Imagine being in the middle of an important Zoom meeting. It’s August in Santa Cruz, the sun is shining and there is a pleasant coastal breeze. Suddenly the power shuts off leaving you with an interrupted meeting, disabled wifi, and the foreboding that it is fire season in California.

Power utility shutoffs have become ever more common as a preventative measure to recurring and worsening natural crisis. From high winds to heat waves, the weather dictates our access to the non-negotiable necessity of electricity. Rolling blackouts and State and IOU’s (investor owned utilities) efforts to provision emergency generators are not a solution that will scale to match the challenges of the future.

Solar photovoltaic microgrids with battery storage offer a local solution to these and other problems within our regional monopoly IOU. The Sustainable Systems Research Foundation and its partners are investigating the development of solar photovoltaic microgrids with battery storage in the City of Santa Cruz to meet the Central Coast’s future power needs. These include:

1. A 10-Megawatt system plus battery storage, which will serve light industrial buildings in an area bounded by the Mission Street extension, Natural Bridges Drive and Delaware Street (see Figure 2), with resilience transmission to essential facilities on and near Mission Street.

2. A 6-Megawatt system plus storage, which will provide the SC Beach Boardwalk and adjacent neighborhoods with power from solar carports built over nearby parking lots.

3. A 500-kilowatt microgrid plus storage serving a future community of new homes on property adjacent to Antonelli Pond.

The proposed community energy system would be developed and deployed over a ten- year period, during which, rules, regulations and financing options governing both installation and grid connections are likely to be liberalized.