California Energy Summit

The Clean Coalition was a partner organization forthe California Energy Summit, which took place on May 16-18, 2017 in Santa Monica, CA. Craig Lewis, Executive Director for the Clean Coalition, moderated two panels at the event.

The California energy market is at the center of a maelstrom of change that will have profound impacts on strategic directions and opportunities for utilities, power producers, preferred resources providers, and customers on multiple fronts:

• The 50% Renewable Portfolio Standard is driving not only wind and solar procurements, but also increased demands for investments in energy storage, distributed resources, and other fast responding grid assets
• Regionalization of the California Independent System Operatoris also being driven by increased reliance on renewables, but the path forward to a multistate regional transmission organizationis uncertain
• Integrated resource plans from investor owned utilitiesand public utilities will for the first time include distributed assets, with unknown impacts on long term power procurement
• The loss of Aliso Canyon and quick deployment of storage assets points out both the challenges and creative solutions in solving local capacity issues
• The California Demand Response Auction Mechanism is opening the wholesale market for the first time to aggregated distributed resources from distributed energy resources
• Planners are for the first time trying to establish multiyear resource adequacy requirements, with the potential for revised flexible capacity requirements that could affect wind, solar, and gas power projects

Only those organizations that fully understand the complex, confusing, and constantly changing California energy market will be able to develop strategies to profit.

This year’s California Energy Summit broughtpolicymakers together with utility, independent power producers, energy storage, and finance executives to provide the latest information on the opportunities and threats in California, and discussed potential strategies for the future.