New Bay Area Partnership Could Increase Grid Resilience
California Energy Markets
A new grid storage program rolling out across the San Francisco Bay Area could increase community resilience to blackouts and decrease a power provider’s resource-adequacy obligations, but regulatory uncertainty remains, speakers said during an Aug. 28 webinar.
The program, Power On Peninsula, is one of three being implemented through a 10-year contract between three California community choice aggregators and solar developer Sunrun, a representative from Peninsula Clean Energy said during the webinar hosted by the California Community Choice Association.
In addition to PCE, community choice power providers East Bay Community Energy and Silicon Valley Clean Energy also signed agreements with Sunrun (see CEM No. 1601). Collectively, the solar company will install up to 20 MW of residential solar power for around 6,000 households. The program is the result of a joint solicitation issued in November 2019.
It will also allow PCE to modify its load, decreasing the “duck curve” by dispatching storage capacity during peak load hours, Peter Levitt, associate manager of distributed energy resources strategy with PCE, said during the webinar. Under the agreement, PCE will pay Sunrun to continually discharge energy storage from the company’s distributed residential and multifamily solar-plus-storage systems in the 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. window, when PCE’s peak load traditionally hits, in order to create a permanent load shift to the evening hours.