Webinar: NREL’S Cost of Renewable Energy Spreadsheet Tool (CREST)

Clean Energy Group and Clean Energy States Alliance hosted this webinar to introduce a new tool from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) designed to allow state public utility commissions and the renewable energy community to assess renewable energy project costs, develop cost-based incentives (e.g., feed-in tariffs), and evaluate the impact of tax incentives or other support structures.

The tool is called the Cost of Renewable Energy Spreadsheet Tool (CREST), and it was developed for NREL by Sustainable Energy Advantage (SEA). CREST is the result of a collaborative process that NREL held with several state public utility commissions and other members of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC). The tool is designed and developed to be highly flexible, easy to use, and incorporate the wide array of federal and state incentives currently (or not) available to RE project deployment – not an easy task. SEA conducted a thorough review of publicly available models and cherry-picked the best features for the CREST tool.

Speakers:

• Jason Gifford, Sustainable Energy Advantage (presentation slides)
• Michael Mendelsohn, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) (presentation slides)