The next IREC Telephone Seminar will be held Thursday, August 21, at 2pm EDT (1pm CDT, noon MDT, 11am PDT, 10am Alaska, 8am Hawaii) on “How will Smart Grid and AMI Impact Solar?” The seminar will last for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

The Smart Grid offers the potential for both the utility and the customer to manage their energy more efficiently. A Smart Grid will use Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), which will give much more data on the energy use at individual sites and allow two-way communications between the customer and the utility. Smart Grid and AMI present opportunities to integrate solar and other renewables more effectively into the grid systems, but also pose threats to the policy tools, especially net metering, which have helped promote solar installations to date.

Dan James of Xcel Energy will discuss how a smart grid work, opportunities for solar, and the smart grid pilot Xcel is implementing in Boulder, Colorado. Keith McAllister of the N.C. Solar Center at N.C. State University will discuss Advanced Metering Infrastructure and the need to adapt net metering policies to the AMI technology.

Dan James
Dan James is the Manager of Pricing and Planning in the Governmental and Regulatory Affairs Department at Xcel Energy. He has 23 years of experience with the utility industry in the areas of cost allocation, rate design, product development and program management. Dan holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Colorado State University.

Keith McAllister
Keith McAllister, PE is the Distributed Generation Program Manager for the North Carolina Solar Center at North Carolina State University. Mr. McAllister manages the Solar Center’s Interconnection and Net Metering efforts with the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. He is also the Co-Director of the US DOE’s Southeast Regional Application Center for Combined Heat and Power. Prior to joining the NC Solar Center Mr. McAllister worked in the Research and Development and Retail Sales and Services departments for Progress Energy. Mr. McAllister holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina State University and is a registered Professional Engineer in North Carolina.

Seminar Format
This seminar will be conducted on the telephone. The slides will be in pdf files, which you can download before the seminar.

Registration
Click the Register Now button to register for this seminar. Roughly a week before the seminar you will receive dial in instructions and a link to download the presentation slides. There is no cost to participate in the seminar.

This seminar is presented by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar America Initiative.

Questions? Contact Larry Sherwood at Larry@irecusa.org