The only thing more important to America’s electric companies than protecting the nation’s energy grid is ensuring the safety of our customers and our communities.
National Weather Service modeling in Northern California recently showed high-risk areas, or “red flag warnings,” where wind patterns were alarmingly similar to the deadly October 2017 events that resulted in more than 20 fires in Pacific Gas and Electric’s (PG&E) service territory. That led to the company’s recent decision to use a public safety power shutoff, which, while extraordinary, protected property and saved lives.
With more people living in high-risk areas, we must confront the growing threat of fires and their impacts on people, property, and infrastructure. One suggestion has been to do away with the interconnected energy grid and rely instead on microgrids. As the thinking goes, this would address fire risk by eliminating infrastructure that can be compromised by high winds or other hazards.
To paraphrase H.L. Mencken: For every complex problem, there’s a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.
That is not to say that microgrids cannot play a valuable role in supporting a safe, reliable, affordable, clean and secure energy grid. Across the United States, microgrids have been built or are being considered to help solve localized challenges or to provide power for customers that need to exceed 99.9% reliability.
But microgrids are expensive to build, and the ones being built today still are connected to the energy grid because the grid’s interconnectedness allows electric companies to leverage a broad set of tools, characteristics and capabilities that enhance resilience in ways that a self-contained microgrid cannot.
This includes the grid’s ability to integrate diverse resources, including more and more renewables. There also is benefit from enhanced situational awareness, using the ubiquitous infrastructure to sense anomalies and facilitate response. And, the energy grid provides redundancy, limiting single points of failure and withstanding extraordinary conditions, but also recovering quickly when Mother Nature or malicious actors impact operations.
Having the capability to island off sections of the energy grid during emergency situations is one tool in the toolbox for electric companies. There also are technologies that enable energy grid operators to shut off more targeted segments of the system strategically, or to reroute power and still deliver electricity to communities, while safely de-energizing lines where necessary.
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