Why Calistoga needs a Community Microgrid
The City of Calistoga is in a Northern California region of high wildfire risk. That means increased risk of power outages — which can make it harder to fight fires. Power outages also lead to lost revenue, disruption, and potentially even lost lives.
A Community Microgrid will protect the City from power outages related to wildfires — or any other disaster — as well as planned utility outages. This modern power system will bring Calistoga unparalleled economic, environmental, and resilience benefits.
Community Microgrids represent a new approach for designing and operating electric grids. A Community Microgrid is a coordinated local grid area served by one or more distribution substations and supported by high penetrations of local renewables and other distributed energy resources (DER), such as energy storage and demand response.
Although connected to the larger power grid, during a power outage a renewables-driven Community Microgrid can “island” from the grid and keep critical facilities like fire stations, hospitals, and emergency shelters online indefinitely.
Community Microgrid feasibility assessment
In July 2019, the City of Calistoga entered into an agreement with the Clean Coalition to conduct a Community Microgrid feasibility assessment for the City.
The long-term vision for this Initiative is to develop a Community Microgrid serving the 2,285 electric accounts in the full Calistoga substation grid area.
This will be the first Community Microgrid to be developed as part of the North Bay Community Resilience Initiative.
Download a 2-page overview of the North Bay Community Resilience Initiative (PDF)
