Comments of the Geothermal Resource Council in response to administrative law judge ruling seeking comments on inputs and assumptions for development of the 2019-2020 reference system plan.
Summary of GRC Recommendations
- If, as the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) proposes, RESOLVE is used again in the 2019 IRP cycle, the GRC suggests the Commission require all other parties using different models and methods to create benchmark cases which can be compared to those using RESOLVE. Additionally, in the context of the announced retirement of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in 2024-2025, the GRC believes resource diversity is a critical and a portion of Diablo’s baseload capacity should be replaced with a diverse set of baseload renewables.
- The CPUC should include a range for geothermal installed costs. This could be done by creating a similar sensitivity option as for some other resources: $5,063/kW (High), $4,500/kW (Mid), $4,000/kW (Low).
- The CPUC should evaluate why RESOLVE’s results do not build new geothermal until 2030 even in low cost geothermal and high cost solar/battery scenarios. This result is not consistent with new geothermal contracts in California with commercial on-line dates beginning in 2017.