Chris Marnay

Senior Advisor, China Energy Group
Energy Technologies Area (ETA)
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Chris Marnay is a retired Staff Scientist currently affiliated with the China Energy Group. He 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 storage charging and discharging at the University of New Mexico Mechanical Engineering in Albuquerque. He has lectured widely on microgrid principles, economics, and demonstrations, chairs the annual International Microgrids Symposiums, and served as Convenor of CIGRE Working Group 6.22, Microgrid Evolution Roadmap. He 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.