Electricity Markets and Policy > Staff > Chris Marnay

Chris Marnay is a Staff Scientist in the Technology Evaluation, Modeling, and Assessment group within the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Berkeley Lab. He models problems related to likely future adoption patterns of small-scale distributed energy resources (DER), especially when clustered with loads in locally controlled microgrids. He was a founding member of the Consortium for Electric Reliability Solutions (CERTS), which proposed the CERTS Microgrid concept, and his team has since developed methods for the economic evaluation of microgrids. Work has led to development of the DER Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM) that finds optimum technology-neutral combinations of equipment and operating schedules, given microgrid energy service requirements, prevailing economic circumstances, and available equipment performance specifications. DER-CAM has been used for numerous studies of DER potential at both site and regional levels. It powers the Storage Viability Optimization Web Service (SVOW), and is being demonstrated as a real-time operational optimization engine for microgrid control. He chairs the annual Microgrids Symposiums, which have been held in the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Greece, with the next one planned for Jeju Island, Korea, in May 2011. He also serves as Convenor of the CIGRÉ C 6.22 Working Group, Microgrids Evolution Roadmap.

His other responsibilities include maintaining and enhancing the latest version of the Energy Information Administration's National Energy Modeling System (NEMS), which is used for most national level energy policy analysis. Other work in progress includes the development of a national scale uncertainty-based national building energy demand and supply forecasting module for the Stochastic Energy Deployment System (SEDS). SEDS forecasts stochastic national outcomes given uncertain energy technology R&D success.

He has an A.B. in Development Studies, an M.S. in Agricultural and Resource Economics, and a Ph.D. in Energy and Resources, all from the University of California, Berkeley. He has also studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Hawaii, and was a post-doc at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2006 he was a visiting professor at The University of Kitakyushu under a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and he serves as an Affiliate Faculty member with the Energy and Resources Group at U.C. Berkeley.

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