PG&E Utilizes Islanding to Reduce Outages

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) is pursuing an “islanding” strategy to help reduce the customer impact of its rolling / panned blackouts (purposeful shut downs of sections of the grid during hot and dry weather designed to prevent grid equipment from sparking forest fires). 

Although not the end-all-be-all, islanding can be an effective tool in the battle against California wildfires.  But what exactly is it?

The Nuts and Bolts of Islanding

Islanding refers to the practice of reconfiguring a power plant so that it can be isolated from the larger grid.  This allows the local area served by the plant to retain electric service even when nearby transmission lines are compromised.  In other words, because the plant has been isolated, it can remain operational during rolling blackout scenarios because is not dependent on power moving through transmission lines that may be impacted upstream.   

This practice can also be used to provide backup power to community centers, allowing customers that have lost power to visit a center to recharge devices, use restrooms, access the internet, etc.

In conjunction with islanding, PG&E maintains lists of “medical baseline customers” that require power for medical reasons.  Whenever a blackout occurs that impacts its medical baseline customers, PG&E reaches out to them with instructions for how to access islanded power sources.

I really appreciate PG&E’s efforts to do anything possible to reduce the customer impact of these rolling blackouts.  The company has taken additional steps as well, such as bolstering its alert notifications, providing more advance notice that a planned outage is coming, and shoring up some of its critical assets.