#microgrids

Chelsea and Chinatown are worried about the big picture when it comes to climate change and energy resilience. To address the problems they face, officials and advocates are thinking small.

The two environmental justice communities will soon begin construction of the nation's first cloud-based microgrids. The system's developer believes the building-by-building projects will be more robust, resilient to climate change disasters, and will empower local residents in their energy future.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

For more than a century, governments have offered electric utilities a monopoly on selling power to homes and businesses so long as they agreed to serve everybody and subject themselves to regulation.

But as homeowners have begun installing solar panels and batteries, that simple arrangement has become more complicated. That has led to fierce battles between utility companies and relatively young solar businesses that sell and install rooftop systems for use by homes and businesses.

On Thursday, one of the nation’s largest rooftop solar companies, Sunnova Energy, asked the California Public Utilities Commission to let it directly compete with investor-owned utilities to provide electricity to homes in new residential developments as a private “micro-utility” — a business model that is illegal in much of the United States.

The company said it would offer those residents electricity that was up to 20 percent cheaper than the rates charged by investor-owned utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. If approved by regulators, the micro-utility model, also known as a microgrid, could undermine the growth of those larger utilities by depriving them access to new homes or forcing them to lower their rates to keep that business.