Resilient Energy Subscription (RES)

RES allows any facility within the footprint of a Community Microgrid to pay a simple fee on top of its normal electricity tariff for guaranteed daily delivery of locally generated renewable energy during grid outages, ensuring unparalleled energy resilience. Each individual facility will decide which loads are critical and will procure resilience for those loads via a transparent fee that covers the cost of service (COS) of provisioning such energy resilience from a Community Microgrid. 

• Facilities located within the footprint of a Community Microgrid have the opportunity to procure resilience through a monthly $/kWh RES fee that is separate from any existing rate tariffs, which will remain unchanged. A facility will pay the RES fee to reserve a guaranteed allotment of daily delivered energy when the traditional transmission and distribution grids are unavailable for any reason.
• Through RES fees, the Community Microgrid owner-operators will recover the COS that is required to meet the contracted RES obligations. As is standard in the utility industry, COS is determined by the capital expenditures (capex) associated with Community Microgrid assets, operational expenditures (opex) associated with operations and maintenance (O&M), and an appropriate rate of return.

The figure here illustrates how the different loads in a Community Microgrid should be valued, with the green boxes indicating the most essential loads to keep on. Due to the critical role that Tier 1 facilities play in keeping communities safe and functioning, the COS for serving all Tier 1 loads at Tier 1 facilities (shown in dark green) should be ratebased, similar to how costs associated with the transmission grid are ratebased. Given the societal value of of these Tier 1 Critical Community Facilities (CCFs), it is more than reasonable to ratebase the associated COS for Community Microgrids to a level that they can deliver RES allocations covering Tier 1 loads at Tier 1 facilities — and arguably Tier 2 loads at Tier 1 facilities, too.

To determine RES requirements for a specific facility, the facility first reviews its historical energy usage and can then either:

• Use VOR123 to assess general load tier percentages and determine how much RES it wants to procure — and whether the cost of the RES contract will be less than the VOR123-derived value.
• Use empirical experience from past grid outages or some other method to determine its load tiering, VOR, and appetite for RES fees.

For a hypothetical financial institution, we can see that each 1% of load that a facility secures for guaranteed daily energy delivery via a RES will result in a 1% electricity bill increase.

For a bank with typical load tiering percentages of 10% for Tier 1 and 15% for Tier 2 loads (indicated by the hashed black lines), a RES contract for Tier 1 loads only will result in the bank’s electricity cost increasing by only 10%, and reserving for both Tier 1 and Tier 2 loads will result in a 25% increase. Most facilities will contract RES to guarantee coverage for only Tier 1 loads, but each facility can make such decisions for itself.

In partnership with the County of Los Angeles, the Clean Coalition is conducting a Solar Microgrids feasibility study to determine the possibilities for Solar Microgrids at three County of Los Angeles CCFs. Despite being adjacent facilities with available space to deploy immense levels of solar, current restrictions make it nearly impossible to achieve a Community Microgrid for these CCFs. 

As a result, a configuration of three separate Solar Microgrids is the most likely outcome, leaving significant solar siting opportunities on nearby built environments unutilized and missing a big opportunity for increased reliability and resilience to this area. A Community Microgrid can be implemented at this East Los Angeles hub to maximize local solar, reliability, and resilience to vital CCFs and potentially additional nearby facilities.