Elisa Wood, Microgrid Knowledge
Summary
Twenty-five parties today urged California regulators to finalize microgrid tariffs by January, underscoring the need to incentivize the technology in a state now characterized by wildfires, blackouts and safety power shutoffs.
In a filing submitted by the Microgrid Resources Coalition (MRC), the stakeholders asked the public utilities commission to finalize and implement a microgrid tariff for single-customer microgrids by January and develop a tariff for multi-customer microgrids in the first half of 2021. (Rulemaking 19-09-009)
Microgrid advocates are pushing for tariffs that compensate microgrids for the range of services they provide, including resilience, resource adequacy, generation, storage, and load management.
The group filing sprang from a meeting September 9 with commission staff that was organized by two consultants working with the stakeholders, Allie Detrio and Lorenzo Kristov. In a letter also filed today with the commission, they described the urgent need “to proliferate microgrids and other local energy resources across California.”
“The dramatic unanticipated events of 2020 — an ongoing global pandemic, followed by dry lightning storms igniting the largest wildfires in California history, all coming on the heels of widespread PSPS [public safety power shutoffs] and the devastating wildfires of 2017-19 — require the commission and other California policy makers to prepare for a decade or more of disruptions of equal or even greater severity,” said the letter.
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