Economic & Community Impact Analysis

3.3 - Providing Regional Leadership on Clean Energy

One of the most dynamic centers of research, technology development, and thought leadership at HSU is the Schatz Energy Research Center. For thirty years, the Schatz Center has been working to promote the use of clean and renewable energy technologies, both within the HSU region and around the world.87

The Schatz Center pursues this goal through:

• Research: Performing lab and field research, and engaging in scientific and policy analysis;
• Education: Providing graduate fellowships and work opportunities for student engineers and scientists, and educating the public about clean and renewable energy;
• Collaboration: Implementing collaborative programs that support the deployment of clean energy systems;
• Projects: Designing, demonstrating, and deploying clean and renewable energy technologies in the region.

HSU has provided critical support to the range of Schatz Center’s activities from its creation, and the relationship between the university and research center remains vital. The founding director of the Center, Peter Lehman, and current director Arne Jacobsen, both also serve as professors at HSU. And all of its current and past directors, as well as the managing research engineers and most other professional staff at the Center, are HSU alumni. Thus, the Schatz Center’s impacts on the region can also be thought of as HSU impacts.

Applied Research

The Schatz Center began its research with a focus on hydrogen as a storage medium for intermittent renewable energy. This evolved into R&D on fuel cells, electric vehicles, and hydrogen fueling infrastructure, and today the Center’s research activities encompass the full range of clean and renewable energy technologies, including smart grids, bioenergy, offshore wind, and clean transportation.88

At the regional level, the Schatz Center has worked with Redwood Coast Energy Authority (RCEA) for over a decade to analyze and plan for the Humboldt region’s energy needs. In 2009, the two organizations received a $200,000 grant from the California Energy Commission to develop the RePower Humboldt Strategic Plan. This plan found that the county could meet all of its energy needs using local renewable energy sources, and that the local community had a strong desire to influence energy planning decisions. This early work planning helped lay the groundwork for the region to pursue community-based energy supply options such as Community Choice Aggregation.

In addition to its widely recognized work on microgrids (discussed below), the Schatz Center is also currently conducting an in-depth feasibility analysis to assess the potential for offshore wind development on the northern California coast. While there remain a range of technical, legal, and stakeholder issues to address, development of this resource could significantly help to achieve local renewable energy supply goals and have major impacts on the regional economy.

Education and Thought Leadership

The Schatz Center’s educational mission is to “increase energy and environmental awareness, and to engage students and community members firsthand with clean and renewable energy technologies.”89 The Center is affiliated with HSU’s Environmental Resources Engineering department, and also works closely with department faculty in Environmental Science and Management, Environmental Systems, Economics, and Forestry.

The Center pursues its educational mission through the following range of activities:

• Curriculum Development: Schatz Center engineers and educators work together to design curriculum for elementary through university students.
• Off-Grid Energy Access Training: SERC provides training to solar product testing labs worldwide, under the Lighting Global program.
• Graduate Fellowships & Assistantships: Providing graduate fellowships and work opportunities for student engineers and scientists.
• Educational Outreach: Educating K-12 classes and the general public on clean energy technologies through interactive lectures and hands-on activities tailored to the audience.

Regional Collaboration on Community Power

The Schatz Energy Center has had a long and fruitful collaborative relationship with the Redwood Coast Energy Authority (RCEA), which was formed in 2003 and has since evolved into an important force in the region’s development. In recent years, the Center has worked with RCEA to establish it as a community choice aggregator (CCA), an innovative type of public utility that allows local governments to provide electric power to residents, typically with lower prices, higher percentages of renewable energy and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

By supporting generation of local renewable power, including from Humboldt Redwood Company’s biomass power plant in Scotia, the Schatz Center and RCEA are helping to keep millions of energy dollars in Humboldt County that would otherwise go elsewhere, and working to build a locally-controlled energy economy.90

Regional Microgrid Projects

Among the Schatz Center’s most significant and visible regional impacts have been its design, development, and deployment of several innovative, community-scale, low-carbon microgrids.91 Microgrids are an important technology approach that can help enable and accelerate the clean energy transition. Microgrids can simultaneously enable greater renewable energy generation (by using their energy storage capabilities to smooth the effects of intermittent power generation from solar and wind), increase overall grid stability, and increase energy resilience (through their ability to maintain local power in the case of system outages). Several of SERC’s recent microgrid projects are highlighted below.

The Schatz Center’s cutting-edge research, thought leadership, and project development have helped establish Humboldt County as a statewide leader in the planning and deployment of community-scale renewable energy.