De-energizing Utility Lines as a Safety Measure

February 25, 2019

Utility Dive quoted the Energy Analysis & Environmental Impacts Division's Chris Marnay in a recent article about de-energizing utility lines as a safety measure.

Chris Marnay is a retired Staff Scientist who worked at Berkeley Lab for 29 years. He models economic-environmental problems related to likely future adoption patterns of small-scale distributed energy resources (DER), especially when clustered in microgrids exercising local semiautonomous control and able to island.

He was a member of the Consortium of Electric Reliability Solutions (CERTS) team that proposed the CERTS Microgrid concept, and has published a large body of research on microgrid principles, economics, and applications. His work on Distributed Energy Resources led to development of the Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM), which finds optimum technology neutral combinations of equipment and operating schedules, given prevailing economic circumstances and available equipment descriptions, including multiple generation options, energy storage, and electric vehicles.