The City of Santa Barbara, California, will establish its own virtual power plant through residential solar microgrids using the PowerPod 2 energy storage system from Electriq Power.
Santa Barbara County homeowners, regardless of means, will have access to Electriq’s smart home energy storage system, which is recharged by an included solar power system. The system will help achieve the Santa Barbara Home Power Program’s key goal of offsetting 100% of each home’s electricity consumption, providing immediate savings over annual utility costs.
“At Santa Barbara Clean Energy, we are looking to improve local resilience by building local energy generation and storage. The Santa Barbara Home Power Program allows local residents to do just that, while also gaining peace of mind against potential grid outages and rising prices,” said Alelia Parenteau, Acting Sustainability & Resilience Director for the City of Santa Barbara, Sustainability & Resilience.
The intelligence and networking features built into the PowerPod 2 enable users to avoid peak pricing spikes and benefit from resilience in the event of public safety power shutoffs, as well as support the region’s vulnerable electrical infrastructure.
“We are pleased to have this opportunity to provide every Santa Barbara County homeowner, at any income level, with our sustainable and resilient energy solution,” said Frank Magnotti, CEO of Electriq Power. “At Electriq Power, we believe that access to clean, dependable energy should not be limited due to financial constraints. Rather, it should be available to anyone who needs it and sees its value in both saving money and contributing to a greener environment. We look forward to supporting similar clean energy community access programs in the future.”
News item from Electriq Power
Depending on whose statistics you use, it seems in California about 1.2 million solar PV roofs exist in the State and climbing. The NREL Lidar study done in 2016 seems to hint that California alone has about 5.1 million roofs that are solar PV viable. Just 8.5kWp solar PV on average on these 5.1 million roofs and a conservative 4 sun hours a day would generate 173.4GWh a day. In Southern California it would be around 6 to 7 sun hours a day on average. California needs about 57GWh of distributed energy storage to handle this distributed generation capability in California. Now considering there have been some push for solar PV farms in the California desert and somewhere around 100,000 acres have been carved out for these projects on public lands by the BLM, there’s a lot of room for utility scale solar PV plants and large scale energy storage over this 100,000 acres of desert scrub. One could easily get utility scale solar PV farms with energy storage that would provide 80GWh/day to 1TWh/day energy generation from these wastelands.