Communities most likely to be affected by both the effects of and the response to devastating wildfires which have wreaked havoc on California will be given extra incentive to install solar-plus-storage at their properties.
In addition to the impact of the fires themselves, the latter part of this year saw utility PG&E, already facing bankruptcy proceedings relating to liabilities for previous fires, shut off power to more than a million people in areas where outlying substations, wires and cables from the grid are mapped out to be at risk from high winds and falling trees.
A series of fires in the past few days alone has led to up to 2.7 million people losing electricity in the PG&E service area by yesterday (27 October).
While shut-offs had been considered a prudent move by the utility, one of California’s three main investor-owned utility (IOU) companies, to do so, there has been criticism of the short notice given to customers on around 700,000 grid connection points, some of whom will lose power for several days at a time.
While deliberation is ongoing on how PG&E has handled the matter, in the meantime there has been a response from the California Public Utilies Commission which has responded by making some adjustments to the state’s Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP).
Described by research firm Navigant as “one of the longest running and most successful distributed energy incentive programmes globally”, SGIP will pay out over half a billion dollars to technologies including renewable and non-renewable generation, as well as large and small scale energy storage. It also has a provision for encouraging adoption in lower-income communities, the Equity Budget.
SGIP precedes California’s recently introduced 100% renewables targets and was one of the main initiatives at both public and private level examined in-depth by Strategen Consulting’s Janice Lin and Jack Chang in a recent feature article.
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