Testing off-the-grid solutions
Nation’s largest utility shows benefits of using microgrids
SAN FRANCISCO — When a wildfire tore through Briceburg, California, nearly two years ago, the tiny community on the edge of Yosemite National Park lost the only power line connecting it to the electrical grid.
Rather than rebuilding poles and wires over dry hillsides, which could raise the risk of equipment igniting fires, the nation’s largest utility decided to give Briceburg a self-reliant power system.
The stand-alone grid made of solar panels, batteries and a backup generator began operating in June. It’s the first of potentially hundreds of its kind as Pacific Gas & Electric works to prevent another deadly fire like the one that forced it to file for bankruptcy in 2019.
The ramping up of this technology is among a number of strategies to improve energy resilience in California as a cycle of extreme heat, drought and wildfires hammers the West, triggering massive blackouts and threatening the power supply in the country’s most populous state.
“I don’t think anyone in the world anticipated how quickly the changes brought on by climate change would manifest. We’re all scrambling to deal with that,” said Peter Lehman, founding director of the Schatz Energy Research Center, a clean energy institute in Arcata.
The response follows blackouts in California in the past two years that exposed the power grid’s vulnerability to weather. Eindstorms led utilities to shut off power to keep transmission lines from sparking fire. Then last summer, a heat wave triggered the first rolling outages in 20 years. Over 800,000 homes and businesses lost power over two days in August.
During both crises, a Native American reservation on California’s far northern coast kept the electricity flowing with the help of two microgrids that can disconnect from the larger electrical grid and switch to using solar energy generated and stored in battery banks near its hotel-casino.
As most of rural Humboldt County sat in the dark during a planned shutoff in October 2019, the Blue Lake Rancheria became a lifeline for thousands of its neighbors: The gas station and convenience store provided fuel and supplies, the hotel housed patients who needed a place to plug in medical devices, the local newspaper used the conference room to put out the next day’s edition, and a hatchery continued pumping water to keep its fish alive.
“We’ve had outages before, but they were not severe,” said Shad Overton, a manager at Mad River Hatchery. “The electricity from the microgrid pumped the diesel fuel we needed for our generator.”
During a few hours of rolling blackouts last August, the reservation’s microgrids went into “island mode” to help ease stress on the state’s maxed-out grid.
“We seemed to arrive just in time to handle these emergencies,” said Jana Ganion, the tribe’s director of sustainability.
Energy experts said the tribe’s $8 million microgrids highlight the technology’s potential in providing reliable power to hospitals, fire stations and other small-scale operations during a disaster, and to remote communities vulnerable to power loss.
“Anything that can give you a little bit of electricity ... when it’s dark is enormously valuable. Microgrids can play a huge part in that,” said Severin Borenstein, an energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley.