Abstract
Energy issues have once again emerged as central public policy themes within the U.S. and abroad. In particular, energy efficiency and smart grid technologies are emphasized significantly in recent federal legislation, such as the in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and landmark California global warming solutions act, AB32. The Indian government has set aggressive energy efficiency and solar development goals through its National Action Plan on Climate Change. In this seminar, I describe three distinct analytical efforts that inform these policy decisions. The analyses span energy efficiency, buildings-to-grid, and renewables topics. I first describe work that was conducted in my role as a fellow at the Climate Protection Partnerships Division, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. I review the results of an internal effort to understand the potential for reducing energy consumption through increased end use energy efficiency. A meta analysis of recent studies of U.S. national and regional energy efficiency potential in buildings and industry was conducted. Despite the differences among the studies, the analysis underscores the existence of large and cost-effective potential for energy efficiency. In the second part of my talk, I discuss the method and results from a recent study of permanent load shifting technologies (PLS) in California. PLS technologies, which include thermal and electrical storage, and process shifting, is a smart grid application that may provide renewables integration, demand reduction, and energy efficiency in some cases. In the third section, I discuss recent efforts in informing Indian renewables policy decisions. A grid planning framework is developed and illustrated using solar energy as an example. This framework allows policy makers, utilities, project developers to compare and contrast the reliability, economic and environmental performance aspects of different renewables development options – namely distributed, central and off-grid development. I conclude my talk with insights on the types of analysis, particularly working across scales of project, utility program and federal programs, can help to advance energy efficiency, smart grid, and climate change mitigation goals. Finally, I will briefly describe current projects in the buildings-to-grid domain in which we are developing techniques and frameworks to understand how load resources can help integrate renewables.
Biography
Priya Sreedharan is a senior consultant at E3, where she focuses on buildings-to-grid, energy efficiency and environmental impact projects. Her work has been driven by a deep belief in integrated design and systems-analysis perspectives. Prior to joining E3, she was a AAAS fellowship at the Environmental Protection Agency, where she researched energy efficiency, renewable energy and smart grid technologies in the context of climate change. Among her previous affiliations, she is an alumni of the Integral Group/Rumsey Engineers, where she engaged on benchmarking, consulting and design projects for data centers and commercial buildings. She has PhD and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. In her doctoral research, she developed real-time indoor sensor systems, using Bayesian statistical algorithms, to detect and characterize acute air contaminant releases. In her MS research, she developed model based fault detection and diagnostics systems for chillers. She has collaborated extensively with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a graduate researcher, postdoctoral research specialist and outside consultant.
