're bringing online a lot of solar and battery storage. So hopefully with that local portfolio in the future, we can start to think about how to get off the the gas plant as much as possible. Although that facility does serve its own very important reliability service for the region.

WHEELER:

So Jocelyn, I'll stick with you a little bit more. There might be landowners out there who have a similar couple dozen acres that is nice and sunny and is maybe potentially useful for a project like these. So how does a landowner go about working with a developer or working with RCEA to find a developer to bring projects like these to our community?

GWYNN:

Yeah, so we don't have a formal process for, we can't really recommend a developer, a specific developer or set of developers, but we do have a list that we maintain of just folks we know who work at this scale, EDP renewables included, as well as a few other folks. And we do send that to landowners when they express interest in the program. We encourage them to do their own vetting and that it's not a, we haven't vetted all of these, all of these developers ourselves, but they can, you know, a lot of these developers have forms on their websites for landowners specifically. So they make it super easy to contact them and a site assessment will be conducted remotely at first.

And I'm sure Kendra can talk more about this, but the, we do require for the feed-in tariff program that the project be kind of at a certain standard of development status before they submit an application to us. So the developer and the landowner will work closely together to make sure that that, those steps take place, like an application to PG&E for interconnection, initiating the permitting process with the county and getting kind of initial designs underway such that the energy production can be modeled. And once that status is achieved, then they can submit an application to us.

WHEELER:

All right, Kendra, a very similar question. Someone's interested in planning a small but good sized solar project on their property. How can they work with ADP Renewables? What's the best way to go about that?

KALLEVIG:

Yeah, as Jocelyn says, we are always happy to hear from folks who would be interested in partnering with us on a project. I'm glad that information is going out to folks with developers they can contact. Of course, our website is a great way to get in touch. I mean, we work directly with our landowner partners on sites and would be able to visit with them, take a look at their site, some of those initial siting characteristics. Is this a site that would potentially be buildable? We're looking at a lot of things. Is the energy resource there? Is the sun resource there to make this a good project based on topography and all sorts of things? What about interconnection? We have to interconnect these projects to the grid. That's super important. I'm an environmental specialist, so my job is to look at all the natural resources on the site and see, is this a good place to build a site? Are we able to avoid wetlands, waterways, impact sensitive species, and that sort of thing. So there's a whole lot that goes into it from a really early stage to look at whether a site would be a good fit or not.

WHEELER:

So Jocelyn, we'll close with you. Feed-in tariff program, thinking forward, what kind of growth does RCEA expect for projects like these? What amount of our grid would you imagine, let's say, 10 years in the future, small-scale solar projects built locally in the community? How much of that will be feeding into our local grid?

GWYNN:

Yeah, so this project, the North Coast Highway Solar, is probably going to generate less than 1% of RCEA's annual energy needs. So it will be a drop in the bucket, but collectively, the feed-in tariff program with the increased capacity that the board has approved up to, I think, 17 megawatts, it'll be about 5% to 10% of our annual energy needs. And RCEA serves about 92% of the county's energy needs right now. And so that's sort of the scale we're looking at. We can't go up to 40%, 50% of our portfolio for a subsidized resource, so we're keeping it small and keeping it proportional to the size of these projects.

WHEELER:

And as you said earlier, we are working towards a hundred percent renewable energy by 2030, uh, I will be terribly excited when we, when we reached that goal, RCA has been working hard to develop small projects like these also has been working on offshore wind energy development. So we are looking at both big and small solutions to our climate crisis and getting the power that our local community needs, unfortunately, we are out of time, Kendra, Jocelyn, thank you both so much for joining the eco news.

GWYNN:

Thank you so much, Tom, happy to be on.

WHEELER:

Hey gang, that was great. And join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North cCast of California.