As California faced devastating wildfires and Public Safety Power Shutoffs left over a million Californians without power and PG&E at historic lows in public trust, California sought new models to enhance grid resiliency by enabling community microgrids on the existing distribution system.

With the launch of PG&E’s first in the nation comprehensive community microgrid tariff and program, PG&E championed a model that offers third parties guaranteed PG&E partnership in the development of a community microgrid while protecting the broader customer base from subsidizing premium resilience services.

At the same time, CA adopted the Microgrid Incentive Program (MIP), which seeks to jumpstart the development of community microgrids with $200M in statewide funding, $86M of which was allocated to PG&E.  Recognizing that this was a unique opportunity to allow our communities and industry to determine the most viable community microgrid models—PG&E designed a market driven, technology agnostic program that prioritized resilience impact and scaling through private capital. The results have exceeded expectations, attracting roughly $600M in match funds across 14 planned projects thus far, and offering actionable lessons on how utilities can enable microgrid markets while retaining system integrity and affordability.

In this session, PG&E will share what has worked, what hasn’t, and proposed enhancements to the program design.