Energy & CivilizationStudent Project Showcase: Fall 2020

Group Members

Simon Vaillancourt, Isis Liu, Yahya Alazani

Presentation

Project Report

Executive Summary

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) based in San Francisco, California has made national headlines on numerous occasions over the last two years for a variety of crises. From pleading guilty to 84 deaths caused by failures in their electrical grid in 2018 that started a state-wide fire (Reuters, 2020) to rolling out blackouts for 200,000 Californians in 2020 for the first time since the 2001 energy crisis (CBS Sacramento, 2020), the utilities giant appears unable to both adequately avoid electrical failures while responding to the growing demand for energy in the most populous state in the country. The inefficiency and unreliability of California’s grid system in the face of a warming climate has left the state wondering where to go from here.

In response to the outdated grid system, climate change, growing energy demands, and the power outages that follow, it is time for the state of California to begin investing in microgrid technologies. The U.S. Department of Energy defines a microgrid as a group of interconnected loads and distributed energy resources within a clearly defined electrical boundary that acts as a single, controllable entity with respect to the grid. Microgrid solutions focus primarily on building grid resilience and keeping the power on for customers in communities that have high likelihood of experiencing a Public Safety Planned Shutoffs (PSPS), which PG&E utilizes to turn off powers in communities to avoid fire danger during dry weather. This paper will look at how the state of California can utilize microgrids from a public and private perspective to deter outages while encouraging clean-energy solutions.

Final Paper: Microgrid Deployment in Northern California- A solution to California's wildfire and energy inefficiency problem