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Hello, I'm Rich Harkness.  I first spoke to you on June 27 to
describe a potential new solar electric service I call
remote-solar. I attached a whitepaper describing it in detail.  I
want to tell you I'm now in the process of becoming a party to
CPUC's proceeding A2205022 dealing with a related concept called
community solar. My objective is that CPUC, with the help of CARB,
Cal Energy and CAISO, fully evaluate this concept and -if it makes
sense as a win-win for both the environment and for consumer's
wallets- tariff it.  I hope each of you will have another look at
it, and I would very much appreciate any feedback and advice about
how to move it forward. Whitepaper is attached again below.

By way of background, I'm retired from doing strategic and new
business planning at Stanford Research Institute, IBM and Boeing. 
I've written a book about global warming.  Last year I wrote a
paper showing that utility- scale solar is about 6 times more
cost-effective than rooftop solar per unit of power produced.  That
fact isn't in the literature and I think very few know the
difference is so large. 

To take advantage of it I analyzed a scenario where homeowners
could purchase solar panels and battery storage in utility-scale
solar farms and export that energy into the grid to replace or
offset the grid energy used at home.  The homeowner would just pay
for transmission and distribution. I called this "remote-solar".

It took about 6 months to get the data and construct a financial
model but the results were dramatic.  I estimated that a
remote-solar system capable of generating as much power as the
average California home uses each year would only cost about $4200,
payback in 3.3 years and have an ROI of about 30%.  About half that
$4200 is for battery storage. 

I suspect many folks would voluntarily invest some of their savings
in something that gets a 30% ROI, so remote-solar could be a way to
reduce electric bills while significantly and painlessly increasing
the funding for solar. 

I've read CARBs laudable and necessary Scoping Plan and believe if
remote-solar were made available it would help meet the stated
goals for renewable energy.  Therefore I hope Board members will
read the executive summary of my whitepaper, and ask their
technical staff to study the entire document.  If there are no
fatal flaws in this concept, I hope CARB will encourage the CPUC to
develop a tariff for remote-solar and that CARB will consider
running a pilot program to test remote-solar in the real world.