California’s largest electric utility took the unprecedented step of shutting off power to millions of customers beginning last October. The decision was meant to prevent power equipment from sparking catastrophic wildfires.
Now a renewable energy microgrid on a tiny California Native American reservation is proving to be one solution to this ongoing problem.
The Blue Lake Rancheria is located just north of Eureka, Calif. On the 100-acre campus, just behind the casino and hotel, Jana Ganion opens a chain-link fence.
“We’re up on a little platform that can oversee most of the array,” she says. “This is the view I like the best.”
Inside, in an area half the size of a football field, are more than 1,500 solar panels, slanted toward the noonday sun.
Ganion is the sustainability director with the Blue Lake Rancheria, which includes about 50 members. She helped build this solar microgrid as part of the tribe’s goal to develop climate-resilient infrastructure and to be ready for earthquakes and tsunamis.
But then beginning in October, it became useful in a whole new way.
The utility, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), shut off power to more than 30 counties in Central and Northern California on Oct. 9.
“We had probably 30- to 45-minute gas lines,” Ganion says. “People were fueling up vehicles, but also their home generators. That continued, basically, for the duration of the 28-hour outage.”
As one of the only gas stations in the county with power, the reservation provided diesel to United Indian Health Services to refrigerate their medications and to the Mad River Fish Hatchery to keep their fish alive. The local newspaper used a hotel conference room to put out the next day’s paper. Area residents stopped by to charge their cell phones.
Ganion estimates that on that day more than 10,000 nearby residents came to the reservation for gas and supplies.
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