Latest / Clean Power Hour / Lives Saved: The Case for Community Microgrids #358

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Lives Saved: The Case for Community Microgrids #358 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Lisa Cohn: So my favorite example of the benefit of community micro grids is Blue Lake Rancheria. It was, let's see, I think it was built maybe in 2018 In 2019 during, you know, they were in PG and E's territory, and there was a PSPS and wildfires, and when the power went off all around them in Humboldt County, the Blue Lake invited the community in and actually saved four lives, and these were people who had medical devices that they really needed to charge, so that's really my one of my favorite examples of what a microgrid can do
• 1:32
  intro: the clean energy industry is moving fast. The deals are getting bigger. The technology is evolving, and the stakes have never been higher. Welcome to the Clean Power Hour, the podcast for solar storage and microgrid professionals who want to stay ahead of it all. Each week, your host Tim Montague, industry advisor and president of Clean Power Consulting Group, brings you unfiltered conversations with the leaders actually building the energy transition. Now, here's your host, Tim Montague.
• 2:07
  Tim Montague: When the grid goes down in a storm or a fire, the communities that survive intact are the ones that planned ahead, not by stockpiling fuel, by building micro grids. Lisa Cohen has covered energy for three decades. She runs micro grid knowledge, and she tracks every community micro grid being built in America right now. What she's seeing tells us a lot about where this industry is going and who's getting left behind. This is the Clean Power Hour. Welcome to the show, Lisa.
• 2:39
  Lisa Cohn: Thank you. Nice to talk, Tim. So, I've been writing about energy issues for three decades, and when we started Micro Grid Knowledge, it wasn't micro grid knowledge, it was something about energy efficiency, and we kept seeing these micro grids pop up, and at the time it was called solar and storage, which was like 10 years ago, and we just thought that they were going to grow, and we ended up forming micro grid knowledge,
• 3:08
  Tim Montague: so I think of micro grids as a way to earn, save, protect, in the language of intelligent generation, you can earn money with a battery, attacking, sorry, providing grid services, right, that is a cash machine. You can save money by attacking capacity charges or demand charges, which fall under the umbrella of demand charges.
• 3:30
  Tim Montague: Most energy professionals just call them demand charges, but depending on the geography, here in Illinois, we attack capacity charges, not so much demand charges. In California, you attack demand charges, and then you protect, so it's earn, save, protect with a micro grid. You provide a level of resiliency.
• 3:48
  Tim Montague: The theory is simple. The real world proof is harder to come by. Lisa has been tracking the projects that actually got built, and she starts with one that saved lives.
• 4:03
  Lisa Cohn: Well, so my favorite example of the benefit of community micro grids is Blue Lake Rancheria. It was. let's see.. I think it was built maybe in 2018 In 2019 during.. you know, they were in PG and E's territory, and there was a PSPS and wildfires, and when the power went off all around them in Humboldt County, the Blue Lake invited the community in and actually saved four lives, and these were people who had medical devices that they really needed to charge, so that's really my one of my favorite examples of what a micro grid can do.
• 4:45
  Tim Montague: Yes, it can save lives, and and that is something that we want, and as the weather gets weirder and the storms, fires, floods, droughts, etc.
• 4:54
  Tim Montague: increase in frequency and knock out the grid sometimes for only in a couple of hours, sometimes it's a rolling blackout, right, and then sometimes it's several days of not having any power, and then you're super grateful if you have solar and battery, right, because then you can actually have some semblance of the ordinary life that you had while you had grid power running off grid, but what is the future, I guess, in your mind of a smarter, better way of building out the grid in a way that gives us, in addition to grid power, gives us resilience.
• 5:37
  Lisa Cohn: Well, so local power is something that a lot of people are talking about, the advantages of building just with local power that goes the distribution system, the local distribution system, and that's what. Micro grids do, so they may use solar that's on a roof and a battery that's on it, you know, that's in a different building, and you don't have to worry about transmission so much, you don't always have to worry about transmission, so if you could build it kind of from the ground up locally, that's one of the big advantages, and a lot of people are talking about, you know, building the grid with a series of micro grids, or they talk about rebuilding Puerto Rico with a series of micro grids.
• 6:26
  Tim Montague: Building from the ground up with local power sounds straightforward. It is not. The biggest obstacle is not technology, it is not even money, though money is close.
• 6:37
  Tim Montague: The first obstacle is control.
• 6:37
  Tim Montague: Who owns a community micro grid, who operates it, and who benefits from it are questions that utilities and regulators have been fighting over for years in California. That fight produced two very different programs.
• 6:55
  Lisa Cohn: Well, the environmentalists and the folks who don't like utilities so much would say that they just want control, and a great example is PG and E's. Let's see, what was the first micro grid program?
• 7:06
  Lisa Cohn: Right now they have the MIP, which is pretty good, but they had the CMAP CMEP program, which basically, you know, offered communities some help, some technical help for front of the meter micro grids, but it didn't really - it basically gave the utilities and the utilities in California total control over the micro grid, so it couldn't be something that was, you know, locally controlled, and under CMEP, I think they can only run when there's an outage, so it doesn't really take advantage of them.
• 7:44
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I don't know anything about CMAP, but, but Craig and others recently on the show have talked about the MIP, the Micro Grid Incentive Program,
• 7:54
  Lisa Cohn: right,
• 7:54
  Tim Montague: and that program does seem to have some good bones, right. You're, if you're a commercial off-taker, you can, you can become part of a community-scale micro grid, you get free, for all intents and purposes, free solar and batteries on the front end, and then you also get some ability to have off-grid operation. What is your critique? I guess, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the MIP?
• 8:25
  Lisa Cohn: Well, I think that people are much happier, excuse me, I'm much happier with the MIP program, and I think, let's see the examples that I have, and you talked to Craig, he's got a lot of the MIP microgrids, either up and running or on their way, they've got the Goleta load pocket one, and that's in, obviously, they're in California, and then they've got the Santa Barbara Unified School District microgrid, and I think these provide a lot more help for the people who are building them than the CMAP program.
• 9:07
  Tim Montague: Even with better policy, the funding problem does not go away. The MIP helps, it doesn't solve the capex challenge that every community faces when they try to get a micro grid off the ground. Lisa has tracked what separates the projects that get built from the ones that do not.
• 9:24
  Lisa Cohn: Well, first of all, it is, it is very difficult to fund community micro grids, and the ones that are actually being built get help, you know. I mentioned the Blue Lake Rancheria, that was funded by the seat, the California Energy Commission. And then there's also the Redwood Coast Airport micro grid. Are you familiar with that?
• 9:48
  Tim Montague: No.
• 9:49
  Lisa Cohn: And that was that was under P G and E's community micro grid enablement program, and that got a lot of money. It got 5 million from the California Energy Commission and 6.5 million in lowest interest loans from USDA. That's a really well-known community microgrid, but without that funding, it's hard to get them up and going.
• 10:13
  Lisa Cohn: I'm seeing a lot of tribal micro grids. I'm writing about one in a tribe in Wisconsin that has put up a couple of micro grids, and they have gotten funding through the DOE tribal program.
• 10:28
  Lisa Cohn: So, what I'm seeing is, you know, community micro grids that get funding. I can give you a great example of one that wasn't funded. There was a group of seniors in California who wanted a micro grid because they had a pretty, they had a lot of vulnerable residents, and they tried everything to. Raise money to get involved in PG and Ease programs, and in the end they just gave up. I believe that Maryland has the state has set aside money for micro grids, and that's why we're seeing so many in Maryland. So, again, it really depends on the funding.
• 11:09
  Lisa Cohn: Sometimes these, and these are not community micro grids, but commercial micro grids, you know. They have demand response, you know, they have a lot of ways to make some money with the value stack. It's not always so easy with community micro grids, so a lot of it, it depends on the money, right. The
• 11:34
  Tim Montague: Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three-phase string inverter, with over 10 gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kw to 350 kw. Their flagship inverter, the CPS 350 kw, is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand and is America's number one choice for solar plants, now offering solutions for commercial utility, ESS, and balance of system requirements.
• 12:12
  Tim Montague: Go to Chint Power systems.com or call 855-584-7168 to find out more. So, the projects that get built are the ones that secure funding, whether from the state, the DOE, or a creative utility partnership that last category is worth paying attention to.
• 12:34
  Tim Montague: Some utilities are not waiting for legislation, they are building new models right now that make community micro grids possible without a large upfront capital ask from the community itself.
• 12:48
  Lisa Cohn: So an interesting model is here in Oregon, Portland General Electric will help customers buy batteries, or they will borrow customers' batteries in solar, and say in Beaverton there they use that model where they helped with the battery, and then Beaverton already had the solar, and that created a community micro grid, so we are seeing some, you know, different models that the utilities are using.
• 13:22
  Tim Montague: Do you see any patterns, though, in terms of like public power, the munis and co-ops versus the investor-owned utilities?
• 13:31
  Lisa Cohn: Well, yeah, I think the public power is much more open to doing micro grids, and they don't have as many rules around them. So, another story I'm working on right now is about a tribe in it's about a tribe that's served by a U by a muni, a public power utility, and they don't have to worry about the over the fence rule, because they're not being served by an investor-owned utility, so that makes it much easier for them to create a community microgrid, right, because it can serve more than one property.
• 14:08
  Tim Montague: And explain the over the fence rule, if you would.
• 14:11
  Lisa Cohn: The over the fence rule says that unless you have to be a utility in order to serve more than one meter, but we're seeing it on tribal property where you know often the IOUs don't really have any say in what's going on, and where sometimes they'll build their own infrastructure, so that they can, you know, distribute the power to their micro grids.
• 14:38
  Tim Montague: Public power utilities are closer to their customers than IOUs, that is structural. They are owned by the people they serve, but proximity alone does not build micro grids. It takes organizations on the ground doing their design work, navigating the regulatory environment, and pushing projects from concept to construction in California. One nonprofit has been doing exactly that, and Lisa names them by name.
• 15:06
  Lisa Cohn: Well, as I understand it, public power utilities respond to the wants of the people who they're serving, and they'll often, you know, ask them what they want, and often the answer is, we want more clean power. So, I see a lot of that, like here in Oregon, we've got Eugene Water and Electric Board, which is known as being a pretty green utility. It's, you know, it's a public utility that focuses a lot on unclean power, so they're responding to what the, what the folks want, and if they want resilience, I'm sure that's something that gets worked into the equation.
• 16:41
  Tim Montague: And do you have any. Sense of where we are on that journey to getting clean energy and resiliency to the munis and co-ops in America.
• 16:55
  Lisa Cohn: Well, that's an interesting question. So a lot of them purchase power, they usually don't have their own generating resources, or sometimes they do, but more often they purchase power. So, if they're, if they can secure a contract with a solar company, and a lot of them do, that's one way to get the clean energy up and running, but they often, not always, but they often don't own their own generating resources, so they will. I hear a lot from the public power utilities who say, "Oh, we're up to 50 60% clean power, and it's through purchases, usually.
• 17:39
  Tim Montague: Yeah,
• 17:39
  Lisa Cohn: or sometimes they'll own a part of a solar plant, but I haven't seen a lot of that, but there are other groups, like the Clean Coalition, environmental groups that get involved in communities and helping to deploy micro grids.
• 17:54
  Lisa Cohn: You see them involved a lot, but Clean Coalition is doing, is really doing a great job. They have so many micro grids going up right now, and as I understand it, they design them right, they, they do the design, yes, and working with, and they work with the communities, and they're
• 18:13
  Tim Montague: nonprofit,
• 18:14
  Lisa Cohn: right, that's a really good model, having them, you know, do the design work with the communities, serve as a nonprofit, and they're really going for it. The
• 18:25
  Tim Montague: MIP program that makes clean coalitions work possible today did not come easily. It emerged from years of complaints about what came before it. Lisa walks me through how that policy fight unfolded.
• 18:39
  Lisa Cohn: California tried to come up with microgrid incentive, and that led to the C Map program. Basically, after a lot of back and forth, the PUC decided to base it on the C map, which people weren't very happy with, because that does not allow you to run your micro grid all the time, it's only when you need it during outages, so there was a lot of pushback about that, and I think perhaps what came out of that, and the complaints about it was the MIP program, which is, which provides more help.
• 19:22
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's hard to get a value for these, these assets, right?
• 19:25
  Tim Montague: If you can't use them every day, it just doesn't make any sense, right? You, it's a both, and you want to be able to use them every day, and when the grid goes down,
• 19:38
  Lisa Cohn: right. So, under the, yeah, MIP program, I don't think there's that restriction, most of the thing coalition micro grids I've seen are not restricted in that way, they can, you know, 24/7 and that's really important, because then you can provide grid services, and you can do demand response, you can do much more than just resilience,
• 19:59
  Tim Montague: state legislation is creating the conditions for community micro grids to grow.
• 20:02
  Tim Montague: The next step is connecting them. What happens when individual micro grids can share power with each other? Lisa calls this networked micro grids, and there are already examples in the field,
• 20:17
  Lisa Cohn: like here in Oregon.
• 20:17
  Lisa Cohn: There were two bills passed recently, and I mean, you were talking about state right state incentives. There were two bills passed recently to move micro grids forward, especially community micro grids in these areas of Oregon that are subject to wildfires, and that those local incentives, those state incentives, I mean they make a big difference. I think that must be what's happening where you are. So there's an interesting project in California where they want to, and it's again a tribal project where they want to network the micro grids, which is a really cool idea that we haven't really discussed, and that's what's happening in the Bronzeville, right? Because the Bronzeville micro grid is tied to the ITT micro grid, and when they can back each other up, they become even more powerful.
• 21:13
  Tim Montague: The IIT, the Illinois Institute of Technology,
• 21:17
  Lisa Cohn: I couldn't pull that one out of my head. Now that
• 21:19
  Tim Montague: makes sense, right? They're in, they're in close physical proximity. Is that what you're referring to, though? Like communities that are in close physical proximity,
• 21:28
  Lisa Cohn: right? And if they each have a micro grid, they can, they can back each other up, they can send power to each other if they're networked. Now we haven't seen a lot of that, except in Bronzeville, but I've seen a lot of proposals to do that. Yeah, network the micro grids.
• 21:45
  Tim Montague: I was talking with a gentleman from the Chattanooga utility recently, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and you know they had a rolling blackout a couple of years ago where the TVA, the grid operator in the region, said, look, locals, you know, meaning munies and co-ops, where you're going to have rolling blackouts. We're going to cut you off for a couple of hours at a time, and we want you to load shed. And the way they've responded to that event is by installing five megawatt hour batteries. They're installing the batteries at substations, so there's existing infrastructure, which makes a lot of sense, right? There's a big pipe there, and, and, and if, and when I think of the grid, that machine, right, if we just retrofitted in batteries and solar, if you have land or big roofs around your facility, that substation or near that substation, right, it's.. it's that is kind of the next level grid, truly. If you had batteries and solar just added on to those hot spots,
• 23:02
  Lisa Cohn: right? And I think that's something that PG and E is doing. I think they talk about substation micro grids, and you do hear a fair amount about that. These efforts, especially in rural areas, where folks are at the very end of the line, you know, they want to, they want to get a micro grid in there to provide the resilience, and sometimes they say, you know, we'll do it from the substation.
• 23:28
  Tim Montague: All right. Well, we didn't get to talk about data centers. We'll have to save that conversation for another discussion, because I know that you're writing a lot about data centers, and that's on everybody's minds,
• 23:39
  Lisa Cohn: right? And you know that in Oregon, there a law just passed saying that they have to pay for their share of energy costs, and they put all the data centers on a special rate that is now going to increase by 29% Hey
• 23:56
  Tim Montague: guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial, but wanting to scale into large CNI solar? I'm Tim Montague. I've developed over 150 megawatts of commercial solar, and I've solved the problem that you're having. You don't know what tools and technologies you need in order to successfully close 100 kw to megawatt scale projects. I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you. Just go to Clean Power hour.com click on strategy, and book a call today. It's totally free with no obligation. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate you listening to the pod. And I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar and storage. Go to Clean Power Hour and click strategy today. Thanks so much.
• 24:43
  Tim Montague: Community micro grids are not a niche technology anymore. They are the infrastructure model
• 24:53
  that survives what is coming: storms, fires, grid overload, and a generation of energy demand that the existing system was not built to handle. The projects being built right now in California, Oregon, Wisconsin, Maryland, and Illinois are proof that the model works. What they need is funding, legislation, and partners willing to do the design work alongside communities. If you are an EPC, a developer, or an energy professional who works with commercial and industrial customers, this market is going to be in front of you sooner than you think. You can find Lisa Cohen at Clean Energy writers.com The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three-phase string inverter with over 10 gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kw to 350 kw. Their flagship inverter, the CPS 350 kw, is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand, and is America's number one choice for solar plants. Now offering solutions for commercial utility, ESS, and balance of system requirements.
• 26:17
  that survives what is coming: Go to Chint Power systems.com or call 855-584-7168 to find out more.