Our Electrifying World is a series about how electrification is creating a more sustainable energy transition. It is sponsored by Rewiring America.
In December of 2022, a 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck Northern California, destroying homes, damaging infrastructure, killing two people and leaving tens of thousands of households and businesses without electricity.
Typically, when power goes out in America, diesel generators come on to provide ad-hoc, dirty and expensive electricity while the grid is down. But that’s not what happened on the reservation of the Blue Lake Rancheria, a tribe comprising Wiyot, Yurok and Hupa Indians, after the quake. The reservation had a different solution. They simply turned on the grid — that is, their own.
A microgrid is a small-scale energy system that can operate either independently or as part of the larger electric grid. Microgrids consist of generation devices along with management systems that control voltage and distribution of power. Their technology allows for cleaner, more efficient and more reliable power to buildings and communities in the event of greater grid failures. And with climate change increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, such resilience is increasingly important.
The Rancheria sits at the junction of three tectonic plates and is prone to numerous natural disasters — rainstorms, forest fires and earthquakes — and the outages they bring. In tandem with the Schatz Energy Research Center at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, Pacific Gas and Electric Company and the California Energy Commission, the Rancheria installed its first microgrid in 2016 as part of a project to increase tribal sovereignty and energy stability, and reduce their carbon footprint. The $6.3 million “low-carbon community microgrid” was powered by a 500 kilowatt solar array paired with battery storage and connected to water systems, food storage, electric vehicle chargers, communications facilities and other essential infrastructure in the community. The system provides electricity cost savings of 25 percent and reduces the Rancheria’s carbon footprint by hundreds of tons of carbon annually.
“With this microgrid, we have improved resilience across the Rancheria,” Jana Ganion, director of sustainability and government affairs for Blue Lake Rancheria from 2012 to 2024, said upon the project’s completion. “We started with energy because we need quality power to support the other lifeline sectors,” like health care and other social services.
Now, Blue Lake Rancheria is set to greatly expand its microgrid system through the Tribal Energy Resilience and Sovereignty project, a $177 million initiative that will add 20,000 kilowatts of solar capacity and will connect Blue Lake to the land of three other communities — comprising Hoopa, Yurok and Karuk Indians — with a 142-mile-long distribution circuit to increase regional resiliency between the tribes. Moreover, the expanded grid system will enable staff to choose between five priority levels for energy usage, allowing the operators to turn off non-essential power during outages — which will in turn allow the system to operate indefinitely during extended emergencies. Altogether, the expanded microgrid will “radically expand” the capacity of microgrids to “provide energy reliability in high-risk locations,” says Schatz Center director Arne Jacobson. “These tribes are already leading the field in dam removal, healthy fire on the land, middle and last-mile telecommunications access, and renewable energy systems deployment — and will now support development of what we hope will be a game-changing climate resilience solution.”
In expanding its microgrid capacity, Blue Lake Rancheria is not alone. Across the United States, communities, hospitals, companies and more are turning to microgrids to expand stable and clean electric power — for reliability, affordability and flexibility — to new frontiers. According to the Department of Energy, there are some 1,100 active microgrid installations in the U.S., with new installations planned everywhere from Maine to Hawaii. These installations boast a total generating capacity of over five million kilowatts — a 170 percent increase from a decade ago — and over two million kilowatt-hours of storage capacity.
When Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas last summer, it brought with it 80 mile per hour winds and more than three feet of flooding. The storm wreaked havoc on the greater Houston area — and its electrical system. Nearly three million people lost power, with outages lasting for more than a week amid temperatures above 100 degrees. One microgrid company, Enchanted Rock, operated 140 microgrids — totaling 210 megawatts — simultaneously. “That was a record for us,” says Allen Shurr, the company’s chief commercial officer. Grocery stores kept thousands of dollars in product from spoiling, medical centers kept their lights on, and flood control operations were able to keep working on disaster relief. Smaller residential, solar-powered microgrids kept power on in peoples’ homes, and those with power even ran lines to their neighbors’ homes to share in the relief.
While most microgrids run on gas, the precipitous decline in both solar and battery prices has driven a surge in green microgrid installations. The price of solar panels has declined by 90 percent over the last decade, and the price of power provided by battery storage has fallen by more than 80 percent over the same period to record lows (rounding out a 97 percent decline in prices since the 1990s). Today, solar comprises an increasing share of all new microgrid projects. In 2023, 51 percent of all new microgrid generating capacity came from solar — up from just 19 percent in 2013, and virtually zero percent in 2003.
“Normally when you install solar, if the grid goes down, the solar has to shut off as well,” says Ramé Hemstreet. Hemstreet is vice president for national facilities and design and chief energy officer at Kaiser Permanente, which has installed microgrids at a number of its facilities across Hawaii and California, including California’s first solar microgrid powering a medical facility at its Richmond Hospital in the Bay Area. “If you’re going to use renewable energy, you have to have some means to store that energy.”
At Kaiser’s facility, battery storage serves a dual purpose. For one, part of the system is able to run on solar alone for between four and ten hours during a grid outage (the hospital is required by law to retain generators that can provide 96 hours of power during an outage). More regularly, however, the Richmond facility’s microgrid helps to balance demand and reduce energy prices, as the facility draws from the microgrid at times of high prices and high demand, and stores that energy or sells it back to the grid when it is unneeded. In California, for instance, the rapid growth of solar has brought with it massive fluctuations in price between night — when panels are not producing electricity — and day, when they are. “California doesn’t need any more solar alone,” says Hemstreet. “What California needs is more renewable resources, including solar, paired with batteries … and what makes that economical is the time of day pricing opportunities and demand response.”
This reflects a critical second role for microgrids: Even those that don’t have the capacity to “island” in the event of grid failure help provide green grid stability by preventing grid failures in the first place. This combination of improving both affordability and reliability is what drew Bimbo Bakeries — the company behind Entenmann’s, Thomas’ and other brands — to install microgrid systems on half a dozen industrial bakeries. “We’re very automated, so we use quite a bit of electricity comparable to other industries, and it’s not cheap in California … and the utility grid in California is stressed with brown-outs and blackouts,” says Christopher Wolfe, senior director of environmental sustainability at Bimbo Bakeries USA. “Indirectly, we’re helping the grid. We’re lowering stress during those peak times because we’re able to feed the energy from the batteries back to the grid [rather than] direct to our bakeries.”
Decarbonization relies on electrification — and for electrification to work, America needs to be able to keep the lights on, even when disaster strikes. From California to Houston, industrial bakeries to hospitals to homes, microgrids are helping America do just that.
