PG&E to Expand Use of Permanent Microgrids in Northern California naturalgasintel.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from naturalgasintel.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Published: 15 Apr 2021, 06:48
By:
Andy Colthorpe
The basics of how a community microgrid built under the scheme would work to supply customers and critical facilities like hospitals in the event of outages or PSPS events. Image: PG&E.
Communities at risk of losing their electricity supply in the service area of California utility PG&E when disasters strike are being supported in developing their own microgrids through a new scheme announced by the utility this week.
PG&E, one of California’s three big investor-owned utility companies, is rolling out the Community Microgrid Enablement Program (CMEP), which will offer assistance for the design and deployment of microgrids which can be islanded and operate independently of the main grid operated by PG&E.
California regulators and utilities want to build microgrids for communities most at threat from the state’s increasingly deadly wildfires, and the widespread public safety power shutoff (PSPS) grid outages meant to prevent them.
But despite policies to fund and enable these microgrids, California is still far from finding effective ways to get them in place for next year’s fire season.
Even Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility most affected by wildfires and fire-prevention blackouts, is struggling to find solutions to replace the hundreds of megawatts worth of mobile diesel generators it’s secured to back up Northern California communities facing power outages.