Good morning everyone. Welcome back to the Virtual Summit on Distributed Energy Systems for Workforce Development sponsored by Santa Fe Community College EPSCORE and with partnerships with our Economic Development Administration. I am absolutely grateful to have you all here today. I want just a reflection on yesterday's conversation. We heard a little bit about policy. We heard a lot about policy, some of those things that are in the pipeline for making renewables more available of work for getting micro grid systems evaluated in the state of New Mexico and ways that we can better work together on our workforce development through workforce solutions. So we heard from Secretary McCamely and we had a great welcome from our Economic Development Administration Jorge Ayala or George Ayala. I'm absolutely grateful to have you here today. The next slide and today we're going to be looking at we're going to have a conversation. If we can look at that we're going to have a conversation with Selena and Olga are going to talk to us about the New Mexico Smart Grid Center. We will have a welcome from Jessica Falk from the Economic Development Administration who have made the infrastructure possible for the training center and then we're going to hear from Frank Curry. We're going to look a lot. We're going to look at a lot of our infrastructure at the college. We'll be looking at our systems, our curriculum, what the nano grid does for us and I hope that you will all be thinking of ways that we can deploy these assets to support your initiatives statewide either as workforce, if you're an industry partner, if you are with our local 611 and you work to train and qualify employees, how can we support that with our apprenticeship partnerships and looking at how the big picture sort of plays itself out to better diffuse and make our micro grid, our smart grid systems more accessible statewide and then we'll take a break. There will be a number of opportunities for you to communicate real time as we did yesterday so be prepared to participate in surveys and the likes when they come up and then after our break we're going to hear from eSAMTAC, the energy storage micro grid training and certification from Andrew Mackie who will be joining us from the east coast and then we'll have a quick wrap up of our day. So I will now at this point hand the conversation over to Selina Kaneli who is one of our outreach managers with the EPSCORE State Office, an absolutely wonderful person to work with. Selina, thank you for working with us. She's also one half of the technical brains and how this is all working together. You'll see videos and Selina is really our our expert in that area so thank you so much Selina. It's wonderful to work with you and we'll hand this over to you now. Thank you. Thank you so much for the introduction Kamila and I would like to recognize my EPSCORE colleagues who are also contributing to this. So my partner in crime is Brittany Vanderwerf and I'm not sure you'll see her today but she's definitely running the things behind the screen but I'd also like to recognize our project director Bill Mishner, the associate director Anne Jekyll and yesterday we had a number of EPSCORE staff as moderators Isis Serna, Ondra Kiskaden, Sarah and Sarah Pichet along with Anne Jekyll. So we're so pleased to be partnering with the Santa Fe Community College to build workforce capacity for distributed energy systems. I'm going to take a few minutes to talk about the New Mexico Smart Grid Center, a project of New Mexico EPSCORE and I'd be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to tell you that EPSCORE stands for Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. Don't blame us, that's a National Science Foundation acronym. The New Mexico Smart Grid Center is a five-year project funded through the National Science Foundation that establishes an interdisciplinary research center to address the design, operational, data and security challenges of next generation electric power management. Specifically our project is investigating how we can transform existing electricity distribution feeders into interconnected distribution feeder microgrids. This image is a model of a distribution feeder microgrid and how it can be both connected to and islanded from the electrical grid. On the left is the large-scale generation, we heard a lot about that from our speakers yesterday, with traditional power generation and utility scale renewables. And on the right is a schematic of all the elements of a distribution feeder microgrid. The Smart Grid Center is organized around four research goals, architecture, networking, decision support and deployment. You'll see the goal described on the right side of the slide and we have dedicated research groups including both faculty and students working on those goals. Supporting the research groups are the cyber infrastructure resources including data management and high-performance computing and finally at the top is our human infrastructure representing all the programs and resources to strengthen education, outreach and workforce development. And this is where the work with Santa Fe Community College fits. The Smart Grid Center is a collaborative effort with many partners including three research universities, New Mexico State, New Mexico Tech and UNM, Santa Fe Community College, our two national laboratories, Sandia and Los Alamos, the Explorer Museum, Microgrid Systems Laboratory and nine industry partners which are pictured on the bottom. We heard from many of our industry partners yesterday as part of the industry panel and they provide advice to our Smart Grid Center and also participate in a number of activities. But when it comes down to it, the Smart Grid Center is really made up of people from across New Mexico. I want to point out that Camila Bustamante with her kilowatt smile is located right in the center of this photo wearing a white jacket. This picture was taken during our last in-person gathering of the Smart Grid Center during our all-hands meeting in 2019 and we hope to be able to be back together in person sometime soon. Earlier I mentioned the human infrastructure of the Smart Grid Center. Workforce development encompasses activities and training that prepare people for jobs. Our programs support people in academia for faculty, postdocs and STEM students. They prepare scientists to use computing power in their research and of course they support training for grid professionals through programs at Santa Fe Community College. Later in the program Frank is going to share all of the exciting things that are happening at SFCC. We also have a robust suite of outreach programs through our partner Explora, a hands-on science museum based here in Albuquerque but with a reach throughout the whole state. Our outreach programs provide opportunities for the public to engage with Smart Grid topics and to inspire the next generation of Smart Grid professionals and research. I'm going to finish with a list of New Mexico Smart Grid programs and opportunities that are available to you, to your students and in some cases the general public. I don't have time to go through this whole list in detail but if any of these sound interesting please visit our website and sign up for our monthly newsletter. You can find our URL at the bottom of the slide. I'd also like to point out that Santa Fe Community College was a recipient of a $50,000 seed award and Frank will describe more about how that money is being used there. So that sums up my overview of the New Mexico Smart Grid Center and next it's my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Olga Lavrova who's one of the researchers in the New Mexico Smart Grid Center. Olga serves on our technical team and was recently recognized with her excellent mentor award. She's an associate professor in power systems and renewable energy integration at New Mexico State University. Previously she held positions at Sandia National Labs and the University of New Mexico. Welcome Olga. Frank Curry is going to join us to talk with Olga about research pathways. Good morning. Good morning Olga. Thank you for coming. I had the pleasure of working with you at Sandia for a little while before you went to New Mexico State. So the program that I'm working on is you know at the Community College has a lot we've heard in the last day people talking about certifications and badges and trying to move into like you know technician kinds of roles but there's also we're trying to build a program that is going to stimulate people to move into four-year and beyond kinds of you know career paths educational paths and so you know I guess the thing that I would like to hear from you talk about this morning is you know one is the general gaps in the in knowledge distributed energy and smart grid space what are the research opportunities there and then more specifically talk about the the the research that is going on under under this project and let people know a little bit a little more detailed some of the exciting things that are going on in research beyond the Community College level. Yeah thanks for having me. So I if I may if I put share the screen I have a short presentation so I will jump over and I will share my PowerPoint I hope you can see my screen with my PowerPoint. So this is the introduction introductory slide that I always start my classes with and I always tell everybody that in our classes and in my classes we will learn about those things that you should not attempt at home like this one depicted here so but just to start and give everybody a little bit of an introduction and I'm going to use a land grant Hispanic serving and minority serving institution we have a very large student body something like 16 000 15 000 20 000 I don't know I lost count across all of our colleges so we are in college of engineering obviously but there are other colleges that you might be or students might be interested in. Clearly as a New Mexico State higher ed institution we do support lottery scholarships and we also have lots of other opportunities for getting your degree funded through different stipends scholarships grants and awards so as I mentioned we are in Cliff School of Electrical Engineering we award we basically have education starting from undergraduate universities to masters to PhD and also we have professional certificate awards so this is great for professionals who may already be working in industry in electric utility or looking to switch to a different area of work but I'm not quite sure of the whole graduate school is completely for them so they can go back and get some additional classes take additional classes get interesting research experience and get a certificate degree in new area and so specifically for our area we have our electric utility management program which is funded by core members of New Mexico State electric utility group which is PNM El Paso Electric New Mexico Electric co-ops and a couple of our neighbors including Arizona public service so for this particular program this is the program that intended to prepare students and professionals to be actually in the upper management for running power systems companies whether they are public utility companies or startups working on micro grids startups working on interesting technologies in electric power and so on and so there is normally a master's degree fellowship which pays for basically all of the tuition and pays a small statement for students who are funded by these electric utilities so normally the expectation is that you will be working on the research topic relevant to one of those companies but there is no expectation that you will actually commit your life to working for them although of course they always look for great hires in terms of our teaching and research infrastructure we have a couple of pictures on on the right showing some of our infrastructure in our teaching lab our teaching lab consists and sponsored by electric power electric power systems consist of a lot of hands-on equipment starting from basically small low voltage equipment like 24 volts 48 volts all the way to real life equipment that we treat with great care with basically 120 volts coming in some of the DC power coming in from our rooftop PVRA we have some of the interconnection with actual three-phase system so students get to practice a lot of three-phase system work this is something that we noticed that is not is is undertaught in this day and age because it's actually fairly challenging to teach three-phase power applications and on the right in the far right the figure that is kind of at an angle this is our mock microgrid system consisting of multiple nodes where students can prototype different control algorithms for example for one of the households running one or another type of smart inverter one another type of smart control system and basically see how this will work in the big picture in the big grid and see if it doesn't destabilize or damage the big system in anyways additionally when students are ready for real big-scale research we have our off-campus microgrid which is called Southwest Technology Development Institute that consists of this little many village of several houses that can all operate individually or can operate as a microgrid and what's very interesting is on this upper right figure I don't know if you see my mouse we have infrastructure that allows us to be completely islanding from a bus or electric so therefore we can do a lot of interesting very interesting research here on individual units that would not normally be possible when we are connected to the grid just for the safety and stability reasons so there are lots of interesting research topics that we are working on there and as I mentioned there are lots of opportunities for students here's a picture of one of our students working on a generator synchronization lab and basically teaching students how to do a generator synchronization we have students who are going to conferences presenting their research work I torture students with lots of individual research presentations that they later practice at their real conferences and what's very exciting we also have a new cybersecurity program at NMSU that has just been actually accredited so it's an accredited bachelor's in cybersecurity degree and of course this can lead later to master's and phd work so this is very very applicable to all of the work that we do in microgrids and finally just to go over a little bit of the actual research topics we cover all of the topics that are relevant to our systems such as generation that we have heard about yesterday and probably will hear about today so generation including traditional generation all the way from coal to nuclear fired plants but also obviously a lot of renewables we're looking at the big picture such as power system stability how all of the power systems operate across North American continent and even between continents we are looking at power electronics that are applicable to electric vehicles we are looking at power at cybersecurity as I mentioned energy storage which is now a very very important area of research and so if you think about power systems that are around us I quickly went over the power grid and we talked about that yesterday and Selina presented a different picture overview of our power systems but so we're looking at all of the components so for example we're looking at transformers how the new modern transformers work some of them are already solid state transformers that are really really advanced we're looking at solar pv and how we can make sure that pv systems are operating at their best performance including some things like where you have to monitor pv arrays with drones and communicated information we're looking at very very needed really power systems and power electronics specifically what are the insides of all of these electronics and we're looking at other big pictures such as applications of power electronics to electric vehicles satellites cell phones and all of the electronics around us so I'll stop here my contact information is here my group is required to take mandatory selfies with me every semester so if you come and join us in our group then you will be required to all right well thank you for that presentation Olga it's um it all looks very exciting something that's um I came across recently was uh that if Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison were both teleported into the modern time that Alexander Graham Bell would have no concept of what was going on with the with modern communications technology he wouldn't even recognize the phone to be a phone but but Thomas Edison would look at our power system in in 2020 and say yeah I know what that's doing and I know what that's doing and I know what that's doing so like one of the things that jumped out at me is this concept of a solid state transformer just something that he might look at and say what is that and so I think it's really cool that the the opportunities and the way we're beginning to actually modernize and change this grid and turn it into something that it just it hasn't continued to be for the last hundred and twenty hundred and thirty years so um thank you very much for that I think it's time to turn this back over to Camilla to move us along and thank you for coming and speaking with us today thank you both very very much thank you for being here oh god it's wonderful to see you um the next person that I'm going to introduce is Jessica Falk who is currently the senior program officer with the economic development administration austin regional office where she oversees regional offices university center program and the economic development district programs she also oversees the regional offices disaster recovery responses to hurricanes eich gustav dolly in the midwest flubs floods excuse me for which she was awarded the department of commerce's gold medal award i have to say that i am been honored to know jessica now i realize that it's been even just a little bit over ten years since i've been working with jessica um and i'm very grateful for her oversight for the work that they do with the economic development administration and supporting many of the projects that we have here in new mexico which is part of our region six area so um without further ado i'd like to invite jessica to turn on her camera and welcome her to our conference and introduce frank curry who is now able to work with us through the epscore grant on the equipment that has been supported by the economic development administration so thank you so much um jessica for being here grateful and happy to see you well good morning um i am very honored to be able to attend this uh um summit and welcome you all um i'll tell you a little bit about the economic development administration and why this um santa fe community college program is so exciting to us um the economic development administration strives to make strategic investments to job drive job growth innovation and long-term economic gain and we look to partner with organizations um to fund projects that are very forward-looking and that are going to result in jobs but we're not looking for just any jobs jobs that will provide employment opportunities and professional growth so we're looking for jobs that are going to provide employment opportunities in long for the long term um so when the santa fe community college approached eda to purchase this equipment and microgrid energy assets it was not the equipment that got us excited it was the vision behind it in the partnerships the vision of having state-of-the-art hands-on training for workers and building automation systems and microgrid and microgrids training that would allow people to find jobs in growing industries and provide pathways for continual personal growth for those workers um but of course we're the government and we don't just invest in a vision in a vision this vision had support and in particular the partnerships that included private entities governments and educational entities that showed us that this vision was something that could really come into reality and so on the basis of this well-supported vision in 2017 eda visited a little over 350 thousand dollars to purchase the equipment to support the well-trained the the training center um if you look at eda's website you'll find eda's mission to lead the federal economic development agenda by promoting innovation and competitiveness preparing america's region for growth and success in the worldwide economy this partnership with eda santa fe community college really brings meaning to those words it means helping real people get real jobs and to achieve success for them for their families and for the communities as such i'm pleased to turn it back over to frank curry to discuss the innovative aid of microgrid training center at santa fe community college um you all met frank yesterday and you've heard from him a little bit today um he is now going to discuss how the vision that inspired the eda investment is going to come into reality as he spearheads the development of the training center mr curry i'm very excited to hear about how the smart grid and microgrid systems technician training is becoming a reality thank you jessica good morning everybody welcome back so yeah yesterday we talked about some of the um the the need for a workforce with new skills olga just talked about research pathways and jessica talked about the the kinds of jobs that we're trying to move toward and so today i'm going to spend a little more time uh looking at how s of cc is trying to lay the groundwork to prepare people to move into these kinds of technician jobs these good jobs and and uh in smart grids micro grids distributed energy we're going to talk about those terms just a little bit um but we're also with the programs that we're building trying to build programs that prepare students to get excited about transferring to institutions like nmsu and working with um with uh top notch researchers like olga laverola and others um and you know in generally try to move people into uh getting excited about careers and in energy and engineering so i'll be presenting the programs and the infrastructure that we're developing here at the college um to help create the foundations for people to enter into this space uh and so we spent uh in the last two days there's been a lot of talk around um smart grids micro grids distributed energy and so i just want to stop for a minute and um at least give high level definitions of those terms so that uh so that we've got common definitions as we move forward um smart grids are essentially just a combination i say just but it's a great big just a combination of information and communication technologies coupled with new energy technologies so and you know people may have heard about the you know terms like the internet of things and so uh smart grid is basically the internet of things dropped on to um traditional technologies and evolving modern technologies as we talked about earlier olga brought up things like solid state transformers just new interesting technologies um and so uh i'm losing my place here um and so you know smart grids will take it take into account everything from weather to load profiles what's on now what do we think's going to be on in 15 minutes what's going to be on in an hour or a day um and then uh and adapt the way the system runs according to uh forward projections smart grids can look at things like uh real-time energy costs so that resources can be dispatched intelligently to minimize the total cost to operate the system over time um and then if we further imagine a world in which costs of things are calculated according to the two crop excuse me true cost to the health of the the planet and its inhabitants people you know things like us um then we can use these smart systems to begin to finally create a truly sustainable energy system so that's the smart uh distributed energy is really just what the name implies it was opposed to the huge traditional uh generating stations that Abbas talked about yesterday um where we move power between regions between states distributed energy systems are smaller and they put the the energy sources where we have the loads and so we can begin to move away from the the big central concept and large power lines and transmission lines what we'll always probably still need those but um but distributed starts to put the energy where the loads are that's the key thing about it and then another term that comes up as a micro grid and well you know micro grids are their collections of distributed energy resources that are you know basically contiguous collections they're connected together so that they can be operated either in conjunction with the system that they're connected to or they can be islanded from that system so that they can uh so that they can provide energy no matter what's going on with the transmission and the energy system around them so things like you know earthquakes or or you know more recently a great example is hurricanes in the southeast and and you know one of our biggest stories with hurricanes is um is Puerto Rico so at this point I'd like to back up for a moment and give you begin to give you a short tour of the SFCC nanogrid so our nanogrid is basically um it's the greenhouse it's what the EDA built that Jessica talked about and it's I'm going to talk a little bit more about how it fits into a broader project here at Santa Fe Community College but um I'm going to start with the nanogrid and so Selena if you could play our section one video for us. Hi welcome to the New Mexico Epscore Smart Grid Training Center Workforce Development Summit 2020 my name is Frank Curry I'm lead faculty here at the college for distributed energy technologies and for the next half hour I'll be taking on a tour of the systems and the programs here at the college behind me is approximately 12 kilowatt photovoltaic array it's the primary energy source for the nanogrid under normal circumstances the sun would be shining and this array would be tracking with the sun and putting energy either into the loads of the greenhouse or excess energy will will be being stored by our energy storage system which we're going to visit in a few minutes. We also have the capability through our photovoltaic installation uh program that Zuby Wilson runs to have students move those panels around so that they can see how the angle of the the panels and the incident uh angles of the sun affect output on the panel so they can understand how that operates um as you can see right now there's not a lot of sun going on even though it's New Mexico and so under conditions like this the array is putting out very little but we will have the energy storage system that can back that up when we're in island mode otherwise we've got the grid itself that'll feed it when we're in grid connected mode. Hi I'm Zuby Wilson I'm the coordinator for renewable energy programs here at Santa Fe Community College and I am the lead faculty for the solar and water conservation programs but today we're talking about solar and particularly solar's involvement in what we have that's called a nano grid here the college is going to be a micro grid a nano grid is a micro grid within a micro grid so the entire college is going to be an islandable micro grid which means we can potentially export power when we have a surplus import power we don't have enough or separate ourselves from the grid and operate as our own independent grid the same is going to be true for our greenhouse over here on us which is the nano grid which is a micro grid within the micro grid so behind me we have this solar array and it is producing power that either powers what is going on in the greenhouse or charges a battery that allows us to still use the solar electricity at night so again the greenhouse can either produce power when we're producing more than we want we need from the array which happens every day it also has a surplus that can either go to charge the battery to run it at night or when the battery is full and we satisfy the loads we can export that power into the larger campus of course the larger campus is a gigantic one and a half megawatt array behind me over there and that produces more power than the college needs during the day so the college was also exporting power these are called inverters they convert direct current electricity into alternating current electricity photovoltaic arrays produce direct current what we use in our homes and businesses is alternating current all of this equipment then converts to alternating current and we can monitor from this meter how much is being produced each day and we can do data recording on that as a matter of fact in my classrooms my students can track that data live in the classroom and see what's going on instantaneously and historically there's actually a computer screen in the hallway that anytime a student wants to they can go with a touchscreen and see how much is being produced right now how much was produced today and really see like oh look a cloud went over 10 minutes ago and look what the effect that had they can look at it in many graph forms so Santa Fe community college has a solar program since 2003 and it was encouraged to do that by the city as part of our academic development package so students can get a certificate in solar in one calendar year and it goes all the way through from introduction to solar introduction to photovoltaics advanced photovoltaics solar thermal advanced solar thermal and then a series of lab classes they take there are also a number of other classes that you take introduction to sustainability a lot of interesting classes about electricity national electric code it's a really excellent program and we have very high job placement if you are a talented person and you are a good employee which is something the employers are looking for our program will prepare you for an entry level job mostly installing solar but i have some students that sell it some students that work in warehouses and some students who actually do design work again i'm zuby wilson from Santa Fe community college a coordinator for renewable energy programs i want to thank you for your time and i hope i was able to give you a little more information about the nano grid and how our solar program fits into it so i appreciate your time and i hope you're having a great conference all right thank you zuby so zuby talked about the nano grid is part of a larger vision at um at Santa Fe community college to create a campus wide microgrid we're doing that in partnership with seamans um who is it is who's done the planning for the microgrid system and is in is putting the equipment in um and and uh where am i and so you know the idea is that under normal operating conditions uh the nano grid resources will be controlled by the central controller that will be running the entire microgrid for the school including the one and a half megawatt array that zuby talked about and also a megawatt and a half of battery storage but we're also going to be able to to island the nano grid for teaching and research purposes so all these systems that you've just seen the microgrid and the nested nano grid will be the basically comprise the physical distributed energy assets of the smart grid training center and they also come with some exciting training assets from seamans one of the most exciting ones is a pair of training simulators that will be looking in real time at the campus microgrid controller so the students will be able to work and learn in the context of a real functioning microgrid see what's happening and understand how it works which will be a valuable experience for people moving on to the world and one of the things that came up to there was energy storage and so now as we'll see the nano grid also has energy storage in it as I talked about in that first video and so I want to uh go ahead and kick into the second video where we're going to talk a little more about the energy storage in the nano grid so we talked a little bit about the photovoltaics about the energy source and a little bit about the the concept that the the sun isn't always shining right when you want it sometimes that system's going to be able to put out more than you need sometimes it's not going to put out enough and so one of the most critical components of an independent microgrid of nano grid like this if it's going to be islanded is an energy storage system um this energy storage system is really exciting for a couple of reasons uh one is that it was funded by the department of energy so the department of energy funded that through the sandia national labs energy storage demonstration team who still works with us on things like getting sensors into the system um so they can track and do research and uh and so they can watch its operation and so the the information the data that's coming off the system as we run it in various modes to various experiments is actually being fed in near real time to sandia national labs to be used by the national lab system so that's really cool um more specifically this energy storage system is a 100 kilowatt 85 kilowatt hour system and so basically um everyone's familiar with teslas behind this door that says any c on it are a bunch of modules of batteries that are basically a tesla most teslas the base models an 85 kilowatt hour system and so this is kind of like a tesla stand it up the 85 kilowatt hours is able to serve our nano grid uh greenhouse which is about a 10 kilowatt load right now so depending on the mode of operation what we need to do um it can serve its peak load for probably you know less than eight hours six to eight hours um and if we were able to scale back to the critical systems uh in the in the greenhouse so the the pumps on the nft system the pumps on the dutch bucket system things that have shallow water so that they constantly need water flow so we always need those running no matter what if if one of those goes down for even half an hour to 45 minutes our plants will begin to die um then once we've fed just that's just a couple of kilowatts of load once we've fed those we could stage in for example the the big cooling fans the exhaust fans that are on the greenhouse those run about a kilowatt each and we have eight of them so um so we could we could begin to step those in there and when the system is operating in an islanded mode it'll be taking in or or compensating for energy from the photo voltaic system uh to feed the loads in here when the nanogrid is being operated in grid tide mode so that it's connected back to the school we can actually dispatch this energy storage system against things like peak loads in the system to bring down bring down peak demand charges um if we can time the discharge of this battery with the peak that goes out with the school um we can actually you know knock off hundreds of dollars of bill each month in some cases thousands of dollars um this hundred kilowatts i'm going to do a little quick math 23 it's about 23 a kilowatt times 100 so it's about if we can discharge this at full capacity while the peak is going on and shave the peak for the school that that's a couple of thousand dollars that comes off the bill every month just for turning on for the right five minutes we've talked about the energies the energy source for the nanogrid the photovoltaic system we've got the energy storage system that can either compensate that or absorb energy from it and these resources come together and are actually controlled through a central point that we're that we can go talk about right now so the various distributed energy resources that we've seen so far the photovoltaic system the energy storage system come together to serve our loads this is the main switch gear for for this system this is what allows us to island the system and separate it from the rest of the campus system so there's a main breaker connecting us to the campus that we can open to turn this into an island and then downstream of the island inside the island are the photovoltaic system the energy storage system we've got a bay for a generator system that's going to be coming in here soon this this coming semester and once we've got our energy sources all mixed together we need to feed them into the loads and so everything comes through this big transformer right here and the transformer then drops us to the 120 in the 208 three-phase that we need to feed Pedro's systems in the greenhouse that was entertaining um frank you're muted sir here i am um so yeah that was our general overview of the nanogrid system at the college and so now i want to take a few minutes with this next video to put the nanogrid into a little bit more of a human context and kind of and show you what we do with this nanogrid what makes working with some of the energy systems distributed energy systems to me kind of exciting and gives it meaning the technical systems are great but the reason we use systems like this is to support something some critical load that we need and so in this next video we're going to introduce you to um the interior and the heart and the life of of the greenhouse the the what the the energy systems of the nanogrid what they what they feed so Salina if you could kick us into Pedro in the greenhouse okay welcome to SFCC my name is Pedro Casas i'm from Puerto Rico i'm the greenhouse manager of this uh incredible 12 000 square feet greenhouse um let me tell you a little bit of my story and how do i got here the lead faculty at the SFCC college is Charlie Cholks and he was my mentor wow 12 years ago when i started this uh incredible new business back home in Puerto Rico where i built a greenhouse and a commercial aquaponic farm um sadly two and a half years ago the hurricane destroyed it and Charlie called me because he needed a help here and i was able to move here and start teaching and helping running this beautiful greenhouse in this section that i'm showing here that i that i have some of these systems behind me it's our student area this greenhouse is huge we have it divided in different commercial and student sections so right here we're in the student area so basically they run these systems we we give them projects so they manage the the units this is an aquaponic system we got the fish here running some growing beds and some floating beds so they can cycle plants and they can run the whole process water chemistry feeding the fish maintaining cycling fishes they want to so they can eat them and they can also cycle their veggies so they can count and get numbers so what a family can do weekly if they build one of these systems in their backyard let me show you a little bit what we do here in the in the aquaponic section uh here at SFCC one of the system the recirculating system that we teach it's aquaponic where we grow fish and plants together why we do that it becomes an ecosystem fish produce the nutrients that we need for the plants they do all those things in the water we send all that water through the biological filters and here in the biological filters we convert most of that into the nutrients that the plants need so over by the beds all the water that is running under it's high in nutrient because we convert it and at the end of the process plants clean that water so we can take that water back to our fish tanks so the fish tank will always have clean water and do that cycle back again we're going to talk about a very easy system to put together uh it looks complicated because this one is a commercial one but we call it an NFT system is a nutrient film technique it's a hydroponic system we mix the salts we have a big tank of water so it's our nutrient resager tank and we have a pump that pumps and send the water through these emitters to each of the channels so we can send the nutrient necessary for the plants so it's a very simple system to manage so we're going to talk about the dutch bucket system we have here at SFCC it's one of those commercial units that we teach our students how to manage this is the injection wall that controls all the nutrients and the water flow that we send to each of the lines of these buckets the purpose of that is for us to be able to do cycles the cycles go I plant this first row of tomatoes let's say we did it I think we did it about a week ago two months later we do another set of tomatoes and we plant it and then two months later we do another set and that way we can create incredible cycles year-round so even in winter time when the weather outside is freezing we have this incredible greenhouse controlling the weather and we can keep producing tomatoes year-round we usually will have a maybe a line or two that we're taking out or we're planting but there's always at least three of my channels producing tomatoes constantly this is a 500 square foot compared to our greenhouse there is a 12 000 square foot this is where we started our curriculum this is where CA curriculum at SFCC started and basically what we have here is almost the same things that we have over by the big greenhouse but in a smaller version just to show people that they can run any of these at home in a backyard small greenhouse we have dutch bucket system we have aquaponic systems here and we have an nft system the three main commercial system that we show you guys in the 12 000 square foot greenhouse we have them here in a way much more smaller version that anybody can manage thank you everybody for following me in this incredible SFCC tour I hope you all now understand what is the things that we do here in our facilities and I hope you guys enjoyed it welcome and I hope you guys come and visit whenever we can hi my name is Natasha and I'm a student at the Santa Fe Community College controlled environment agriculture program so I chose this program because I'm passionate about food security especially as the climate changes I believe it's going to become important to one grow food as efficiently as possible using hydroponics or something that conserve resources and two to be able to grow food in whatever location and whatever climate so controlled environment agriculture is a good way to learn to do that now we are harvesting lettuce from an nft which stands for nutrient film technique system it's a hydroponic system and this lettuce is ultimately going to be donated to hunger efforts for the local community since I started the program I say I learned a lot about hydroponics and also just about uh plants in general uh so we study soil biology as well as soilless so I think that the skills that I've learned are applicable to a lot of fields the program has really grown since I've started we've kind of have been building the greenhouse as we go so the nft was not a full production until now these two big aquaponic systems have ramped up and there's a lot more students now as well than there used to be the most important thing I've learned is just about resource management um how to conserve resources in a variety of different situations for the effort that we're doing right now we produce uh now that our tomatoes are fully going we produce about 90 to 100 pounds of tomatoes a week and in the nft system we produce 400 heads of lettuce a week anybody could get involved in this program uh we even have people who have come from out of state to do this program we've also got kind of sister to the aquaponic program the algae cultivation program which is also one of either the only or one of the only in the country at a community college level so it's pretty it's a pretty special place so hope you enjoyed that uh so the idea there was to you know kind of contextualize um the the you know efforts for micro grids um we've sorry I'm losing my place here um so you know in this case we're using micro grids to do things like make sure that food is available to the community and so we've been able to do that through um throughout a pandemic um that that uh greenhouse that Pedro just gave you a tour of is one of the primary foundations of our smart and micro grid training center um in in uh another example um is in Puerto Rico um Pedro's from Puerto Rico and when I just came out of sandia national labs yes last year um my colleagues at at sandia um we're looking at using existing hydro generators in the mountainous central municipalities um there's hydro up there that's been neglected for decades and we want to use it as the heart of resilient micro grids so coupled with pv and energy storage the hydro generators will allow communities in the central region communities that in Maria went in some cases for up to a year without power um we want to be able to get them online and you know in weeks instead of months and so a more extreme example uh that's going on but of micro grids and how micro grids create resilience and so the idea here is that you know the greenhouse is this little microcosm that allows our students to operate in real time and see how something is really works and have an impact so we're very excited about that and we're very proud also of our controlled environment agriculture um uh program and so uh we've got one more video for you that does a little bit of a wrap up and so Selina if you could do section four for us please now we've seen the nano grid we've seen some of the resources that we have in there we've talked about the program a little bit but you know one of the coolest things about the nano grid about distributed energy in general is that a lot of the impetus for doing it at all is about resilience it's about riding through things it's about local resources and meeting local needs and one of the um I don't know if it's necessarily fortuitous in a lot of ways but one of the most interesting things that has happened through the beginning of the development of this program uh is that we have a global pandemic in March when the school shut down Pedro and his people in the greenhouse where began growing food for multiple community groups there was food going to sheltered people to at-risk people um and that in the greenhouse had to run we had we also have a lot of construction going on on the campus right now and so there have been power blips and fluctuations and things under normal circumstances could have interrupted uh the flow of that greenhouse and its operation a lot more than they might have otherwise um part of the reason that we were able to ride through right now that's because the nano grid isn't fully functional yet it's what we're working on but it's interesting to see the parts that we theoretically knew we needed but now really know that we needed so we've got you know a backup generator coming there that instead of having facilities bring in a generator when they need when in hope that it's going to be hooked up correctly um we've got uh we've got a bay for um for people to put in research organizations to put in distributed energy resources and see how they function and all of this gets to happen in the context of a real functioning micro grid that you know needs to keep running this isn't just uh this isn't just a bunch of lab equipment where you know you turn it off and go home at night and turn it on and run a few experiments this is a real system with that really serves our community it feeds our culinary kitchen beside um among other things there was the uh what's the world's central kitchen project that was supporting a lot of Santa Fe throughout the throughout the pandemic and a lot of produce a lot of lettuce hundreds and hundreds of pounds of tomatoes came out of the greenhouse and went into the kitchen as well as going into other things around the community and so it's really cool that that that as students come in here and we begin begin to put in the the new generator the new bay um get the energy storage system finally online that the pandemic interrupted that so we weren't able to fully commission it but very soon we'll be able to get everything in place and students will be learning in the context of a real functioning system uh with with uh critical functionality and so um I think that's one of the most exciting things about it um we've got uh we've got uh Sandia National Labs is in the process of outfitting sensors in our energy storage system so that we can test you know thermal gradients across the system among other things um and I don't even actually know everything they're going to do in there because I'm going to leave it to uh all the really smart guys down at uh Sandia to figure out what they're doing there but um we've so we've got Sandia coming in we're we're putting in a data acquisition system with Sandia so that they can see what's happening in the energy storage system and in the rest of the grid so this isn't just students coming in and again like I said you know just running like you know test bench things this is students looking at a real system working in conjunction with National Lab and in uh uh university level resources and collaborators to to understand how how nano grids how micro grids truly function and what needs to happen there so that when they go out into the world they're going to have a real understanding of what's happening I want to thank everybody for coming I hope that this has been informative for all of you I hope you had a good time with it I hope you've learned something as I step out of here into real time I'll be available to answer any of your questions so if you've got any questions I'll I'll see you in a couple minutes so that has been sorry I forgot about this so so far we have toured the physical facilities that we're developing here to give students and researchers hands-on real-time tools that will facilitate learning about modern smarkrids but now I want to move into some of the academic framework that we're building to try to provide the fundamental knowledge and skills that students will need to work in these in these systems are we ready for I'm sorry I've just seen the instructions yeah so as I move through the rest of this I'm going to spend about 10 minutes talking about the program certificates in the classes that we're putting together as you have questions from what has already come or what I'm about to talk about please submit them at any time through the zoom Q&A and then when I finish talking about the program we'll circle back and get your questions so as we've already talked about today smart grids employ areas of knowledge beyond traditional power engineering areas like information technology cyber security working with smart grids requires knowledge of safety of codes standards that requires knowledge of distributed energy technologies especially solar and energy storage technologies and but while smart grids rely on knowledge that goes beyond traditional energy knowledge it doesn't necessarily mean that we don't already have a lot of the foundational coursework already as we talked about yesterday a little bit with a boss he'd mentioned that you know we've got a system that's been here and we're trying to adapt it to a new paradigm and so as we started to build this program we tried to focus to start with on existing knowledge and then figure out where we needed to supplement to to round things out and so sorry and so what I'm going to do now is get into the the the program and so what you see up on the screen right now is an overview of the certificate in distributed energy technologies and systems the basic idea here I'll just I'll go through the the summary there but successful completion of this student of the certificate prepares the students to enter the transforming electrical power sector as a competent distributed energy systems technician so this one is focusing on the tech side we will then at some point over the next year we'll be moving into putting together associates level things that move people into into a four-year and beyond institutions so the basic idea is to as we've talked about when people have expressed concern about for a program like this yesterday in this morning we want to make sure that this program lets people understand the you know safety construction safety is one of the things that came up yesterday so we want to focus on safety we want to focus focus on the technologies that go when we want to make sure that codes and regulations the students have been have been exposed to those and we want to make make sure that students get the ability to actually do some design so can we move to the next slide please so what you'll see here is these are the courses that we have in our certificate right now this is the initial certificate it will be evolving with industry and academic input but right now a couple of things I just want to highlight are one of the first courses that that students have to take when they step into this program is our BLDG 111 and in the in that in that course students get an OSHA 30 card so they are immersed in in safety and so they come out with actual credentials with OSHA credentials this program is requires at least a little bit of math skills we need students that move out into the workforce with the ability to navigate math so as our foundation right now we've got an algebra and or excuse me or statistics we hit codes we hit electronic fundamentals our PV system that excuse me our PV program that Zuby talked about and then one of the things that has come up it was talked about yesterday by by a boss Olga talked about it a fair amount today is the is the the computer science component the so everything right now what we have is computer networks in some basic hardware and software skills that we get people in but we're also going to be moving into cyber security and put those into into into the program and so and then we once we put those courses together that was our foundation that already existed we realized that we needed to put a couple contextualizing courses together and so over the over the summer we built two courses that are now online one is the SUST 1120 it's an introduction to power systems and I'm going to talk a little bit more about that one is the introduction to smart grids which I'm also going to talk a little bit more about and then one of the things that is critical to making sure students are prepared isn't just to get a theoretical foundation but to get them hands on experience with these resources with the nano grid with the micro grid with the with the micro grid simulators and so we are we've tried to create a couple of pathways depending how students want to move through this and one of them is a capstone again I will talk about that I'll be talking about all these for a minute and we also have an internship and for now the way the certificate is set up is if somebody wants to they could also take the the the ISIS information systems and computer science internship to meet the the requirements of the certificate can we move to the next slide so one of the two courses that was created and put online this fall is is we pushed that ship out to sea is an introduction to power systems the base I mostly included all the words so that when people go back and look at this they can they can they can see what's there I don't want to read all of it right now but the basic idea is to give students an introduction to the to the power system again as we've talked about and our boss brought this up right we've got an existing system and we need to figure out how to take this existing system and move it into the places that we needed to operate for the future and so you know we introduce students to the history of the system we we talk about you know basic power system knowledge low generation you know real and reactive power alternating direct currents and then move through increasingly taking them into the system so how the how the power system has operated various time modes you know from really short short duration things to you know to looking at the system operating over hours and days and weeks and years and so that's that we think that's going to be a really cool course can we go to the next one and then while the the power systems course talks about the the the grid as it has been and as it is and that's the course that's going to talk about focus primarily on energy conversion and generation technologies and and storage and that kind of thing this elac 201 introduction to smart grids is going to get students more specifically into working with smart grids this is where they'll be while they'll be working with the with the nano grid and with the and with the simulators and so you know we talk about the you know the technical design issues that go into smart grids talk about the economics because economics are a huge driver in the way our power system is operated historically in the way it will be operated as we move into the future somebody yesterday brought up making sure that we have data analysis they brought a big data and big data is absolutely a huge part of of smart grids and in the grid moving forward and then finally what we're doing is we've we've and I'm going to talk more about the seed grant in a little bit but we were we won a seed grant that gave us money to get industry standard simulation software and so we've purchased and we're using Homer pro so that so that students can actually design and work in in in micro grid simulations and Homer was initially developed developed by national renewable energy lab in sandia and it has since been transferred into the private sector but but so this is an industry level software package that our students will be using to learn we go to the next slide so yeah the capstone we I talked about two a couple of pathways a couple of ways for students to try to apply the knowledge that they're learning with the rest of this and so the capstone the high level of this is that I I envisioned that being almost a competition based kind of a way of doing things there are always through research through academia there are you know various kinds of kinds of competitions student competitions that go on design projects and so the general intent of this distributed energy capstone is to identify various you know design competitions and have the students participate in them and so they can practice they can practice skills from the technical skills to to to project management and working in teams and so that's the general idea behind this one and then the next one is the internship and the internship is a little more specific to trying to find employers for our students to work with and also working within our own nano grid and micro grids here here on on the on campus and so this is this is an opportunity for students to identify research projects that might be you know they could be in conjunction with Sandia that could be in conjunction perhaps with excuse me with a new Mexico state or UNM or something and so and so here we try you know students are a little more individual they're either in a job or they're in a in a research pathway where they're trying to learn how to conduct and present research next slide please this I just brought up for a moment because I stumbled across it this summer a few years ago well about five years ago somebody put together in our in our SHEM science health engineering and math and information technology support for smart grids and micro grids and so go ahead and go to the next slide Selena and so it was really cool because when we were first putting some putting courses together this is before I came on board here somebody had envisioned this and the idea basically and I want to revive this is which is why I'm putting it back up I want to work with my dean and curriculum committee and revive this is it's it's it's basically an IT certificate but we the intent was to put in enough enough sustainability and distributed energy so that as students work through IT through the IT certificate they'll they'll have a little bit of a context for where this might go and the other reason I put this up is because you'll see in the in the certificate that we already showed that we had the ISIS 114 and the ISIS 122 already in but the other courses that I specifically and we specifically want to begin to work in because of the cyber security aspect of of smart grids are the ISIS 171 and 273 courses that are so talk about computer security fundamentals and network defenses and countermeasures so it's going to be exciting to put in to put some of the computer science into this to to really make this a comprehensive program go ahead and go to the next slide okay so one of the things that has happened since we began this program that is very very exciting I talked about it a little bit in the videos is that in April we were awarded a $50,000 seed grant from EPSCORE and so we had already you know the the smart grid center grant that that funds my position in the in this curriculum development that's already been ongoing since since last fall but with the with the the seed grant we're able to put in more equipment and software and and internships to take the the the curriculum development the academic side of it and really begin to create a hands-on environment for students to apply the knowledge that they're going to learn so go ahead and move to the next slide please and so I'll go really quickly over this but and so we're going to add equipment the pieces of equipment that were put into the proposal for the seed grant initially included a variable load bank so that we can kind of create our own load profiles the greenhouse will be doing what it's doing but we can also add or add or subtract if they've already been added in the load bank we can kind of we can we can kind of create our own load profiles and and have resources dispatch against those I mentioned in one of the videos that we're going to be putting in a backup generator and so the seed grant will be helping us purchase that backup generator and then the other aspect that I think is really cool is we are getting energy management energy monitoring and management equipment and so students will be able in one of the internships will have students out there working with me to you know to put you know potential transformers and sensors and stuff throughout throughout the nano grid so that we can so that we can feedback real-time energy data so we so that we truly know how the how the nano grid in is operating and so I think that that hands-on experience and getting out there with sensors and then looking at you know controllers is going to be invaluable to our students as they move forward okay next slide and then the other so that was the that's the equipment that's coming in because of the seed grant the seed grant also funded some software that I'm really excited about so the the introduction to power systems course is now using something called the power world simulator it's a it's an industry standard software package for power system simulation and so students will be building actual models with generators and loads and balancing loads across balancing areas and understanding how how how power is moved through the system they'll be able to experiment with putting in energy storage systems and and and see how that balances together and as I already talked about a little bit for the micro grid smart grid course we're getting Homer which is a a nationally used micro grid design tool and so same thing students are going to take the things that they learn in their classes and they're going to apply them to actual modeling and so they're so they're going to get real modeling hands-on skills understanding how all this goes together so go ahead next slide and so I think that do we have anything in the q and a that's where we said to put things right yeah we've got we've got time to do q and a so please folks go ahead and put your questions in the q and a box and frank will entertain your questions here we go could you describe a bit more detail how the collaboration between sfcc and sandia national labs works what are the goals for the research on the greenhouse nano grid is more info available online somewhere in this effort um the the collaboration between sfcc and and sandia national labs is right now is largely based around that energy storage system sandia always wants information coming back from from energy storage systems that are out in the world we are specifically right now working with the demonstrations team the energy storage demonstrations team who has projects across the country in some cases outside the continental united states to bring back real-time data and become this repository of information in real-time systems so that researchers can look at how systems operate and and understand how you know where where the gaps are and what we need to to do to do things differently and so one of the major goals for them is just to get real-time data coming back from real from real operating systems uh one of the other things that sandia has talked about wanting to do is as i said um there are sensors that i i'm not completely up on the project but there are sensors being built into the battery system so that we can get some so that sandia can get real data back from from systems and and start to understand how energy storage systems operate in various you know you know in various climates and in in various circumstances and so i can get more information um about that for somebody who's interested if they want to email me after um do you think these programs are unique that just moved um nationally if so are there plans to try to recruit students from outside of new mexico uh in the research that i've done so far i think that the program is unique it we we know that there are some other programs that deal with various aspects of it and it is our goal to work with these programs to try to to make sure that we're the gaps are being filled where they where they need to be filled but um i think that i think that this this program is unique um it the way it's being structured right now and how we're trying to move forward i think it's unique in the fact that it is working within um an amazing research collaborative that includes multiple higher education institutions and national laboratories and in uh in one of the uh i guess one of the consequences of of uh you know of a pandemic is that we were already planning on moving a lot of this online but we are forced to now that for this next year everything is online we're under we're learning how to how to deliver the labs online we're learning how to do all of this online and so i think that it absolutely is something that we could do to um the recruiting students from outside of new mexico is something that can happen particularly um in in a more virtual world um we got here clay doil are you are or will any of these courses be available online i think okay yeah we just talked about that they are um this semester has already started so i think it's too late for that but beginning in the spring i believe the same courses will be available and um we also are going to have the um the certificate and the associate of applied science and an associate of science um run through our curriculum committee over the next couple of months so that people can declare these as as their pathway whether it's a certificate or an as and so i hope the answers that what do we got here megan uh what other partners who who are sorry going a little dyslexic who are other partners we should be working with to create internships and apprenticeships well that's one of the points of this of this summit is to put outreach or you know tell people what we're doing and get feedback to figure out where we can create new partnerships with respect to internships um we're creating the the internship program or the internship courses um that was the first step arguably the first step beyond that it will be um we i other people um anyone who has any ideas we we can be working actively to identify places for people to go i mean everything from from solar installers to energy storage installers to we're hoping people you know move into uh the national lab setting as as technicians to help to help with um you know the energy storage and distributed energy systems as lab tags and that kind of a thing so we are actively working on identifying partners um you know say as i've already talked about a number of times now like sandia is is one um and we've got some you know the local pv installers there are the are the more low hanging fruit but we're trying to develop those partnerships as we move forward we're still in the first few months of the program um john have you been looking at combined heat and power for use in district energy systems um the concept of combined heat and power will be coming up um our micro grid campus micro grid uh it's actually going to be including generation and some chp type things as we bring those online we will figure out how to um integrate them into the program so that students can get practical application uh practical hands-on experience with them um we we've retired we had a biomass boiler but we've retired that so um the the chp aspect i would be very interested in learning i'm talking to people about the i how to integrate that um right now right now i'm primarily looking at um distributed energy sources um i'm gonna say traditional but traditional in a modern sense meaning um you know like pv and energy storage in in the in the smart side of the technologies chp is absolutely going to be part of um the modernized grid moving forward and um all i can say right now is that we will be doing our best to hear what's going on out there look at what's going on integrate it into the program um and Olga tells me that nmsu's classes are also available online so that is a wonderful thing to know um so that you know as we work with nmsu unm new mexico tech the idea is to create these programs especially the as as it comes together so that so that someone like all got an institution like nmsu can take the two years that somebody did in our distributed energy associate yeah associates and just and just step right into a program with with olga and nmsu or somewhere else frank i have a question this is camilla hi hi um so how will sfcc work with the industry advisory committees and include the ibe w and the industry to inform curriculum so how are we going to align our curriculum to ensure that the program supports our industry and we i um i i think the answer that i have to that right now um and you you probably camilla have a have a more precise answer but as we put this together the intent was to build on what we had and get a program that kind of could hit the ground running it is so the the certificate um courses that certificate that that we've seen so far a little bit ago in these courses they're they're just the beginning this this is a this is a four-year program um developing this and so my my focus when when i stepped in was to say what can we do to most expediently put something that has value to um to industry into academia for our students you know how can we put something together that they can work on now and then forums like this and conversations with people like bernie um um and i'm going to forget um local 611 i believe was but i forgot his name well we will continue to talk to these talk to these people and make sure that the programs were putting together uh support their needs uh one of the things that's going to be talked about this afternoon is eSAMTAC the energy storage and microgrid uh training what's the sea in that one camilla um but so so the conversation is happening and will continue to happen uh the certificate in the classes so far we're about making sure that we could get something on the ground that was meaningful but it is by no means done that's what the next three years are for is to you know it's ready fire aim we're going to we're going to be working from here to make sure that what we're doing aligns and we and we have an advisory panel um that is likely to emorph change grow over the next few years to make sure that what we're putting together meets industry and academic needs excellent thank you so i think we've hit our time um for me yes that's right frank is there anything else you want to finish with i don't think so i guess other than um oh yeah there are a couple of things one i'm really excited about this program and then two is um one of the one of the people who is responsible for so much of what you saw in those videos um much of the greenhouse um our our biofuels program our innovation center uh luke spangenberg um passed away this past weekend um i luke has been a friend and a colleague of mine for a long time and i just um and many of you on here may know him because he's just he's he's basically a superstar and sustainability and so i just um it makes me sad that luke wasn't able to see he's been behind the scenes and little parts of of putting this the videos in particular together but the programs at santa fe community college he's been integral to and much of it wouldn't exist if it wasn't for him and so um i and i i i just i'm gonna i'm gonna lose my train i apologize i just i just want to thank luke and honor luke and all the work that he's done to put this this foundation together uh to help us move forward into the future and i'm excited to honor his memory by by putting together a program that he would be proud of and i and i will strive to put at least a fraction of the energy that luke put into building and community outreach and and just as amazing personality and and being a champion of sustainability i will i will do my best to put at least a small piece of that energy into myself and and and try to carry forward at least a small part of his torch and so i'd just like to say um goodbye to luke thank you frank it it is uh condolences from all of us at new xquab score as well and it's certainly a life too short so sending sending love and light to the colleagues at santa fe community college and his friends and family so uh now we've come up on our time to take a break and i'd like to invite you all to get up and move around take care of yourself and uh log back in with us in another five or ten five or six minutes and we'll actually get started promptly at 11 45 so we'll leave this webinar link open and you are welcome to to keep it open as well we'll we'll see you on the other side thank you all right welcome back good we've got more people in the room looking forward to our next presenter i'd like to introduce andrew mackey um andrew let's see we're going in the wrong andrew andrew is the executive vice president and one of the co-founders of protogen excuse me he has over 20 years of experience in the construction industry performs roles as a general contractor electrician estimator project manager designer and field engineer he has a master's degree in architectural engineering and is a certified measurement and verification professional there's more information in his bio but it's really important for us to share with you all how we will take this information and integrate it into the industry and into workforce so ladies and gentlemen i'm welcome andy mackey thank you andy for being here thank you camilla that was a great introduction as mentioned i'm andrew mackey from protogen and i'm very happy to be here today to speak on behalf of the e-samtac program energy storage and microgrid training and certification next please so the agenda i want to go through we've got a lot to cover in a very short amount of time so the highest level agenda is going to be why e-samtac why is it here why is there an industry need for it and then what is an e-samtac what does it involve what content is delivered by the program and what are the outcomes of the program and then finally how how can different organizations and institutions become involved in e-samtac and then spread the knowledge across the country as i think everybody here would agree that we are starting to see a pretty significant need for next so i don't want to dwell too long on the why i think it's pretty clear that microgrids and energy storage are really taking off almost at an exponential rate as you can see here in this chart from navigant it's predicted just in the next couple of years that the microgrid need and investments is going to start following almost an exponential trajectory across the world next please and then the a subsection of microgrids is battery services e-samtac energy storage is that's the first part and energy storage encompasses all sorts of different things from batteries which are primarily the most common but you've also got thermal thermal storage and kinetic storage hydrogen storage options etc and these large grid scale batteries which will kind of focus on here are used in a multitude of ways across the the grid for anything from you know backing up computer centers to allowing the grid to operate in a smooth smoother and more economical manner as well as deferring transmission and distribution upgrades when there are constraints on the grid by having localized energy storage it allows them to kind of bump out infrastructure upgrades while still serving the needs of the clients and customers attached to the grid the chart on the right here you can see is dominated by those blue bars and this is just kind of a little non sequitur if you will or a tangent but lithium is really starting to take a foothold and there's many reasons why that's happening we're not going to dwell on it but i just like to show that the the lithium implementation is is really starting to kind of run away with the market next and i think as everybody knows prices for most electronics computers etc are always following a downward trend and that's no different in the battery storage or energy storage market similar to photovoltaics the prices have been driven driven down towards grid parity and then it's predicted in the next 10 years the price of a four hour battery is going to be hopefully cut in half next to make it a little bit more local for me our company is based out of pennsylvania and we work in the pjm market and i believe this is an excerpt from the pjm deployments but what you can see here is the exponential current trend already occurring so if you look at the dates on the x-axis it really starts that exponential up curve in 2018 and then by just four years the amount of energy storage connected to the grid is really going to be taking off next sorry this that was the national chart this is the pjm chart this is the one that kind of blew me away so from 2016 to 2019 these are actual connected projects or projects in the queue which means they're awaiting approval for connection to the grid it's grown by 8600 percent just in the last three to four years and i think if anything says that this has arrived this is a great chart to kind of illustrate that point next micro grids are relatively complex systems so in in industry throughout industry there are professionals that specialize in certain aspects whether it's automatic temperature control and building management systems and automation or pv systems fuel cell integration chp and hbac integration the professionals in those segments have committed their careers and all of their bodies of knowledge to understanding the nuances of those specific elements but a micro grid takes almost all of those elements and incorporates them on every single project yeah there's some small micro grids that don't have everything but in general a micro grid is going to be typically more complex and it's going to require a large system level approach and a system level understanding to make sure that all the components within the system work together and well frankly don't get in the way of each other which can be found can sometimes happen so it's important to be able to have a holistic understanding of the micro grid systems next training and certification is you know it's a it's a strong push towards increasing the safety resiliency serviceability and investor confidence on these systems we don't want it to be the wild west there are people doing research projects that you know kind of they identify the challenges and as you move forward in that progression you identify more safety issues and challenges towards resiliency but in a micro grid project if cash is going to be king because these systems typically need to pencil out so you need to have strong investor confidence and insurance on in place of these systems and a lot of micro grids are installed for resiliency capacity you know if the grid goes down we'll turn a micro grid on we'll go island mode and we can keep a hospital up we can keep a police station up or maybe we're just keeping up an industrial process that's going to lose significant amounts of money during downtime but if your system isn't installed your micro grid isn't installed to the highest level of craftsmanship then do you really have a resiliency plan or resiliency possibility and we found that a lot of micro grids actually fall short in this if they don't have the full thought out plan from the very beginning in installation by qualified personnel next this is just a brief little example I don't know how well it's showing up against your screen but there are some bus bars in there that were installed due to the spacing between the batteries that are too small will it work yes but over the long haul the life of the system would be degraded decreased because the there would be an imbalance of the voltages through the array and you know standard practices may not make that overly apparent next please and then I like to kind of harp on it's a little bit kind of word play but you know these signs we've all seen them authorized personnel and you've got your safety diamonds I'll give this project credit at least there's values in the safety diamonds sometimes we don't have those and next please but that sign says authorized personnel and then this is one of my all-time favorite stock photos where you know this is from a data center application and absolutely these individuals could be authorized to be in that space but it's probably pretty unlikely that they are qualified based on the level of PPE that they're well not wearing next so now let's get into the what what is esam tap this is just a little excerpt image from an exercise about order of operations how to you know what order are you connecting wires and terminals which is surprisingly important on battery storage systems and next please so the the broad overview of esam tack is it's a course developed in order to increase the knowledge and skills with an emphasis on energy storage and microgrid components and it includes in comprehensive examination and then the individuals that go through the course and successfully complete it take the tests within the course they're then able to sit for an independently administered effort proof certification which at this point is kind of still forthcoming unfortunately did get a little delayed with with covid but that effort proof cert is definitely in the works next the program itself is broken down into 11 modules the first couple modules give you an understanding of the business drivers for the program and for microgrids and then talks about distributed energy systems kind of as a whole a 10 000 foot view what are the components and how are these components used and integrated within microgrid systems and then through module four five basically module four or five you really start digging into the unique safety issues around these systems it's primarily focused on batteries because that's where a lot of the safety nuances are and then we also go into the dc theory grounding in meters which you know a lot of so solar programs cover but solar and batteries and microgrids are they do kind of diverge and in a couple significant manners and the course aims to you know highlight those differences to make sure the individuals coming through the program are as safe as possible and then the last half of the course is kind of a hands-on understanding of how the connections are made what's important it starts to look at the nuts and bolts of these systems and and how they're assembled next the ecm tech program is also accompanied by a series of lab activities the program itself is primarily designed for electricians and electricians are the first line of installers and troubleshooters of these systems and it's very important that they get the hands the hands-on experience working with these types of technologies so that they're able to you know make all their connections appropriately and have a safe environment to make some mistakes that's not going to cause a catastrophic failure as well as there's a large portion of ppe selection and i think you can see just by a high level cursory view of this slide you see ppe show up there quite a few times next part of the course as mentioned is understanding safety's safety and the the new roles and experiences that individuals working on microgrids and battery storage systems or other energy storage systems would come across and there's some good you know this is a flow chart it's a decision matrix for how to select the ppe you would wear and that's because working in these systems exposes workers to new risks and hazards that they haven't typically come across such as thermal exposures and chemical exposures and how those chemical and thermal exposures are interrelated to the shock and arc flash hazards that they're used to dealing with because not all arc flash clothing is chemical rated so there there's some challenges that need to be navigated and we aim to provide that understanding next and this is a little side example that i think it was a great project so i hate to kind of bring this up as an example of what not to do but the batteries they're installing here are sealed gel batteries which means they're effectively spilled proof so you could argue that these installers are over encumbered by ppe that's not necessary and also maybe they haven't heard of a lift table which is a great piece of equipment that not everybody has seen that can help load batteries next here's a another little example of the accumulation of hazards i think one of the big things for energy storage systems is that they can't be turned off and that's a big difference for typical electrical industry workers kind of the first rule of thumb is de-energize everything but when you come into energy storage systems there are parts of the project that just simply can't be de-energized and the nuance with energy storage systems that's different from pv is pv is intrinsically current limited the solar panels can't ever really output more current than they're they're operating at batteries are an entirely different story they can you know output magnitudes more current than they typically do and that can become a significant hazard and risk that needs to be mitigated next here's just a another example i i hate to kind of do the scared straight approach but you know sometimes it's interesting to see this piece of equipment is a switch for a battery storage system in a data center and the two shiny metal parts at the bottom are the most negative and the most positive piece of the array if somebody were to take that cover off and drop it between those connection points they would have a really bad day this is operating at over 500 volts with multiple thousands of amps available and there's no fuses or circuit breakers available between there it would simply keep burning and arcing until there was a catastrophic failure where the metal melted away so yeah just a little example of of kind of the nuances of some of the risks that not everybody sees unless they've had the experience to to see it next please so this is an excerpt from the training equipment drawing sets that have been developed through the e-samtac program it has a on the left a an agm battery system which replicates scalable arrays so you can do 12 24 48 volt arrays over on that left piece of equipment and then on the right is a seismically certified or a seismically rated racking structure for a lead acid wet cell which allows the students in the course to understand the how to work safely with battery acid and electrolyte and take specific gravity measurements etc next once again this is just an overview of the drawings as part of the lab exercises and the training equipment next and now i want to get into the how how do you become involved where can you go for this training how can you offer this training next so there's been a development of credentials or i shouldn't say credentials but standards around the e-samtac program in order to make sure it maintains well a high level of rigor so that we can understand that anybody that comes out of an e-samtac program has the same body of knowledge and is ready to do the same quality of work so the first piece of that puzzle is the instructor requirements i'm not going to go through all of this because i'm sure you can get these slides and review it at your own pace or reach out to us we're happy to share this but generally instructors we're looking for people that have been training uh electrical trade personnel they're familiar with osha and fpa 70e they have a basic understanding of the things that they would come across in the microgrid program and then the real big bullet point here is number three they'd have to go through train the trainer program taught by a master instructor so next and then the student eligibility requirements as the e-samtac program stands with the current e-samtac credential there there's other courses that are being developed around the program but the program now uh e-samtac as it stands the part one program is for electricians so the the prerec of the course is you are a licensed electrician or if you're in a local authority that doesn't have licensure you can get exemptions or you know accredited uh or federal approval effectively if you're if you're approved to work in your jurisdiction as an electrician you qualify and then the second option is if you're a student in one of those uh trade training programs so if you're an apprentice you can take the e-samtac course but you wouldn't get your credential until you became licensed so you'd kind of be in a probation period uh you'd have the knowledge you'd take the internal tests uh within the course but you wouldn't get your e-samtac cert uh until you met all the requirements which would be licensure next and then finally the third uh leg of the authorization stool is the facility so generally the facility we to offer the program would be an accredited training facility whether it's community colleges universities trade schools um you know union training facilities anybody that has a level of accredited uh infrastructure for training electricians with a minimum of three years consecutively and obviously of course that they would have to agree to abide by the you know uphold the e-samtac agreements and then of course they would have to have the training equipment and yeah I think that's that for that everybody can read so uh that was a lot I know and I apologize but we got through it in 20 minutes and I'd now like to open this up for any questions Andrew you don't have to uh apologize for anything we're really grateful there's a lot of information there and I know that it's very helpful to a lot of people who are with us today so if you have questions for Andy in the QA I can get this out for you all any questions specifically looks like I covered everything well take a minute for people to type in some questions and um I'd also be very interested in hearing what Tomas from the local 611 might think there are any questions in the Q&A or in the chat so Andy the question what process is required for getting equipment for the training for absolutely um hopefully you have my contact information available through this summit protogen is the um licensed supplier of the training equipment so you would contact us and then we would be more than happy to provide you the order sheets and all the information you would need okay and to have that equipment so that's assuming that a person has gone through your train the trainer program before the equipment is available is that how it would work I don't believe that there's a hard rule that you need to show your cert because we know that people want to work towards this and especially under COVID there are some challenges with people getting to train the trainers and there is a little bit of a lag between placing an order and getting the equipment so as long as that you could um kind of prove to the ECMTAC organization that you are working towards uh getting your facility ready to you know provide the training then we would definitely work with you on that right um another question um concerning storage is there any other type of equipment um or devices that other than batteries that are available for training and not through the ECMTAC program um the the program was designed for um a 40 hour course effectively and it's offered people break it down depending on their institution whether they're doing night courses or whatever um but the industry process that we went through with the stakeholders and then job task analyses identified generally batteries as being the largest safety hazard um because a lot of other energy storage systems are kind of plug and play where electricians would understand this is our input and this is our output where battery systems often are kind of piecemeal arrays and and uh that's where a lot of the safety concerns came from so that's what the program currently focuses on great thank you what is the projected employment demand for certified workers um unfortunately I don't have a hard number on that because at present there aren't a whole lot of regions that are requiring it um and that's kind of a chicken or the egg situation right you can't demand a certification if there's no labor force for it so we wanted to be out in front of that um I can tell you that we are constantly getting calls for people seeking the training a lot of it's coming from um equipment OEM providers where they want their field professionals to to be ready for that um I would say you could kind of look at that as a parallel against those first couple charts I showed though as those as the demand for those systems be to be installed you know in 20 years or five 10 years we're seeing that exponential growth in the systems being installed well we're going to need an exponential growth in qualified personnel as well and uh you know just to what's happening is you know there are a lot of qualified electricians in the country the challenge is a lot of them take on these projects and I don't want to say they get in over their head but just a little short course can really go a long way to train the existing workforce you know you don't have to start from scratch so along those lines um can you talk a little bit about your partnership we have a question here to speak a little bit about your partnership with IBEW NECA and um the work that you've done with our speaker yesterday Bernie what are your partnerships with IBEW? Sure so IBEW was a um a contributor to the development it was also the program was also done in partnership with Penn State University it's an open program uh so the the partnership is very beneficial for all parties and it does not necessarily say that this is for IBEW or NECA contractors only they just simply kind of picked up the torch for themselves and have been running with it so they have identified that this is a significantly beneficial program and they started to offer it but we are also working just the same with you know trade schools and community colleges as well uh so you know they identified the need and they were willing to support the development and then ESAMTAC itself is an independent uh non-profit 501c3 outside of uh any of of those other affiliations. Thank you and Claybop Doyle says um as we begin deploying ES systems in our substations this training will be essential so it's a comment that it's timely and that they're grateful and then um we have uh Jim um who is saying open it's could you talk about the difference between the NABCEP certification and the ESAMTAC? Yeah absolutely so NABSAP is uh solar only credential I believe I I have a NABSAP I carried a NABSAP um and it was directly focused on the NABSAP has a a lot of different paths now whether you do installer or sales or designer etc but I would say NABSAP is if anything just complementary to ESAMTAC it talks a lot about the solar piece whereas ESAMTAC incorporates solar as merely a small fraction of the content and you know a large part of distributed uh energy systems or uh microgrids are going to implement renewable energy sources which would largely be solar um but they they are they're complementary but they're definitely independent and as somebody who's had both and has worked on ESAMTAC I would say that there's absolutely no reason to pursue to not pursue both they're both very valuable excellent thank you Andy are there any other questions for Andrew? Super grateful to have you with us today it's the kind of thing that makes these virtual summits um maybe a little easier than the regular no travel involved excellent stellar presentation from you and it's really nice to to actually see you we've been on the phone for a few rounds and I'm really happy to have you here so thank you very much Andy great thank you it was a pleasure to be here thank you um well let's let's see where we are in our agenda we're at the end of our morning we're at the end of our our summit I think we've had a very successful summit um right now we want to prompt you to follow the instructions you're going to type in two or three words that are your most important takeaway from the summit so I want you to think a little bit about this again everyone who's been here who was invited has something to contribute to bring micro grid smart grid to our our state so now on the screen that's provided to you you're going to type in two or three words just the words just the words themselves not necessarily full sentences not full sentences just words that are your most important takeaways from the summit we're going to create a word cloud so this is Camilla let me just jump in here and let folks know there's two ways that you can do this you can uh text using your cell phone you're going to text wise planet 683 to that number 37607 or you can surf over to uh poll ev.com slash wise planet 683 and to enter in your responses so we'll invite folks to uh go ahead and and get navigate over whichever way works best for you and um we can uh be watching those as as Camilla is doing doing our wrap up comments so if so I just want to say this again so if you say I put in 237607 and so that's who you're going to text to and then text the the word wise planet 683 and that'll enable your phone to to be able to to type in those it looks like we're getting some answers in so um this is fun to watch look at this so as we're watching all everybody's answers come in I want to I want to thank our speakers today and thank everybody who's participated this is really super exciting and we're we're so pleased that you were able to join us for these two days but I'll I'll toss it back to Camilla because you you can tell us about what you're seeing here on the screen well it's exciting so I did pause out and I think Selena's used to staring at a word cloud a little more than I am and watching these words grow but I definitely we have to absolutely thank everyone who's made this possible um I have to also thank our our technical crew but Brittany and Selena and absolutely the good work that was done on our wear video team and microgrid systems lab MSL David Breaker assured us this this was scheduled to happen in the spring and we weren't able to have it in the spring next thing you knew we were all in lockdown with COVID it was an issue of delay or jump on it and do a virtual summit and though we started in June David Breaker assured us that time was going to go by quickly so I really have to acknowledge the microgrid systems laboratory the collaborations that that organization brings it's really about partnerships it's about integration of the different entities that have microgrid as a priority from a different area so this is for primarily undergraduate institutions for the industry and how we collaborate and team up to create the workforce and everyone who's been in this was identified either by someone on our active team or by microgrid systems laboratory so I have to to say thank you to David Breaker and as we watch this grow we have also some gratitude completely to Bill Michener to Ann Jekyll and Selena everyone with EPSCORE as with our Economic Development Administration partners who made it possible to have that incredible equipment that you saw in our videos so as you see this growing and everyone is looking at the word cloud you also should have a poll that popped up on your screen where you are able to vote your next steps are and um when you have a chance go ahead and indicate for the day to pull what your next steps are you will also be receiving an assessment and evaluation for the um summit and we'd very much appreciate your input um regarding the summit what you saw that worked for you what you saw that you or what you didn't see you know what could be more helpful we have um additional summits planned and we want to hear from you to see what we can do to make sure that these are valuable we're definitely looking for a way to expand our capabilities statewide so we look at the um poll results um your first your next steps talk to your colleagues we had 53 percent at your institution that's great to hear get more information at 47 percent share videos and other resources um to follow up on that the slides based on permission from the speakers will be made available to everyone as well as the videos will be available online and consider integrating topics into your courses we have 13 percent there and we see that 20 percent will follow up with the context the context that you have made here in the summit short of not being able to meet over the the coffee and the donuts I hope that we will all of us go back to the lists of the participants and get to know some of our folks everyone better so we will be distributing the contact list and you feel free to reach out to each other and work together and do not hesitate to contact us at Santa Fe Community College for anything that you may need and at this point I would just really love for everyone who's in the summit to open their cameras we can see everyone and Camilla we can't do that in this app I'm sorry I was really hoping we could see everyone who's still here but I will just say thank you all for your attendance we look forward to seeing you again we look forward to working with you in the future to assure that we have a strong New Mexico based workforce in our distributed energy technologies and thank you all again for being here thank you for your good work goodbye