BY SHEIDA HOOSHMANDI
Sheida Hooshmandi is a senior journalist and SAIS alum with an expertise in sustainability, climate, and energy. She also has a keen interest in behavioral science. Her focus revolves around navigating the intricate intersection of climate adaptation policy and environmental justice within urban environments.
This blog is an executive summary of a longer report. Please scroll to the bottom to view the full research project.
As anthropogenic climate change intensifies drought, heatwaves, and wildfire risks across California, the electrical grid infrastructure faces escalating perils. To mitigate the risk of wildfires triggered by power lines, the state's utilities have increasingly reverted to preemptive electricity blackouts. These can severely disrupt electricity supply for multiple days which cripples the provision of essential public services and upsets residents' daily lives.
This research examines the potential for distributed solar photovoltaics (PV) paired with lithium-ion battery energy storage systems (solar plus) to serve as resilient community-level microgrids that generate and store power locally to sustain critical electricity loads when the centralized grid is intentionally disabled for public safety.
The technical feasibility and economic viability of deploying PVs and solar plus is assessed by examining two communities located in California's exceedingly wildfire-prone San Bernardino County: (1) an urban core characterized by established structures like residential homes, commercial buildings, and industrial spaces with few opportunities for solar PV installation; and (2) the surrounding empty lots of a university campus in a more affluent, suburban setting.
LACK OF LAND AVAILABILITY HINDERS PV DEPLOYMENT
This research finds that increasing the amount of land available for the construction of solar PVs greatly improves the long-term economic feasibility of microgrid arrays. However, space constraints in dense urban environments hinder deployment. Furthermore, in situations where solar PV generation is low, energy storage in large-sized batteries is required to sustain power for 12+ hours. Increasing the battery size results in higher capital costs and decreases the financial viability. Therefore, solar plus integration proves substantially more viable with greater land availability and in places requiring lower critical loads.
Additionally, this research demonstrates the immense value of leveraging techno-economic modeling tools as a powerful means to objectively guide context-specific, evidence-based energy transition strategies. This will result in methods tailored to enhance equitable and affordable community resilience to the shocks of intensifying climate change. As wildfires, heat waves, droughts, and preemptive power shut offs continue to rise in frequency, magnitude, and duration in communities across California, safeguarding energy supply during such outages is an essential climate change adaptation demanding immediate action.
With holistic community-centric policies enacted, solar plus microgrids can empower historically marginalized neighborhoods across California's diverse urban and rural landscape to maintain reliable power access when the centralized electricity grid is intentionally disabled for extended periods of heightened wildfire risk. More broadly, the insights gleaned can help inform coordinated local, state, and federal strategies focused on managing the complex challenges of transitioning aging and climate-vulnerable energy systems to meet the escalating resilience imperatives of the 21st century.
MICROGRID INVESTMENTS: DECISION-MAKING AND RELEVANT POLICIES
The findings from this case study offer perspectives that may inform policymakers and developers exploring distributed energy resource investments beyond the specific locales examined. While geographically limited, the modeling nonetheless provides broadly applicable insights.
The research concludes that ample solar PV generation capacity enabled by substantial land availability can dramatically enhance financial viability. However, severe space constraints in dense urban settings pose deployment barriers. Additionally, meeting high critical electricity loads requires expansive and costly battery storage that may render projects cost prohibitive. Different building types have varied energy needs that impact technical feasibility.
Continuity of power during outages depends primarily on available battery capacity rather than the solar array size or number of microgrid participants alone. Storage cannot perpetually remain fully charged. Another important finding of this research is that a positive 25-year net present value (NPV) – as seen in the research simulations – is necessary but insufficient alone for feasibility. Upfront capital costs should not vastly exceed long-term savings. Ultimately, solar-plus integration proves more viable where land resources are plentiful and critical loads are lower. As such, extensive university campuses may present opportunities exceeding those in space-constrained hospital sites within crowded city centers.
EQUITY CONSIDERATIONS IN SOLAR PLUS DEPLOYMENT
The simulated microgrid projects in this research demonstrate economies of scale that significantly benefit communities in affluent areas with substantial capital. A truly resilient system necessitates a considerable upfront capital investment beyond the means of low-moderate income (LMI) communities. Building upon these findings, the study proposes policy recommendations across five key areas: financial incentives, community participation, capital cost relief, workforce development, and supportive reforms.
Financial incentives that will accelerate solar PV implementation include providing property tax reductions or land gifting to expand solar PV deployment footprints on public, commercial, industrial, and residential sites. This will offer generous feed-in tariffs, tax credits and rebates, renewable energy credits to improve project economics, and provide low-interest loan programs, evolving loan funds, and bill discounts to assist LMI households with participation costs.
Greater community participation can be achieved by instituting consolidated monthly energy billing, interconnection policies to streamline consumer participation, securing creditworthy municipal anchor subscriptions to hedge risks and attract private capital, and partnering with housing authorities and community organizations to increase LMI consumer access.
To relieve high capital costs, issue tax-exempt municipal bonds, enable on-bill financing tariffs to alleviate prohibitively high upfront costs, forge public-private partnerships with utilities and impact investors to develop projects, and pursue innovative financing models such as commercial PACE loans and community fund crowdfunding.
To meet expanding workforce demands, implement workforce training programs to create access to well-paying jobs installing and maintaining projects and cultivate strong local solar business networks and union partnerships.
Finally, supportive reforms include the simplification of permitting processes, enabling net metering and interconnection, and expanding renewable portfolio standards, as well as investing public funding in R&D, expanding pilot demonstrations, providing technical assistance to drive down hardware costs, and incentivizing made-in-America manufacturing to strengthen domestic supply chains.
In conclusion, this comprehensive analysis provides indispensable lessons for community-led transitions to local renewable energy systems that enhance resilience equitably. Using modeling to inform context-specific strategies, solar plus microgrids can empower vulnerable neighborhoods to adapt to accelerating climate disruptions.
Photo Credit: Free use image from Canva Pro