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Dive Brief:
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Pacific Gas & Electric intends to award up to $43 million in grants for community microgrid projects in Northern California, the gas and electric utility said on March 26.
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Issued under California’s Microgrid Incentive Program, a $200 million statewide competitive grant program, the funds will support projects serving nearly 9,000 customers in Humboldt, Lake and Marin counties. Four of the projects are in tribal communities, PG&E said.
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Also this week, distributed energy provider Sunrun announced a “first-of-its-kind program” with PG&E to harness approximately 600 home solar-and-storage systems to provide “targeted load relief to neighborhoods identified with highly constrained electric grids,” potentially avoiding or deferring distribution grid investments.
Dive Insight:
In 2023, the California Public Utilities Commission approved $200 million in funding for the Microgrid Incentive Program, including $79.2 million for PG&E, $83.3 million for Southern California Edison and $17.5 million for San Diego Gas & Electric.
The nine awards announced March 26 represent the first tranche of PG&E’s MIP grants, selected from a pool of 22 applicants. Applications for the second tranche open on April 3 and run through May 30, PG&E said.
First-tranche projects will receive a combined $34 million for front-of-the-meter generating resources and other project costs, plus $1 million each to cover grid interconnection costs, the utility said.
Eligible microgrid projects must be able to provide at least 24 consecutive hours of energy in “island mode,” interconnect on distribution lines at or below 50 kV, and have “island mode” emissions no greater than the surrounding grid, according to a PG&E fact sheet. Projects must also be located in areas vulnerable to outages due to high wildfire or earthquake risk or lower historical reliability, and serve “disadvantaged or vulnerable communities” in rural, tribal or low-income areas.
The awardees will join several active microgrids in Northern and Central California, such as the Redwood Coast Airport and Blue Lake Rancheria microgrids in Humboldt County, PG&E North Coast Region Vice President Dave Canny said in a statement.
“These microgrids have now been active for several years, providing resilience and low-carbon energy to some of our most vulnerable communities,” Canny said.