PG&E has become something of a villain to many Californians in recent years. The state has staggered through increasingly devastating wildfire seasons, and some of the blazes were sparked by aging utility infrastructure. Faulty PG&E equipment ignited the November 2018 Camp Fire, an inferno that destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people. In March, PG&E’s residential customers will see their rates increase as the utility, which recently emerged from bankruptcy, seeks to upgrade its equipment. When there’s high wind and fire danger, PG&E—which provides natural gas and electric service to roughly 15 million people from the Oregon border to Bakersfield—proactively shuts off power to tens of thousands of customers. Costs keep rising and outages are becoming more routine.
But it’s not just PG&E: This week the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the flow of electric power to more than 26 million Texas customers, was crippled by a snow storm that froze wind turbines, kicked natural gas plants offline and resulted in widespread outages that left millions of people shivering in their homes. The climate crisis is here to stay, and finding ways to function independently of utilities is gaining traction.
“On the one hand, it’s an engineering marvel to produce all of the needs of a modern house with locally produced power,” says Rich Brown, a research scientist in the building technologies and urban systems division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. “On the other hand, it’s still expensive.”
The future, says Brown, is aggregation: it is far more cost effective to build a microgrid if you’re serving multiple people, like an entire city block or a new subdivision. Brown and colleagues at the Berkeley Lab are working on a project called “Ecoblock,” in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, that will serve about 25 housing units.
“Low income neighborhoods tend to have more pollution, and the capital required to go solar or buy a battery is just too high,” says Brown. “There’s an equity issue. Ecoblock could be a model for how you could collectively take a neighborhood and make it more resilient, and do it cost effectively.”
Coekaerts agrees. “When it comes to apartment buildings and new homes, instead of using the normal power grid they should do something like this,” says Coekaerts. “It seems like a real scalable solution.”
Coekaerts knows that he is a rare early adopter. Besides being inherently tech-savvy, he has the willingness—and the ample financial resources—to prove the concept. He’s kept a detailed history of how his microgrid has performed over the last few months in hopes of sharing the information, maybe via a YouTube video, to educate others on the process. His main message is that it works: he has zero concern about running out of power.
“The climate is changing, and you see that every year it gets worse,” says Coekaerts. “I’m not a prepper, but I want to be self-reliant. And there’s a cool factor to this. If I can do this, other people can do it too. It’s nice to be on the forefront of something that is coming.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.