Solar Energy Innovation Network Webinar on Solar Community Assistance for Local Equity (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video for the webinar Innovation at SCALE (Solar Community Assistance for Local Equity) initiative.

This video shows NREL Solar Energy Innovation Network (SEIN) researchers Scott Belding and Kamyria Coney, along with an introduction to SEIN from U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office technical monitor Nick Kasza. Harrison Dreves from the NREL Communications Office provides polling support during the webinar.

>>Scott Belding: Ok. Well, I'm seeing more and more people join the webinar here. So welcome to those newcomers. And I think we will leap into it. I am Scott Belding, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL. And excited today to cover the Solar Energy Innovation Network Innovation at SCALE initiative and its assistance offerings for solar energy deployment around the country.

Contents

I'll do a fuller introduction in a minute. But first, I wanted to show you where we're going in the webinar today. Just an overview of the different sections that we have prepared. Do a little bit of introduction, go over the Solar Energy Innovation Network or SEIN program that I mentioned, talk about the projects that it entails, talk about the assistance that we're offering in conjunction with the program, how to receive it, a little bit about the team that we have on hand to provide that assistance, and then have time at the end to answer your questions.

So, to kick us off, hopefully, that progression will make sense. And will continue to make even more sense as we get into the content itself. But to kick us off, I will have our opening remarks presented by Nick Kasza, Department of Energy.

Introduction

>>Nick Kasza: Fantastic. Thanks, Scott. And welcome everyone to today's webinar. As Scott said, my name is Nick Kasza. And I'm a contractor supporting the Solar Energy Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. The Solar Office's mission is to accelerate the advancement and deployment of solar technology in support of an equitable transition to decarbonize the economy no later than 2050. Starting with the decarbonized power sector by 2035.

As many of you may know, the solar industry is rapidly growing, driven by falling costs and federal and state policies. But barriers to equitable deployment remain, particularly for low-income households and those in disadvantaged communities. NREL's Solar Energy Innovation Network has a history of helping multi-stakeholder teams address real world challenges and develop innovative approaches to solar adoption.

Round 3 of the Innovation Network specifically focused on equitable solar deployment in under-served communities. Diverse community-centered teams are one of the strengths of the innovation network. These teams, along with NREL, work together for 18 months to develop innovations and resources that can benefit other stakeholders, such as community-based organizations, local governments, local electric utility schools.

It's very exciting to see so many additional organizations across the country use these innovative approaches to accelerate their journey towards solar adoption. With that, I'd like to send it back to Scott, so he can provide more details about specific projects and opportunities to access assistance.

Webinar Speakers

>>Scott Belding: Wonderful. Thank you, Nick. It's great to have Nick and his Solar Energy Technologies Office colleagues as our clients and partners on this. And yeah. We're really excited to share more of the details about the Solar Energy Innovation Network and what it means for assistance offerings.

In terms of the other speakers today, there's me, and I'll be passing the microphone off to my colleague Kamyria Coney in a little while here. But as I mentioned, I'm Scott Belding. I'm a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. My main focus is on equitable deployment of solar and resilience technologies for its aid in the clean energy transition.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

And I'm also the task lead for the Innovation at SCALE initiative under the Solar Energy Innovation Network, which I will describe shortly. So, to level set a little bit on where we're coming from here, NREL is the National Renewable Energy Lab. As you might have intuited already from the comments so far, it's a National Laboratory under the US Department of Energy. And our dedicated mission is to develop and deploy renewable energy technologies like solar, wind, battery storage, and electric vehicles.

Within that, the program that we're representing here today is the Solar Energy Innovation Network, acronymized to SEIN, which helps communities develop novel and transformative approaches to adopting solar energy in the way that Nick described just a second ago. So how does this fall into the role of a national laboratory?

NREL Works With Renewable Energy at Every Stage

NREL is focused on renewable energy at every stage. It might be most intuitive to think of a laboratory like this as the place where the latest and greatest cutting edge solar panels and similar technologies are developed. And that's certainly true. But the laboratory also supports the clean energy technology deployment at every stage.

You can see the arrow going across from foundational science to accelerating the technology deployment and scaling it up via R&D and process engineering, before finally moving to systems and markets and working with industry partners to actually deploy technologies. And so all of these lead, in all of these different areas, whether it's solar or wind, batteries, resilience, industrial materials, to a place where the deployment experience helps inform the research.

And we want to be sure to learn from how these technologies are actually implemented via place-based collaboration and assistance to accelerate the energy transition. Make it more equitable, make it more effective. So that's where the Solar Energy Innovation Network comes in on this place-based collaboration and assistance.

And just to get a sense of who's in the room today, we wanted to introduce our polling feature. We'll ask a few questions during this webinar. But just to get a sense of the attendees here today in the room. So, I'll pass it over to my colleague Harrison Dreves to help operate and explain the Polling function that we have today.

Poll Question: Which of the Following Best Describes the Entity You Represent?

>>Harrison Dreves: Yeah. Thanks, Scott. My name is Harrison Dreves. I work in the Communications Office here at NREL. And I'm just going to be helping run the polling today. So, we're going to use a platform called Poll Everywhere to do this. I will put a link in the chat, where you can scan this QR code that's on your screen right now. And we're just going to try and get a little bit of context from all of you about where you're coming from, what your background is. Sorry. I went full screen before I put that in the chat.

So, we'll drop it in now. There we go. OK. So, we just wanted to get some background on who you are, where you're coming from. And that'll help us tailor what we present for the rest of the day, and also just provide some context on who's interested in this program. So, you can scan that QR code in the upper right on your phone, if you want, or you can follow that link and answer. You shouldn't need to put in a name. It's anonymous. We just want to get a sense of it.

Great. It looks like people are responding. Definitely getting some government participation here, which is great. But I'm also seeing nonprofits, private companies, and community-based organizations here, which is really exciting. This is exactly the mix we hope to see in the innovation network to overcome these barriers and explore new forms of solar adoption.

All right. I'm going to give it about 10 more seconds to respond. And then we will move on with the presentation. So, if you haven't put your response in, get it in now. And if you had any issues responding, please let me know in chat. And we'll get that sorted out before our next poll, because we're going to do a few more of these today. All right. Looks like a pretty diverse mix of entities represented here today, with nonprofits and government being the largest group. Scott, anything you'd like to say before I drop the results? [Poll results show 24% of respondents chose “non-profit.” 24% chose “government: federal.” 12% chose “government: local.” And 6% of respondents each went to “private company,” “community-based organization,” “education: 4-year degree or vocational,” and “government: state.”]

>>Scott Belding: No. This is perfect. Thanks, Harrison. Yeah. It's a fully populated pie chart, which segues nicely into where we're going next in the presentation.

>>Harrison Dreves: Excellent. Right. Back to you, Scott.

Solar Energy Innovation Network

>>Scott Belding: OK. So, I think Harrison described it really well. But we saw respondents come from all different sorts of backgrounds. And that is really in keeping with what the Solar Energy Innovation Network (SEIN) is set up to perform, which is this collaborative research program that supports teams with multiple stakeholders to research and develop and share solutions to the challenges that their context faces with solar energy adoption.

So, we've supported this program for seven years now and gone through three different rounds of it. And in every case, the project teams are located all around the country. And they've had these objectives to identify and overcome solar energy adoption barriers through collaboration with other folks in their context, with the assistance of national laboratories like NREL, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and additional partners.

And the second objective, of course, connects to why we're all here today, which is the Innovation at SCALE Initiative and the assistance associated with it. But just to double tap on the network itself, I mentioned the rounds and the geographical distribution. We've had 25 different project teams. You can see the maps here from SEIN round 2 on the left and SEIN round 3 on the right.

Solar Energy Innovation Network (Continued)

And each team has taken a unique approach to say, hey. There's this barrier to folks in my area getting solar. What if we tried something new? What if we tried something innovative? And let's communicate our progress and our insights about the work that we did. Each round has had different types of topical focuses.

You can see the color coding here that some teams were focused on commercial scale solar. Some teams were focused on solar in rural communities. All the teams are focused on distributed behind the meter solar. So not utility scale and not community solar. But round 3, in particular, had an emphasis on equitable adoption at both the commercial scale and the residential scale.

And so, I didn't have room on the slide to include the map from round one as well, which had another nine teams across the country tackling different barriers to solar. But it's been a really valuable treasure trove of project experiences and progress in all of these contexts where these teams go out and find new contexts or new ways to address barriers to solar and get more solar deployed.

Poll Question: Which of the Following Best Represents Your Journey to Solar Right Now?

So, I wanted to leap to our second poll question, which also asks, which of the following options that Harrison will present shortly best represents where you are on your journey to solar? The SEIN project teams have all operated at different levels of decision-making, whether it's in the early stage of project conception and addressing barriers there or working out the more nitty-gritty details later where you've got pretty fully formed projects, but just need to address an extra little gap or something like that. And so, you can see the options here.

>>Harrison Dreves: Yeah. And I put that link again. More clickable version of that link in the chat. If you weren't able to get to it last time, you can either click that and do it on your computer or scan this QR code here. It looks like people are responding already. Thank you. Definitely seeing-- we still got people responding, but we're definitely seeing a bit of a trend here, it looks like, with people being later on the spectrum, but still needing additional details to move forward.

And it may take a little while to read all of those options and pick one. So, we'll wait a little bit longer before we wrap up this call. And SEIN can work with people anywhere along this kind of spectrum of the journey, right, Scott?

>>Scott Belding: Yeah. That's absolutely right. So, this is part of how we think about where folks are in their solar journey. SEIN projects have handled all of these different stages of solar advancement and the Innovation at SCALE assistance that we're offering is also designed to support people at all of these different levels.

>>Harrison Dreves: Awesome. Yeah. I think we'll take 5 more seconds. So, if you're pondering between 3 or 4 or 2 or 3, pick one. And then we will wrap up the poll and move back to the presentation. All right. Back to you, Scott. [57% of respondents chose “I understand the benefits of solar and have implemented strategies but need additional details to move forward.” 21% chose “I understand the benefits of solar and have begun strategizing but need specific details to move forward.” 14% chose “I understand the benefits of solar and I just need a starting point to help realize those benefits for my community.” 7% chose “I am just starting out and want to know more about solar’s potential benefits for my community.”]

>>Scott Belding: Thank you.

>>Harrison Dreves: Yeah. Looks good.

>>Scott Belding: Great. Yeah. So just double clicking on that each of these teams had a lot to share at all of those different stages. And we want to be able to reach folks who represent in some ways what those teams accomplished during their journey. Now, I'm talking about these maps of the whole country, but also talking about the project is unique.

Atlanta, Georgia – Breaking Barriers: Solar HBCU Innovation in Microgrids and Resiliency With Solar + Storage

So, in terms of what these projects actually did, we thought it would be helpful to describe just a couple of them to get a sense of the types of barriers to solar that they addressed and how they might be useful to additional communities. So that's done with a couple featured SEIN projects here before we move into examples of assistance that we have based on those SEIN projects.

And I'll start with one in Atlanta, Georgia, that we supported called Breaking Barriers—Solar HBCU Innovation in Microgrids and Resiliency with Solar plus Storage. So, this was a team led by Groundswell and the universities, the historically Black colleges and universities that are members of the Atlanta University Center consortium. So, Spelman College, Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University, and the Morehouse School of Medicine.

And they were interested in pursuing resilience hubs powered by solar and battery storage that could help survive outages and provide safe resource-filled places to gather at both the campuses themselves, but also providing resilient services to the surrounding West Atlanta neighborhoods, which are historically marginalized and have a lot of energy burden in the past.

So, between those schools, the Partnership for Southern Equity, which helped out the project by being able to connect with the community, engage with the community, and figure out, OK. If a resilience hub is going to be around here, what do you need it to provide? And being able to meet the community where they were in that space, as well as getting participation and buy-in from the utility from Georgia Power Company to help assess the landscape of what it takes to actually make resilience hubs happen in the Atlanta context.

And this project went all the way from, OK, we have this goal for solar and resilient power here to designing the potential projects there. Where the National Laboratory experience comes in valuable is for being able to zero in on topics like the analysis of solar and battery sizes, the costs that are entailed by deploying projects like this, the benefits and resilience performance.

Atlanta, Georgia – Breaking Barriers: Solar HBCU Innovation in Microgrids and Resiliency With Solar + Storage (Continued)

So, if you want to develop a solar plus storage resilience hub, how can you tell how long of an outage it can survive. So, I've just included a couple examples here. There's a full report that's publicly available that details both the project and the associated analysis. But just to get a sense, in the upper right, you can see that if you just change the size of the battery for this type of project, how much savings on utility bills does that get you over the lifetime of the project.

And you can see that once you hit a certain size of battery for the university context here, then you start getting diminishing returns on increasing the size of the battery. So that's important from an economic performance standpoint. But what about for resilience? And the graph in the bottom right tracks a similar type of thing where each different color line is a different size of battery, but it lets you project, using NREL's modeling tools, if you had an outage at the worst possible time, how long could you survive with this Resilient Solar plus Storage Project?

So, you can see that as the battery sizes increase and the outage duration is communicated along the horizontal axis there, that you have a better and better chance, say, of surviving a 24-hour outage as the battery goes from what's termed a 4-hour battery or 8-hour battery or 12-hour battery.

So, all of that work led to some real progress for the universities and the whole multi-stakeholder coalition and the community. And there was actually just a ribbon-cutting ceremony in the other week for the Vicars Community Center in Atlanta, which was derived from a lot of this project work that we helped support that does have a solar and storage to assist members of the community during power outages and emergencies.

Atlanta, Georgia – Breaking Barriers: Solar HBCU Innovation in Microgrids and Resiliency With Solar + Storage (Continued)

You can see some of the folks from Groundswell in the community center. And it's actually the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency there to visit that ribbon cutting as well. So real good progress. You just start from trying to meet the goals of the stakeholders in the community coalition. And a lot of good things can end up happening.

California (and Beyond): Bringing Solar to BIPOC Houses of Worship

Wanted to move to a second example, this time in California, but definitely with implications for the entire country called Bringing Solar to BIPOC Houses of Worship. And this team was a combination effort between an organization called RE-volv-- which helps arrange financing for projects, Green the Church, and Interfaith Power & Light. A couple nonprofits who are really focused on finding ways for houses of worship and faith-based communities to access solar.

As nonprofits and with their congregations, there are typically different considerations that go into solar acquisition for these types of entities, especially with the new policy environment of the Inflation Reduction Act and its direct pay provision and its tax credit adders, as well as the context in California, where their net metering rules have been changing.

And so, this project came together, supported through the Solar Energy Innovation Network to help navigate that new landscape and help illuminate these pathways for houses of worship and to deploy solar. And even within the project period, they resulted in new solar installations on churches in Compton and Berkeley and Oakland, which is all really great and really helps pave the way for a lot of houses of worship in California for sure.

California (And Beyond): Bringing Solar to BIPOC Houses of Worship (Continued)

But it also led to a national data set developed by my colleagues on the SEIN team at NREL to identify specific locations throughout the United States where solar projects could be economically beneficial based on the data that we have, and the geo-specific tax credit orders in the Inflation Reduction Act.

So, in the bottom left, you can see representative map. The data set is for almost the entire country. This map is for the Port Arthur, Texas area, the Golden Triangle area of Gulf Coast, Texas, which was the location for another SEIN round 3 team, which don't have time to talk about today in more detail, unfortunately.

But the color coding here represents a mix of economic favorability and a tax credit adder eligibility. So, the greener the map gets, the more you have both of those favorable factors in place based on census tract level data. So, if you have a green area on the map, then that means that your economics, as much as we can determine for solar are in the top third of net present value. So best the most economically favorable solar projects, as well as being eligible for tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act.

So, it's a powerful visualization tool. It's a powerful way for, I don't know if you're a regional government or an association of local governments looking to prioritize solar projects throughout your jurisdictions, then this type of mapping can be really helpful. And it's a direct outcome of this SEIN project.

Twin Cities, Minnesota: Advancing Small Business Solar Equity

The last example that I wanted to get into, just to illustrate a few-- there's a lot of diversity in both the context and the types of work that go into Solar Energy Innovation Network Projects in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. We had a project focused on advancing small business solar equity. This was led by the Lake Street Council in the Twin Cities and worked with businesses in three separate commercial corridors to reduce barriers to solar adoption that were experienced by small business owners in those locations, which were heavily immigrant-owned, BIPOC-owned small businesses.

And really cool innovative approach. A lot of discovery about just the different types of contexts that an immigrant-owned small business might have in its approach to solar as compared to where solar has been more traditionally and historically deployed. And what the team did was develop a human-centered design approach that really prioritized engagement of these small business owners and meeting them where they are, and said, hey. Let's create this solar hub network model, which there's a lot of information there about solar, but not all of it is particularly unified or intelligible.

So, what if we worked with the community-based organizations that these small businesses already engage with and have that be the foundational environment for sharing this information about solar? And that's not all. There's also the economic question of how these types of projects can be beneficial and successfully financed.

And so, this project team also performed economic analysis of these small businesses based on their preferences and profiles and assessed the opportunities available for these minority-owned small businesses for rooftop solar across a few different building types, a few different options for financial incentives, and procurement methods.

Poll Question: What Are the Most Significant Barriers You Have Encountered When Pursuing Solar?

So, I wanted to just get a taste of the array of SEIN projects that we've supported. And also wanted to use this as a little bit of a thought prompt to you all to think about the barriers that you and maybe folks that you interact with or represent encounter on the way to solar. So, I'll pass it off to Harrison for this other poll question.

>>Harrison Dreves: Yeah. Thanks, Scott. And this will be the same address. Same site as before. We wanted to really hear from you about what are the most significant barriers you have encountered when pursuing solar. I think ideally, as an entity, but even barriers you've seen in your communities, or when working with other organizations. This is a free response poll question. So, you should just be able to type in whatever the barriers are.

I would say, try to describe them succinctly if you can, but use as many words as you need to get the idea off. And we're going to wait a little bit-- linger a little bit longer on this poll question because I know it can take some time to post these in. So, we have one person saying the entry points are expensive and require a lot of technical assistance often more than a business or organization may have. We've definitely seen that with other SEIN teams, Scott. That's not a new one for sure.

>>Scott Belding: Yeah. And I'm really glad this is the first one in the free response just because that it's a little validating for us as the offeror's of technical assistance that can hopefully fill in some of these capacity gaps or provide information and decision-making assistance that helps capacity constrained communities be able to access the benefits of solar.

>>Harrison Dreves: There's also a lot of confusion, it looks like, around the different incentives. That's something we've seen as well. In many cases, there's a lot out there, and it can make the projects really financially viable. But you have to figure out how to qualify and secure all of them, which can be hard.

>>Scott Belding: And a shifting landscape, too. We're talking about the team led by RE-volv out there in California where they were dealing with the expiration of one set of policies, the introduction of another, and then the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act all at the same time. So that's-- hopefully leads to more productive uses of that data set that I mentioned that can help people sort through what these laws and regulations actually mean for solar in their context.

>>Harrison Dreves: These are some great responses. So, thank you for sharing. This is really food for thought for us. So, we can see what problems you're dealing with. And hopefully, you can see that you're not alone in the struggles or the barriers you might be encountering. There are other entities across the country dealing with similar challenges. And SEIN is here to help you overcome those.

>>Scott Belding: Yeah. I'm seeing a lot of different great answers here about location, about—some that speak to how many entities it can take to successfully deploy solar, whether that's experiencing pushback or constraints from the local government or just needing to have, in a capacity-constrained environment, a few different organizations on hand to lighten the load for everybody and be able to—for each organization or partner in a solar project to be able to chip in where it's most beneficial.

>>Harrison Dreves: Absolutely. So, let's give it like another 15 seconds. If you're typing out a response, try and wrap it up and hit Submit. And then we'll end this poll so we can move on with the presentation. I want to make sure we save some time for Q&A at the end of the webinar because we want you all to be able to ask any questions you might have specifically about this program, so our team can respond.

>>Scott Belding: Absolutely.

>>Harrison Dreves: All right. 5 more seconds. Hit submit, if you haven't already, and then we will stop the poll.

>>Scott Belding: All right. Thank you, Harrison. And thank you to all who submitted answers for that's illuminating for us and helpful for us. And speaks to the various challenges that folks around the country are experiencing when it comes to solar. So, part of our approach here is I mentioned that one of the tougher parts of preparing the presentation is we have all of these great projects in our experience to choose from, to highlight, and could only really had time for a couple.

Innovation at SCALE (Solar Community Assistance for Local Equity)

But it is the case that we do have this really broad suite of folks who tackled everything from solar that's involved in resilience and clean energy there to navigating that type of policy and regulatory landscape that I mentioned in the California context to dealing with financial barriers and different expectations and also needing to do a lot of engagement with the community to figure out what solar can mean for them and what their primary needs are.

So, while those all occurred in specific locations, occurred in Atlanta and occurred in California and Minnesota. Those projects have insights and processes and new ways to help people get solar that transcend those borders, too. So, speaks to the second fundamental goal that the Solar Energy Innovation Network has, which is to be able to adapt and apply and share these insights where they're helpful to other communities around the country.

So that's where we have the Innovation at SCALE Initiative. SCALE is an acronym. Because we're the federal government, we need to have a few acronyms in here. This one stands for Solar Community Assistance for Local Equity, which really is in the spirit of taking these, like Nick mentioned, 18-month deep dive innovative projects and saying, hey. They came up with something that can be really valuable to other contexts around the country.

So, we are here to provide assistance on that front and provide this targeted communication and sharing and new analysis based on all of these great SEIN projects that can help advance solar in other contexts as well. I wanted to provide just a couple examples—shorter than how I spoke about the projects. But just a couple of examples of what that type of assistance can look like based on what we've already done via this initiative.

Michigan City, Indiana: Michigan City Sustainability Commission

Sharing an example of—we worked with folks in Michigan City, Indiana, a confusingly titled city, but it is on Lake Michigan in the state of Indiana. And we worked with their Sustainability Commission to really achieve a lot of clarity on the goals and the constraints for solar and potentially even electric vehicle charging at their waterfront area, which has a lot of parking needs, has a lot of tourism demands. It has a park and a zoo.

And this community was starting off in pretty early stages of we think there's a really strong opportunity here, but how can we make it work to some of the barriers that were mentioned in the last poll question. Trying to get a firm understanding of where costs are allocated and how benefits get delivered. And we were just able to leverage a lot of good experience on SEIN projects to clarify goals.

We serve the role of utility liaison. Because at the National Lab, we can speak the utility jargon pretty easily. And that was really helpful to help them navigate the landscape of how the utility processes new solar projects. And all of that was instrumental in Michigan City getting almost $100,000 grant from the State Office of Energy Development to take the next step and saying, hey. OK. We've got a good idea of what we want to do. Let's actually do some feasibility studies and site analysis.

Miami Gardens, Florida: Florida Memorial University  School of Arts and Sciences

So that was a good example of the earlier stage decisions of solar. We also built on the Breaking Barriers Project that I mentioned at another HBCU. So, Florida Memorial University is located in the Greater Miami area in Florida. They're an HBCU. And they have really inspiring long-term vision for solarization of their campus in addition to resilience hub development and being able to be the beacon of clean energy and resilient power that the region can look toward.

And this was a good chance to use some of the same modeling expertise that NREL leveraged for the Breaking Barriers Project to inspect a potential resilience hub location. You can see that the image in the bottom right is an evaluation of campus buildings for their solar potential and what the economic profile of those solar projects might be.

So, we were able to look at the campus and say, OK. You have these ambitious goals, and you want to get to as much solar as you can. What's the lower versus higher-hanging fruit, so to speak, of these different opportunities for solar around campus. And if you want this central really well-placed building to be a resilience hub, let's think about the type of outage that you want to be able to endure, the type of power needs for that resilience hub. And yeah. Really good information for them to inform their strategy going forward.

Massachusetts: National Grid (Utility)

Lastly, as an example here, we worked with a utility in Massachusetts, National Grid. A lot of utilities have similar interests to what National Grid was doing here, which was trying to find ways to provide community-level energy resilience solutions to its customers, especially with a focus on historically marginalized communities.

And speaking, again, to the different policy and regulatory landscapes, there was a law that had passed in Massachusetts that gave National Grid the ability to develop resilience projects on their National Grid properties that can benefit the surrounding communities, who may experience energy burden or other historical marginalization.

But where to start in terms of what those types of resilient facilities might offer was capacity constraint for the utility. So, we built on a few different projects in the SEIN catalog to provide assistance to National Grid. And that became the basis for a report that is now published on these high-level categories of resilient solutions.

You can see some of the examples on the right-hand side of communities can have a lot of different priorities and figuring out what types of role you want a resilient asset to play is really important. And having this menu of options allows National Grid and now others to more quickly determine what the capabilities are for resilient solar projects.

And a lot of that happens in conversation with the community. We've had a number of excellent projects in SEIN that have really focused on different community engagement methods as well, and different strategies and programs to help set up the preconditions for these productive conversations. But this was a great example of assistance becoming more and more broadly applicable as we performed it.

Themes of Innovation at SCALE

So, I've tried to cover both SEIN projects and examples of assistance that have been based on SEIN projects in a few different topical areas. We've sorted these roughly based on—we can see how some project teams focused on what are the financial pathways to solar that are involved here. You can think about the Twin Cities Minnesota example of what does it take for a small business owner in those corridors to be able to adopt solar focused on community outreach and engagement strategies, like I just described.

We talked a lot about resilience and the ways that solar can contribute to that. And then solar for small businesses as well as it occupies its own category. So that leads to our last poll question, which based on these examples that were hopefully illustrative and provided you a window into some of the project experience we have here, which themes do you see from those that are most relevant to the challenges and concerns related to solar that you see.

Poll Question: Which Themes of  Innovation at SCALE Are Most Relevant to Your Challenges or Concerns? 

>>Harrison Dreves: Thanks, Scott. Yeah. That poll is now active. I put the link back in the chat for everybody so you can click that or scan the QR code that I'm about to share here. Let's take a look at this. So, there's that QR code. If you want to scan it on your phone or you can use the link in the chat. Really curious to see which of these themes are most relevant for everyone's specific contexts who are watching today.

Seems like financial pathways are definitely a popular one. We've seen that with a number of our SEIN teams. Right, Scott?

>>Scott Belding: Definitely.  The first question that comes up in so many solar contexts is: how can this be financially viable and where how can I overcome the upfront costs? What does it look like long-term to access the benefits? And I'd also add, I'm not sure multiple responses are allowed in this question structure. Right, Harrison?

>>Harrison Dreves: Believe so. I can take a look real quick.

>>Scott Belding: So, if you, as a respondent, were limiting yourself to what you felt was the most important, there might be an opportunity to say, hey. Actually. Think a few of these apply.

>>Harrison Dreves: Yes. Feel free. You should be able to select. You can click on multiple ones when you're responding and feel free to click all that apply in your case. You don't have to pick just one. All right. Give it about 10 more seconds. Make those secondary selections, if you hadn't made them and you want to.

And then we will wrap the pull up and move to the end of the presentation and get to that Q&A period, because I'm sure you have questions you want to ask the team. And they are eager to try and answer them.

>>Scott Belding: Absolutely. And I'd say, the other feature of the multiple response is that financial considerations make their way into every solar project, as we've been talking about. And so even for

SEIN projects that focused on resilience or community outreach, there's always the financial question, too. And I think we can see that ubiquity in the distribution of responses here.

>>Harrison Dreves: All right. So, we'll stop there. Back to you, Scott. [Poll results show 43% of respondents chose “financial pathways to solar,” 21% chose “community outreach and engagement strategies,” 7% chose “disaster resilience through clean energy,” and 29% chose “solar for small businesses in underserved communities.”]

>>Scott Belding: Thank you. OK. So now, like Harrison mentioned, we're nearing the tail end of the prepared content here. Just want to give a little bit of-- OK. We've talked about where we're coming from and what the SEIN program has historically supported. We've talked about the assistance that we're offering based on those projects and all the good work they did.

Requests for Assistance Are Currently Open

So hopefully, if you or folks you know might be interested in receiving assistance on your own solar journeys, there's the how-to. So, we have a website. The website has a button that is displayed in image form at the top of this slide that says—it's just a link to a request form that just has you let us know a little bit about where you are in your solar journey and what your needs are.

So, we have the Innovation at SCALE web page. And if you use this link to fill out a request form, it is a light lift, especially for sometimes accessing federal government resources can have some paperwork intensity to it. We tried to minimize that as much as possible in this case. And we really just want to start the conversation with you.

And so the deadline for request forms is currently September 30 of this year. So, I've got another few weeks here. And we will collect and process those requests during the first weeks of October, then reach out to the selected participants who receive assistance to develop an assistance plan.

Requests for Assistance Are Currently Open (Continued)

In terms of order of operations, once we hear about your context via the request form, we have a meeting to just discuss—try and do this matchmaking process of looking at all of the insights and experience that we have through the SEIN program. Look at the expertise that we have on the staff of the SEIN team, NREL, its partners, and try and organize the best suite of assistance possible via mutually agreed upon assistance plan. And then provide that assistance to you at no cost.

And the timeline here is, yeah. There's the September 30 deadline. We'll process those requests in October, and then be delivering assistance to you this winter. So that's the process. The links to access this should be in the chat. And the last thing I'd say is just we talked about the winter frame. We talked about a lot of different examples of what this assistance can be used for.

Innovation at SCALE Assistance

It is designed to be this targeted offering that fills in gaps in capacity and helps advance the decision making process towards solar. It can take a lot of different forms. It can take resource sharing or best practices about community engagement. It can be utilizing NREL's state of the art modeling and analysis tools say, to provide insight onto the financial profile of potential projects.

It's designed to be very flexible. I'd also say that we're not performing this program to hit a certain mandate of solar panels installed. We're really just trying to help folks make the best clean energy decisions that they can, because that's how the entire clean energy transition will be most effectively accelerated in an equitable fashion.

The right-hand column here just speaks to this has been implied, but the assistance is not from conception to completion of a project. We can't use our funding to pay for the steel in the ground for capital projects like solar panels or different structural improvements. And we aren't set up to provide assistance for a specific grant opportunity.

So, we're not providing grant writing services. But as you saw in the case of the Michigan City, Indiana folks, a lot of the information that we provide can be generally applicable to a lot of downstream future opportunities. The last thing I'd say is to talk about the kind of expertise and assets we have on hand here via our partner organization providers. So, I'll pass the microphone off to my colleague Kamyria Coney to briefly introduce herself and talk through these other wonderful organizations that we have on hand.

Partner Organization Providers

>>Kamyria Coney: Perfect. Yes. Thanks, Scott. Hi, everybody. My name is Kamyria Connie. I'm a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory or NREL. My work focuses a lot on community engagement, best practices, and really just making sure that we are—how do we make sure we're connecting and understanding the community's challenges and also understanding NREL's capabilities in order to overcome some of those challenges and the barriers that we've already previously discussed.

So, I think you guys probably saw it. Throughout the presentation, we kept saying NREL and partners. And so we're really excited that we are actually inviting a group of partner organizations to help us delivering assistance through their expertise and experiences as well.

Shown here, we have a list of those partners. And we're just excited for them to also deliver on their own insights to Innovation at SCALE participants, given that some of them are what we like to call SEIN alumni. They've previously, either contributed to a SEIN project or have led a project as well within innovation networks. We're really excited to have that opportunity to get some of that ground truth expertise within our assistance.

Some time to go over some questions. So, I'll quickly go through who we have here. So, converge strategies, you might know them. They're actually focused primarily on integrating resiliency and security within the clean energy transition. And they were actually part of-- they provided some assistance in our last round of Innovation at SCALE last year. And so we're excited to have them back.

I'll keep going with ReThink Energy Florida. So, they're based in Tallahassee, Florida. And they really focus on community education, engagement, empowerment. They really focus on how we can use that to take action and achieve a just energy transition. Next we have GPI or Great Plains Institute. They actually just recently wrapped up their SEIN round 3 project.

And so overall, GPI really focuses on engaging and collaborating with other communities to develop energy solutions, not only benefit the community, but also-- excuse me. --but it also helps benefit the environment and the economy as well. And then Utah Clean Energy also, they are also previously just wrapped up around three partners as well.

And they actually, their organization really focused on advancing clean energy solutions by providing resources and pathways and all focusing on Utah and the Western region of the US. And then last we have Center for Sustainable Energy. They're based in San Diego, California. But they actually work across the US by providing program administration expertise for decarbonization goals, and as well as climate action implementation.

So we're really excited about these partners. We really are excited that they're spread out throughout the US, which you guys have seen. A lot of our projects are throughout the US. So really excited that that mimics that idea and just really making sure we're able to provide some of that expertise that everybody's needing. So yeah. Think that's it. I guess we can go ahead and go on to Q&A. Scott, unless you had anything else you wanted to add.

>>Scott Belding: No. Thanks for summarizing that, Kamyria. That was perfect. Yeah. We're really excited to have all of the great expertise and experience on hand for that. So yeah. Wanted to move. We've got several minutes left for any questions that have come up. I haven't had much insight into the chat since I've been sharing my screen most of the time here. So yeah. Let's see what has come up.

Questions?

>>Kamyria Coney: Absolutely. Yeah. Please guys, feel free to send in some of those questions as well. If we can't get to them during this webinar. We're also happy to send out an email answering those questions. But we have one from Augusto Diaz. They said, "What would be the best approach to start agrivoltaics or rural communities pilot project proposal?"

>>Scott Belding: Yeah. Great question. So agrivoltaics is definitely an emerging area that we'd be really interested to explore with you. I think one of the things that has come up, as I've been describing the different SEIN projects is how many different overlaps we find with the topics that they've covered in terms of economic profile and agrivoltaics is special dual use category. And we'd be excited to hear about where you're coming from via the request form and start talking about best approaches there.

I'd say that there are-- last time we had a symposium that gathered a lot of SEIN participants and project leaders. We ended up having a field trip to an agrivoltaics location, a solar farm out in the plains of Colorado here, because it's of keen interest to a lot of people. And it's a robust area of research at the laboratory that we're eager to share resources on.

>>Kamyria Coney: Perfect. Thanks, Scott. So we have a couple questions for Mark Webster. The first one was, "What are the key resiliency areas to focus on? I saw them on the last slide, a list of the areas, but I didn't catch them all."

>>Scott Belding: Yeah. Great question, Mark. Yeah. So I think where that starts is on the engagement side, where whether it was in the context that I mentioned at the HBCU campuses in Atlanta, their resilience priorities were somewhat different than the resilience priorities of the communities in Massachusetts.

And they were also different from the priorities of folks in the Port Arthur, Texas, area that I mentioned as well. And so the menu that I described is in that report and has these high-level categories of are you looking to provide resilient power? Are you looking to have another venue for clean energy to meet emissions reduction goals, or it's very possible to have a more disaster response-focused need, where sometimes people are really hit hard by weather disasters and emergencies like that. And they need shelter for the community.

Sometimes the workers, like utility folks and disaster response, emergency response folks, they come in to assist with recovery during a disaster, and they don't have a place to stay. So that can be a resilience need. So it's a broad array of options. And I think what is really important from a solar and battery storage deployment standpoint to support these is being clear about what those priorities are because different technology needs are required to meet those different resilience needs.

So that's part of what we've helped project teams do and what we've provided assistance on before. And we've seen a lot of value in it and hope we can find more context for that.

>>Kamyria Coney: Perfect. Thanks, Scott. I know there's another question from Mark, but we're going to go to another person, and we'll come back. I believe Alex is also answering some questions from the chat. So Claudia asked, "What recommendations or leads are there for affordable housing developers, looking to ensure that solar is integrated as clean energy? But unsure if this program is correct for this kind of scope of work that we're talking about here."

>>Scott Belding: Yeah. That's a great question. It's tough to say for sure, without knowing the specific circumstances of whether it's affordable housing, like the scale of the organization and things like that. But I would say that's why we designed the request form as such a, hopefully, easy to access entry point, where it sounds like there's some really good opportunities there.

We have worked with some affordable housing contexts before and have some insights that we hope we'd be able to transfer. But with that, hopefully, light lift request form, we'd be able to hear about it. And then if for some reason there is a disqualifying factor for assistance, we'd be able to suss it out really quickly without too much effort on either end and make our happy ways and hopefully present you with additional resources as well.

But I'd say that in our experience, at least, Kamyria you can maybe say this, too, but we've seen a lot of overlap and a lot of applicability. So, most people that do approach us, there's a light bulb moment in that process where we say, oh, yeah. Of course. This would be relevant to you.

>>Kamyria Coney: Awesome. We're going to go ahead and go to the next one from Jason. And they said, "Is there a financial institution in Tennessee, especially middle, that finances distributed solar projects?"

>>Scott Belding: Yeah. So, I think there are, especially CDFIs-- Community Development Finance Institutions that do operate in Appalachia. So, they're out there. Throughout the SEIN program and the rest of our work that we as researchers at NREL experience, I think we've come across a few of them. But that's an important point where I might have glossed over it a little bit.

But as a national program at a national laboratory, we do have a lot of cross-regional insight to be able to not just answer questions like this, that yes, there are, but also be able to get into it a little bit more deeply with you and say, hey. These are some of the offerings. These are some of the entities out there providing financial assistance. Would it be helpful if we facilitated an introduction? Those are the types of processes that a lot of the SEIN project teams have found valuable. So, we're eager to support those, too.

>>Kamyria Coney: Absolutely. And then we have another one from Anthony. They said, "What involvement or experience has SEIN had with rural Indigenous communities in the Southwestern regions? I saw New Mexico as an area during the round 2 in our earlier slides."

>>Scott Belding: Yeah. So, it's not the case that a tribal government or affiliated institution has led a  SEIN project, but in pursuit of the assistance, we were constantly on the lookout for ways for it to be applicable. So, I think part of the work that derived from the Breaking Barriers Project was to say, hey. What lessons might we have from this HBCU-centered context that might be able to be transferred to a tribal serving institution or a tribal university?

And somewhat separately, but it's why we're really glad to have folks like Center for Sustainable Energy as one of our partner organizations because they've done work like supporting and producing climate action plans for some of the tribal governments in the Southwest. So, tribes are a huge part of an equitable energy transition. And we really want to be cognizant and attentive to supporting those needs.

>>Kamyria Coney: Perfect. And I just wanted to go back to a question that Mark had asked. I think Alex answered it. Mark had asked, "Have any of your partners been municipal utilities that installed community solar?" Alex responded with the National Community Solar Partnership Program, which has worked with many municipal utilities on community solar. She actually provided a link.

I don't know if these questions are actually able to see by everybody in the webinar. So, I'll make sure that these are all sent out in our follow-up email, so everybody has an opportunity. But we are at time. So, I figured we can close out.

Thank You

>>Scott Belding: Yeah. Absolutely. Perfect timing. And yeah. Alex, that's exactly where I was going to. To connect with the National Community Solar Partnership for those questions about that type of solar. But I want to respect all your time. Thank you so much for spending the hour with us. We really hope to hear from you soon or if you have folks in your network who you think would be able to benefit from this type of solar assistance, we're here to provide it. So, looking forward to continuing the work and hearing from you. And again, thank you so much for your time.

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