As part of the ongoing Microgrids Proceeding, the California Public Utilities Commission directed to PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric to undertake several actions to facilitate and expedite community resilience projects to reduce the impacts of future public safety power shutoff (PSPS) events. In particular, the CPUC directed those utilities to:
- Take preliminary actions to create a dedicated team of staff to manage the intake of local government resiliency projects and provide a single point of contact for local governments to receive pre-application consulting services.
- Provide information to local government agencies to enable those jurisdictions to effectuate emergency plans or engage with local governments to provide technical support for local government power resiliency projects. This could include:
- Developing better internal processes to interact with local and tribal governments.
- Informing local and tribal governments about utility transmission and distribution investments and operational plans that help minimize the use and duration of PSPS events.
- Holding face-to-face workshops to educate local jurisdictions on electric transmission and distribution infrastructure serving their communities.
- Developing a resiliency project management guide to show how to engage with the utility on resiliency projects and developing best practices for successful project implementation.
- Providing detailed historical PSPS outage data to local and tribal governments to help identify resiliency project development opportunities.
Taken as a whole, these directives are expected to improve local government access to utility infrastructure and outage information to facilitate better planning and to expedite local power resiliency projects, including microgrids.
Click these links to access the CPUC letters to PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric.