Southern California Edison (SCE) has recently announced that a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) is possible for some Santa Barbara County areas starting Friday, due to high wind conditions. The length of the outages is currently unknown and depends on weather conditions. Santa Barbara county urges residents, for all PSPS events, to be prepared for outages for up to 7 days, to keep cell phones and battery backups charged, keep vehicle gas tanks full/electric vehicles fully charged, have flashlights and other devices available, and to have non-perishable food and water.
6,689 customers are under advisory in the following areas:
- Santa Barbara
- Santa Barbara County
- Gaviota
- Concepcion
- El Capitan Park
- Mission Canyon
- Montecito
Maps of these areas can be found on their website below.
https://www.sce.com/safety/wildfire/psps
PSPS events like these further validate that we need a higher level of energy resilience in our community. The World Business Academy and The Clean Coalition’s work with the Montecito Community Microgrid Initiative and Goleta Load Pocket Community Microgrid are solutions to these PSPS events and we are working hard to establish them.
For two days last week PG&E shutoff power to hundreds of thousands of customers due to high fire risk weather conditions. During this time, first responders and local officials in northern and central California were stressed about the potential impact that these power outages would have on their communities. However, three fire stations in Fremont didn’t have anything to worry about because their Microgrids kept running even when the electrical grid went down.
This is an excellent example of how Microgrids are becoming an absolute necessity in our new world of Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) and natural disasters. Please see the link below for more information regarding the recent PG&E shutoffs and the success of the Fremont Fire Department’s Microgrids:
The Montecito Fire Protection District Microgrid is designed to operate in the same fashion and keep the Montecito Fire Protection District operational during outages. Further reducing the stress of our first responders and providing resilience in the face of power shutoffs and disasters.
