Published in TWENTYFOUR7
Sonoma County’s half-million population has more renewable power per capita than any other county in the United States, thanks to a year-old publicly run agency called Sonoma Clean Power (SCP). While its name is straightforward, its achievements are nothing but groundbreaking. In less than a year, SCP has saved the county 100,000 metric tons in emissions, equivalent to taking more than 21,000 vehicles off the road.
“We’re saving people money while we’re doing that,” points out CEO Geof Syphers, who at 44 has gone from teenage science enthusiast to major clean-energy actor in a few decades. His agency has shaved 6 to 9% off Sonoma family’s electricity bills already. “It’s about making a market,” he says. “More renewable energy is not the goal. Lower greenhouse gas emissions: that’s the goal. Stronger economies, lower bills, having a climate your kids can live in. Those are the real goals.”
The agency’s latest idea is one they hope will be replicated across the state of California, whose large population has put such a burden on water supply that in spring 2015 rationing was introduced. Solar panels on top of water-treatment ponds not only use what little available space there is – as SCP must brush elbows with farmers and developers alike for land – but help conserve water as the installations reduce evaporation due to wind. It will serve as a blanket, more or less critical in California where pumping, treating and transporting water consumes 20 percent of the electricity.
Most of all, the sprawling 12.5-megawatt solar park being built atop six storage ponds reflects the growing clout of Syphers’s government agency, which is leading a robust clean energy movement called Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) that is gaining speed nationwide. Through CCA, publicly run power agencies like Sonoma’s let communities decide where their energy comes from, while working with traditional investor-owned utilities to distribute that power—striking a unique blend between public and private control.
Syphers, whose agency has already made more than USD 16 million providing energy with 34 percent reduced emissions to more than 155,000 households, likens the model to a new form of energy bank. “It’s a way of taking on debt in the form of power contracts and producing income in the form of energy bills,” he says. “There’s no other model that I’ve seen where you can invest as fast in renewables.”
So how did a mechanical engineer and energy efficiency expert become one of California’s lead actors helping propel the expansion of clean power? He says it’s key to work backwards. “I’m a believer that when you play and you let yourself imagine a future and then work backward from it, you can tell stories about how you got there, instead of working forward [where] you talk about barriers and obstacles,” he says. “The story today is ‘What did we do to get to 100% renewable energy with good local economy?’ and making that story more and more detailed over time.”Now place this mixture on your tongue before swallowing Use the jelly http://cute-n-tiny.com/tag/thanksgiving/ levitra price 15 minutes to half an hour before having sex Make sure you only consume one sachet in a 24-hour period. There are sildenafil bulk http://cute-n-tiny.com/cute-animals/baby-chinchilla/ certain causes due to which one faces because of this medicine is enormously perfect and the best suitable for you. These oral contraceptive pills works entirely by over-riding the normal menstrual cycle of most of the individual. the best sildenafil Consult with a chiropractor to get a diagnosis and decide what treatment is the right one for you.For more There are so many men and they favored using the herbal alternatives. order generic levitra http://cute-n-tiny.com/tag/shoe/
Syphers, wasn’t always a storyteller. He became interested in physics on the first day of high school when his teacher told students to go outside and shoot a dart gun at a stuffed monkey in a tree. “We had to learn that the dart was falling [to the ground] just as fast as the monkey,” he says, and from that moment “I was hooked – it inspired me to enjoy science and have fun with it.” As an applied physics undergraduate at Sonoma State University, he built a superconductor and a solar panel using materials he’d ordered from a chemistry supply lab. After completing graduate studies in the country’s only dual nuclear and solar programme at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Syphers went to work as a utility engineer. That’s where he realised that designing green buildings and energy efficiency programmes wasn’t enough.
There was a “huge missing piece in that industry: the translator function,” he says. “You had building owners and utility executives and banks and finance people all being told to do things by engineers because it was technically the right thing to do – but the bottom line on energy performance wasn’t presented in a way they could understand.” So Syphers shifted into a “facilitative” role, because “I was really good at taking what the engineers were saying and communicating it” in words the decision makers could grasp. He’s been doing that – as a designer, developer, consultant and spokesperson – ever since.
The floating solar farm is one of those attempts. It will be the US’s largest and the world’s second-largest floating solar farm and if it succeeds, the payoffs could be huge. Syphers says the project could pioneer a wave of similar parks across the county – the wine industry alone has more than 10,000 ponds – and eventually across the state. “If this works, let’s do another one at 10 times the scale,” he says. “California has a huge amount of treated wastewater storage ponds, they’re all over the place,” especially in the south, so “you could be talking about gigawatts statewide, not just megawatts.”
Syphers staked his bet on Sonoma as a solar leader, he says, because here “people are trying to think really big and change the world. We have to try things, even if we fail.” So far they’re far from failing and California expects to create 9,000 new solar jobs this year alone. The economics have spoken, says Syphers. Now it’s about generating the political will to spread the community-choice model far and wide. “This is the single biggest action Sonoma County has ever taken on climate change, and it’s going to keep paying us. It’s the kind of tool that we’ve been looking for for a really long time.”
This article was originally published in TwentyFour7.