The 100 percent renewable energy future doesn’t start with a country, state or region. It starts with a city. One power plant in a city, in fact. In Glendale, California.
Glendale is a city of 200,000 people just north of Los Angeles. And in 2014, Glendale was in a tricky spot. The city’s natural-gas plant was old. The City Council faced a decision that would impact the municipality for decades to come: revamp the 252-megawatt gas plant or find local alternatives?
After modeling many different types of local resources, the city found the perfect mix: 75 megawatts of utility-scale storage; 15 megawatts of solar, efficiency and demand response; and 93 megawatts of Wärtsilä engines for backup reliability. It saved the city millions of dollars.
“And it’s just a huge win,” said David Millar, a resource planning consultant at Ascend Analytics, who helped model Glendale’s energy system, “and really, an important model for the future of energy.”
In this episode, produced in collaboration with Wärtsilä, we look at the hidden hero of the 100 percent renewable future: power systems modeling.