California regulators have finalized plans to direct more than half a billion dollars in behind-the-meter battery incentives over the next four years to customers most at risk of being impacted by the state’s increasingly deadly wildfires and the grid outages meant to prevent them.
The decision from the California Public Utilities Commission finalizes a proposal pushed ahead last month as a response to the state’s wildfire and blackout crisis. Its vehicle is the Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP), the state’s premier incentive for energy storage and on-site generation technologies, which will now direct 63 percent of its $830 million in new funding through 2024 to a newly created “equity resilience budget.”
This, along with $100 million in previous funds, adds up to about $613 million through 2024 that will be set aside for low-income, medically vulnerable and other select groups of disadvantaged residents who live in Tier 2 and 3 “High Fire Threat Districts” spread across the state. It’s also open to customers who aren’t in those zones if they’ve experienced two discrete “public safety power shutoff” (PSPS) events, like the multiday blackouts that left millions of customers of bankrupt utility Pacific Gas & Electric without power this fall.
Critical facilities, ranging from fire stations and nursing homes to cell towers and supermarkets serving remote communities, can also qualify for this budget. But the CPUC’s decision reserves the most generous subsidies available from the SGIP program — $1 per watt-hour, or enough to almost completely cover the upfront costs of a typical residential solar-storage system — for residents who could face serious deprivation or even death due to multiday PSPS events.
Under last week’s decision, these customers will be allowed to exceed SGIP’s limits on sizing of residential storage systems to allow them to choose the next step up in modular battery-solar offerings on the market if that’s needed to support their longer-duration backup needs. They’ll also be allowed to include electrical and circuit load panel and wiring upgrades in the costs.
California’s investor-owned utilities, which administer the system for vendors to apply for and receive SGIP grants, have been asked to speed up the typical process from more than 90 days to less than 60 days, in order to assure that systems can be in place for the 2020 fire season.
SGIP’s budget for its remaining existing categories will be cut to pay for this new focus. That’s a potential challenge for companies that have relied on the incentive to boost the business case for behind-the-meter battery projects.
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