How to get more power for buildings in SCE and PG&E territories
Key Takeaways (TL;DR)
From talking to commercial real estate developers and manufacturers looking to increase their site power, there’s a consensus that getting power has become much more difficult over the past 24 months. If you need to add power at your site, you have essentially three options.
- 1
Pay the utility to do an interconnection study and wait to get connected.
- 2
Build a microgrid with a combination of generation and/or storage.
- 3
Give up and move to Texas, which we don’t want you to do.
Going through the utility
If you need several megawatts (MW) of additional power, start early and hire a consultant who understands your region’s challenges and has established relationships with utility providers. Seriously, if you need more power, start much earlier than you think you’d need to. In power-constrained regions like the Inland Empire or San Jose, the wait time to get significant additional power from utilities can stretch up to five years, especially if your site isn’t already in the queue for upgrades.
Building a micro-grid (Traditional)
If you can’t wait years for more power, you can add generation which is typically done in the form of a micro-grid. Historically, building micro-grids was an option limited to large corporations or government projects due to high engineering costs and tenants not wanting to lock themselves into a site for 15-20 years if they didn’t own the real estate. Modern micro-grids have come down in cost and complexity due to lower cost power electronics and battery storage, but still have some challenges. You’re able to generate and store energy through fuel cells and/or solar panels, and potentially store the energy for resilience, cost reduction, or whatever your energy heart desires but the engineering costs are still very high, and you’ll need to be willing to stay in one location essentially indefinitely.
Note: Quality micro-grids are not the same as solar and storage. Solar and storage reduce costs but don’t typically increase resilience to power outages or increase power availability.
Building a micro-grid (Scalable)
At Critical Loop we realized there’s an unmet market for a better modern micro-grid that solves power increases in a business friendly way. We created a scalable, deployable micro-grid that can be leased for as long as it’s needed. Because the system can be scaled up and down to the need, sites that are waiting for more power from the utility can add and subtract capabilities as needed, and tenants can use the equipment for as long as they’re in a space, even if they don’t own it. Some common issues we've solved are listed below.
| Issue | Solution |
|---|---|
| Site needs power in the near future | System can be deployed in less than one month |
| Tenant doesn’t own the building | Equipment is rentable, so the contract is only as long as needed |
| Microgrids are complex | Critical Loop’s system is productized and can increase power availability in 1200amp steps |
For me, the most interesting thing we've done at Critical Loop is having laser focus on making our system serve business needs. The grid will grow, and when that happens, if it’s cheaper to use electricity from the grid, our customers will use the grid.
Our goal is to solve power problems, and if that’s something you need help with, please reach out.
Note: Our systems have more capabilities than described above. The short list includes grid forming, voltage stability increases, critical backup, 24/7 satellite monitored system health status updates, peak shaving, load shifting, etc.