Relaxed SuperCREZ units

This dataset show SuperCREZ where site suitability estimates were relaxed because the existing and commercial renewable energy projects in a subset of SuperCREZs exceeded the estimated potential under the more restrictive Environmental Exclusion levels. For example, no potential installed capacity of solar CSP remain in the Kramer Super CREZ under the Category 4 Exclusion Level, but 1150 GWh of solar CSP generation need to be sited in Kramer due to existing or commercial power plants that cannot be excluded from the portfolio. We chose to model the entire build-out (both existing and commercial, as well as generic) for two key reasons. First, the electricity costs estimated in the RPS calculator reflect the entire portfolio, not just the “net short” build-out. Impacts (land use efficiency, environmental impact score) modeled using the net short build-out would not correspond to the electricity costs. Second, because locations of existing and commercial projects could not be made publicly available, we could not exclude them from the site suitability models. As a result, modeling only the net short build-out (i.e., generic projects) could select sites where current existing and commercial projects may be located.