Pioneering Renewable Energy Choice with Geof Syphers, CEO at Sonoma Clean Power [One of the 2024 Energy Central Innovation Champions]
- by Energy Central
- Jun 10, 2024
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Chester Energy and Policy
Official Energy Central Community Manager of Generation and Energy Management Networks. Matt is an energy analyst in Orlando FL (by way of Washington DC) working as an independent energy...
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Please help us celebrate Geof’s and the other champions' successes by reading some of the insights garnered from these exclusive Innovation Champion Interviews, and we invite you to leave any questions you have in the comments below!
The Energy Central community is thrilled to feature a deep dive interview with Geof Syphers, CEO of Sonoma Clean Power and one of our 2024 Innovation Champions. Under Geof’s leadership, SCP has introduced EverGreen, the first 100% local, renewable power service in the U.S. operating 24/7, significantly influencing both community engagement and state policy goals. His work on the GeoZone project leverages local geothermal resources to enhance electric reliability and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
Recognizing Geof on the cusp of SCP's 10th anniversary, Geof reflects on the milestones that have positioned SCP as a model for community choice programs nationwide. In this conversation, Geof provides insights on the history and the future of SCP and stands out as a clear champion of innovation.
Energy Central: Congratulations on being selected as one of our Champions of Innovation for 2024! Can you tell us a bit about your role in the utility sector and how you got started in this space?
Geof Syphers: I’ve always been fascinated by electricity. As a child I learned how to build a hand-cranked generator to power a lightbulb and found it magical – invisibly moving energy from one place to another.
In high school, I had the privilege of taking physics from Don Rathjen, who taught me how to think about complex systems like the power grid and took me to the San Francisco Exploratorium to study tesla coils. I was hooked.
I selected Sonoma State University for my undergrad work in Applied Physics because I was able to spend all my free time in the basement machine shop building superconductors and miniature gas turbines. In my upper division courses, I didn’t love the theoretical courses, so for grad school I went to the University of Massachusetts in Energy Engineering with an emphasis in solar and nuclear power. There, I helped build a thermal photovoltaic system with a nuclear source for a satellite and learned more about power engineering.
My career pretty much followed this path, with early work running renewable energy and industrial energy efficiency engineering projects for the investor-owned utilities. In the late ‘90s I helped launch a green building division at KEMA (now DNV) in the early days of the L.E.E.D. program and learned how to construct large public works projects for counties and cities. These included simple microgrids and renewably-powered homeless shelters, affordable housing, libraries, fire stations and an expansion of Oakland Airport.
EC: Geof, under your leadership, Sonoma Clean Power has been a pioneer in offering EverGreen, the U.S.'s first 100% local, renewable power service that runs 24/7. Can you talk about the impact this program has had on your community and how it has influenced state policy goals like SB 100?
GS: EverGreen was designed as a prototype for how the bulk grid could eventually operate with zero dependency on natural gas or other fossil fuel sources. It’s quite different from all other existing 100% renewable services, because all of the real-time energy and capacity is renewable. There is no reliance on netting or offsetting some other power provider’s emissions, so it provides a working model of how the grid’s sources need to scale up.
From operating that service for a decade, we’ve learned a lot, including how summer evening capacity can be solved with solar and batteries. But solving for reliability in the winter and in the early morning is much harder. Yet solving that problem is important for economic reasons, not just for the climate – if we keep every single natural gas fired power plant operating year-round just to ramp up for a few hundred hours, we will be paying for a complete duplicate set of power sources. That’s an important lesson that regulators haven’t fully appreciated yet.
EverGreen has shown us the value of geothermal energy and the potential value of deep-water offshore wind. We’ve also learned that once the winter reliability problem is solved, a large fraction of the batteries we’re installing for summer will no longer be needed, since we will have far more gigawatts of high capacity factor sources.
EverGreen’s example helped California lawmakers design and pass Senate Bill 1158 in 2022, which requires all power providers in 2028 to stop reporting greenhouse gas emissions the way they do today on the assumption that all clean energy offsets someone else’s emissions. Instead, the law requires power providers to report their hourly emissions.
EC: Your GeoZone project aims to leverage local geothermal resources to improve electric reliability and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. What are some of the key challenges you've faced in developing this project, and how have you addressed them to ensure its success?
GS: With the Geothermal Opportunity Zone, we’ve partnered with Sonoma and Mendocino Counties and with three private partners, Eavor, Chevron New Energies and Cyrq, to construct 600 MW of new geothermal in our territory. It’s really exciting because Eavor is bringing their Advanced Closed Loop technology to prove that ultra-low water geothermal is ready for scaling up and Chevron is scaling up Enhanced Geothermal Systems that will enable geothermal in more places because it doesn’t depend on existing groundwater or volcanic rock. Cyrq is bringing a thermal storage solution that shapes the output profile so geothermal can provide power outside of peak solar hours.
Any project at this scale requires careful planning, and frequent and broad community outreach and education. So even though we are dozens of public meetings into the process, we’ve barely begun. This year, we’ve focused on building our team for our outreach work and begun scheduling “town hall” style meetings.
Connecting 600 MW of new sources to the bulk grid is another challenge since California has a shortage of transmission capacity. Even if there is plenty of direct path transmission between our resources and our load, none of that matters if there isn’t sufficient transmission between our geothermal and California’s largest loads in Los Angeles. That means our project is dependent on a number of delayed transmission projects in California’s Central Valley. This is why Sonoma Clean Power has recently hired a transmission expert to help us effectively advocate for system-level projects.
EC: As SCP celebrates its 10th anniversary, what have been some of the most significant milestones in your journey towards providing clean, affordable, and locally sourced energy? How have these achievements positioned SCP as a model for other community choice programs?
GS: Because Sonoma Clean Power is owned by our customers and operated from inside our small service territory, and because our governing Board is local, we are able to design and launch customer programs in one or two months and end them just as quickly when they’re not working. That speed means we can adapt.
I’m really proud of how this played out following our devasting fires in 2017, where our team designed the Advanced Energy Rebuild program to help families who had lost homes learn how to hire an architect and contractor, how to design their rebuild, and how to access grants to support energy efficient, renewably-powered homes.
Sonoma Clean Power is also constantly hungry for how we can be more effective at transforming markets. In 2015, we saw that the City of Boulder Colorado had managed to negotiate bulk discounts with Nissan to get their citizens $10,000 discounts on the new Leaf electric vehicle. So we imported that program to California, and it has now been copied by many of our sister agencies all around the state.
EC: With the opening of the Advanced Energy Center and initiatives like the GridOptimal headquarters, SCP has taken significant steps to educate and engage the community on energy efficiency and clean technologies. How do you envision these efforts evolving in the coming years to further support your mission and reach more diverse customer bases?
GS: I’m excited about the evolution of our 10,000-square-foot Customer Center. It started as a showroom and training facility for helping customers learn how to retrofit their homes with all-electric appliances, but is now adding deep support for helping customers under their complex energy bills and how to cut their total energy use. We are also planning to make the Center more relatable by showing appliances in context; the heat pump waters heaters will be in a garage, for example. Cooking with induction is already in a kitchen and we often have cooking classes there so customers can try it out before making a decision about their own kitchen.
We host hundreds of students every year in the Customer Center for break-out room challenges, where they have to solve energy and climate related problems against a clock. And we run the “Duck Curve Challenge” where students have to solve California’s problem with an occasional oversupply of mid-day solar power and a steep evening ramp up of gas-fired power plants.
Sonoma Clean Power keeps inventing new ways to engage and inspire like with our Empower Communities, where we are building long-term relationships with a dozen communities that have little to no representation in government. These are generally low-income neighborhoods, often with primary languages other than English, and after a few years of this kind of engagement, the work is starting to bear fruit. As we design services and programs for customers, we get feedback that helps us improve more quickly, like when we rolled out our text alert demand response program and learned that we needed to add a phone call and email option for those without cell phones or reliable service.
EC: Something we want to ask all of our champions: what does innovation mean to you, especially when it comes to the utility sector? And how do you ensure it finds its way into the DNA of your teams rather than just being a buzzword?
GS: Innovation requires the humility to know that we are not smart enough to plan effective actions in advance. We have to try low-risk experiments to learn what will work, and then invest in the ones that do. Sonoma Clean Power’s DIY Toolkit is a great example of this. We put simple toolkits into a few public libraries with equipment and instructions on how to seal leaks in doors and windows, finish swapping out lightbulbs and such, and for almost no money we learned this was a winning program. That meant we scaled it up and now the toolkits are in every public library across our two counties.
Innovation requires the courage to end activities that are working, but which are no longer changing behavior or markets. Sonoma Clean Power ended our bulk discount electric vehicle program after the third year, at the peak of its popularity, because we saw that the market for electric cars was growing rapidly without our support. That freed us up to shift our efforts to constructing charging stations since that was a harder problem.
Innovation also requires a supportive environment for creativity, fun and failure. When staff think it is a problem when their experiments do not work, then those staff will not innovate. Sonoma Clean Power regularly works to cheer the ending of customer programs and celebrate the courage of staff who make those hard decisions. We celebrate the lessons we learn and feedback we get, and we make sure we share those lessons with everyone we can.
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