NC State University

	November 15-18, 2009 Washington, D.C. BEHAVIOR, ENERGY & CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE A conference focused on understanding the behavior and decision making of individuals and organizations and using that knowledge to accelerate our transition to an energy-efficient and low-carbon future.

About BECC 2009

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center (PEEC), and the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE) are pleased to announce the 3rd annual Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference (BECC). This year’s conference will be held in Washington, D.C., November 15–18th (Sunday evening–Wednesday afternoon) at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel near the National Zoo and accessible via Metro’s red line.

This year’s conference will bring together people from across the nation and around the world to share the latest insights, research, and experiences pertaining to behavior, energy and climate change.

The 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference is the 3rd annual conference focused on accelerating our transition to an energy-efficient and low carbon economy through an improved understanding and application of social and behavioral mechanisms of change.  This year’s conference will build on the overwhelming success of the 2008 BECC Conference in which nearly 700 participants discussed successful program strategies, shared innovative research findings, and built dynamic new networks and means of collaboration.  This pre-eminent conference will bring together a diverse group of energy experts, social scientists, and policymakers to discuss the social and behavioral basis for, and practical implementation of, reducing energy use through the adoption and application of more energy-efficient technologies, energy conservation activities, and lifestyle changes.

The conference is intended to catalyze collaboration across government, utility, business, and research sectors and to share recent research and program information with the goal of achieving viable solutions for meeting long-term energy and greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets.

The 2009 BECC Conference is convened by the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE),University of California Office of the President; the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center (PEEC),Stanford University; and the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE).

Call for Abstracts - CLOSED

Online abstract submission is now CLOSED.

Applicants will be informed of decisions regarding the status of their abstract on Monday, June 1st. Please check your junk mail folder for this message.  Authors that applied to or were recommended for a Roundtable Presentation have not yet been notified of their abstract’s status.  Conference Chairs expect to finalize a schedule for Roundtable presentations soon.

A preliminary conference program will be posted in the coming weeks. Please check back later for more conference details.

Areas of Interest

The 2009 BECC conference is focused on leveraging knowledge about human behavior — drawn from social science research, experiments and other experiences — to improve and accelerate efforts to address our energy and climate challenges.  We are interested in tested applications as well as innovative approaches and research-based theoretical proposals with practical uses. Insights from other fields and perspectives are encouraged.  The following are examples of panels/topic areas that may be included in the conference.

A preliminary conference program will be posted in the coming weeks. Please check back later for more conference details.

Conference presentations will be limited by time and space constraints. The following criteria will be used in selection:

• Relevance to the conference themes (see panels/topic areas above)
• Likelihood of stimulating discussion, innovation
• Clarity of thought & presentation (assume intelligent generalists) implementation or collaboration
• Presentation of new material
• Fit in overall conference program

Hotel Arrangements

The Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference will be held November 15-18, 2009 at The Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C., 2660 Woodley Road, NW, Washington, D.C.

Lodging at Marriott Wardman Park is $259 per night, single occupancy. (We have also reserved a limited number of government rate rooms.) Call the Hotel’s reservation number at 1-800-228-9290 or (202) 328-2000. Mention ACEEE BECC Conference to get the reduced group rate. The Marriott Wardman Park reservation cut-off date for the reduced rate is October 23, 2009.

Student Scholarship Information

To encourage student participation in the BECC Conference, the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center (PEEC) is pleased to offer student scholarships toward the conference registration fee.

1. Accepted students pay a reduced rate of only $95*
2. The cost of transportation, lodging and other personal expenses are not included in the Student Scholarship.

Qualifications
To qualify, you must:

1. Be a registered high school, undergraduate or graduate student at the time of application
2. Be engaged in studies or research related to the conference topics
3. Intend to use and share what you learn from the conference.

Application Process

1. Complete the Student Scholarship application form found here.
2. Have the form signed by an advisor or professor from your institution
3. Send the form, via email, to tammy.goodall@stanford.edu

Deadline and Notification

1. Scholarship applications must be received by October 2, 2009.
2. Students awarded scholarships will be notified by October 15, 2009.

*The $95 student scholarship rate applies to those who have been awarded scholarships.

2009 BECC Conference Sponsors

Interested in becoming a sponsor? We invite you to contirubute to the success of this event by becoming a conference sponsor. You can sponsor receptions, lunches, sessions, the program in general. We offer a number of different sponsorship packages and are open to other ideas. Please email info@BECCconference.org for more information.

2009 BECC Conference Leadership

Convening Directors
Carl Blumstein, CIEE, University of California
Jim Sweeney, PEEC, Stanford University
Steve Nadel, ACEEE

Conference Chair
Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, ACEEE

Co-Chairs
Linda Schuck, CIEE, University of California
Carrie Armel, PEEC, Stanford University

The National Science Foundation now has an RFP out to provide $29

million in grants to academic institutions through two new engineering
research programs under its Emerging Frontiers In Research and
Innovation 2010 (EFRI-2010) program:

1. Renewable Energy Storage (RESTOR)
2. Science in Energy and Environmental Design (SEED): Engineering
Sustainable Buildings

Much more information and contacts are available at:
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09606/nsf09606.htm Please share this
info with your academic partners.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced its intention to fund 8 new “Energy Innovation Hubs” from FY 2010 appropriations. One of the Hub areas is solar fuels research. The Research Triangle Energy Consortium (RTEC), a research collaboration of Duke, North Carolina State University, Research Triangle Institute, and UNC-Chapel Hill, is sponsoring a proposal for the Solar Fuels Hub. A Solar Fuels Hub located in the Triangle would enhance the regional capacity to provide leadership for providing and using energy in the future. Annual DOE funding for a Hub is estimated at $25 million per year, with additional funding from partners, industry, and utilities.

Establishing areas of contribution from NCSU. Click Here for the form.

Names of those who have contributed

Join UCLA WINMEC (http://winmec.ucla.edu/) for its third Leadership Round Table of the UCLA WINSmartGrid Connection (http://winmec.ucla.edu/smartgrid) - a partnership between universities, industry and government. On November 4th, 2009, we are planning a thought leadership round table at UCLA on the state of the Transmission and Distribution Power Grid in the United States and the direction the community is headed in the formation of the Future Smart Grid. We will be joined by several leaders from government, industry, and academia. New topics in this third Leadership Forum will include Carbon Cap and Trade and its affect on Smart Grid, Stimulus Fund Progress and how it is being invested, Smart Meter Implementations nationwide by utilities, Investments into new technologies to support the future Energy Grid, renewable energy sources and their link into the grid, upgrading the infrastructure and intellectual / knowledge base.

Teleconference will be provided for registered attendees who wish to participate remotely.

Background

While the current electric grid in the United States has an impressive 99.97% reliability, it is somewhat limited in its ability to handle renewable energy sources, to effectively manage demand response, to self-repair, or to sense/monitor its own problems. Convergence of communications, sensors and information technology has resulted in phenomenal advances such as the iPhone, but such convergence has been slow to reach the utility industry. With rise in the US population and increase in demand for electricity, there is tremendous opportunity for the United States to lead on the path of a new genre of convergence between the existing electric grid and the next generation of Wireless, Information Technology, RFID and Integrated Sensors (WITRIS) technologies. President Obama’s stimulus package (called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA) that contains approximately $4.4 billion for Smart Grid represents perhaps a starting point for investment to modernize th! e grid.

Coupled to the stimulus package from Washington is the significant change in the national agenda on carbon emissions. The Carbon Cap-and-trade legislation in the form the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (also known as Waxman - Markley comprehensive energy bill) designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020, would have a profound impact on energy production and consumption - it is a game-changer. This in turn would further impact the electric transmission grid - for example if a greater proportion of energy comes from solar, then the grid would have to be modified appropriately to handle solar input in a scalable fashion. This bill would directly and indirectly stimulate private industry and universities into creating new technologies and innovations, resulting in opportunities and growth of new areas. Universities, technology providers, utilities, and governments would need to collaborate to come up with the next generation of Smart Grid an! d Smart Energy Technology. This would also affect training of new students in universities as well as the research agendas at universities. It would have the potential to radically alter how the United States of America thinks about energy. Bringing public policy, economics, business management and technology into the discussion as an inter-disciplinary thought leadership process would be become critical for a meaningful discussion. Our forum will plan to plan to start this discussion as part of the Round Table Thought Leadership activity.

While every major media source today is talking about the Smart Grid due to its importance to the national energy policy agenda, it is still unclear to many as to what this grid of the future will look like. In-fact, it is like trying to predict what an iPhone would have looked like in the year 1984 (25 years ago), when a cell phone was simply a mobile telephone. There is tremendous opportunity for creativity, experimentation and research in the defining of the Future Smart Grid. Throwing open this opportunity to students in universities or entrepreneurs in industry could result in new and currently unimaginable possibilities for the grid of the future. Therefore, while the utility community is trying to determine this singular vision of the grid of the future, the eventual outcome is impossible to predict, but the community at large needs to ensure that those who want to experiment with meritorious ideas get the appropriate resources, opportunities and incentives to do so. ! The innovative ideas of today would get impetus with funds from ARRA coupled with the incentives provided from Cap-and-Trade bill to become the creative Smart Grid ideas of tomorrow.

While the long term vision for the Smart Grid may be elusive, the community needs to come together to define short and medium term goals that are achievable in the next one to five years. Early successes would require some consensus in the short-term vision of the Smart Grid so as to take some actions and have measurable deliverables which would create early proof of success made by the ARRA investment made by the nation.

The UCLA thought Leadership Round Table would include participation from government, utilities, technology and infrastructure providers, energy exploration companies, universities, policy experts, startups and venture capitalists.

Some of the key topics will include:

Which technologies are “shovel-ready” to deploy in the short term, versus which will require some adaptation, versus which are potential for the long-term.

Presentation and discussion of various visions of the Smart Grid from DOE, National Labs, and how it relates to communications technologies available today

Technologies adopted by successful implementations of Smart Grid across the United States and other countries

Open-systems wireless and communications interface software and standards based approach for the Smart Grid of the Future

Presentation of advanced wireless, RFID and RF-sensors technologies and their convergence with the grid

Developing non-renewable energy sources that are grid friendly - i.e. scalable, flexible and secure

Security of information technology that is being applied to the grid (including wireless, wire-line, broadband over power lines).

Infrastructure issues pertaining to the communications technology such as wireless networks that would go into the Grid.

Fundamental research problems that should be tackled by universities

Standards - at what stage should a given technology be standardized, what should be standardized, and who should be allowed to standardize?

Technologies to support the entire energy enterprise including generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure including the workers.

Where is stimulus funding being spent in Smart Grid and where should it be spent.

Stimulus package from the federal government and opportunities for partnering with UCLA-WINMEC member organizations

Objectives of UCLA WINSmartGrid Connection

The objective of the WINSmartGrid Connection is to advance novel Wireless Internet Smart Grid technologies in university labs, perform testing in the labs, transition technologies into the field for scaled testing, and work with partners in industry and government for demonstrations and eventual rollout and deployment.

What is UCLA WINSmartGrid Connection

UCLA WINSmartGrid Connection is a collaborative research program between Universities, Industry and Government whose objective is to advance novel Wireless / Communications Internet Smart Grid technologies in university labs, perform testing in the labs, transition technologies into the field for scaled testing, and work with partners in industry and government for demonstrations and eventual rollout and deployment. Examples of projects undertaken would include:

Real time support of energy worker in field with intelligent communications and computing technology

Monitoring of infrastructure to report to control center for rapid decision making

Minimal delay wireless networks connecting to monitoring infrastructure

Remote / wireless reporting of distance between cables and trees in the field

Bring smartness to condition of equipment by wireless monitoring

Remote monitoring of electric sparks and other potentially harming conditions, and, and getting this information back to the Central station for quick action

Wireless monitoring condition of remote underground power lines where oil line is in close proximity of the power line to prevent explosions

Remote monitoring of conductor temperature

Integration and decision making in the field

Developing architectures and models for remote in-field communications and control

Real-time intelligent response systems for in-field repair, operations and maintenance

Registration

To register to attend - http://winmec.ucla.edu/smartgrid/2009-11/registration.asp

Current Speaker

Andres Carvallo Chief Information Officer Austin Energy

Kevin Garrity Manager LADWP

Mark McGranaghan VP EPRI

Ted Reguly Director - Smart Meter Program Office San Diego Gas and Electric