Chris Marnay is a Staff Scientist of the Grid Integration Group (GIG) of the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Department, within the Environmental Energy Technologies Division. He has worked at Berkeley Lab for 29 years. He models economic-environmental problems related to likely future adoption patterns of small-scale distributed energy resources (DER), especially when clustered in microgrids exercising local semiautonomous control and able to island. He was a member of the Consortium of Electric Reliability Solutions (CERTS) team that proposed the CERTS Microgrid concept, and has published a large body of research on microgrid principles, economics, and applications. His work on DER led to development of the DER Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM), which finds optimum technology neutral combinations of equipment and operating schedules, given prevailing economic circumstances and available equipment descriptions, including multiple generation options, energy storage, and electric vehicles. DER-CAM has been used for numerous analyses and scheduling problems, including at the Mechanical Engineering building at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque and the Santa Rita Jail microgrid. A significant current application of DER-CAM is the scheduling of the demonstration 40-vehicle plug-in electric vehicle fleet at Los Angeles Air Force Base. He has lectured widely on microgrid principles, economics, and demonstrations, chairs the annual International Microgrids Symposiums, and is the Convenor of CIGRÉ Working Group 6.22, Microgrid Evolution Roadmap. 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, has worked at the University of Texas at Austin, was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow at the University of Kitakyushu in 2006, and is an affiliate faculty member in U.C. Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group.

This publications database is an ongoing project, and not all Division publications are represented here yet.

Publications