A Small City with Big Energy Plans

Gonzales, CA is a small city in the Salinas Valley that is home to a $70 million dollar investment in a Microgrid energy project and vision of the future. As one of the country’s most productive agricultural centers, the city of 8500 is also includes two major agricultural processing facilities owned by Taylor Farms and Del Monte Foods. Expanding existing facilities and new business has been hampered by limited energy capacity.

Not only is access to sufficient energy restricting economic growth of the region but poor grid quality has placed local industry and millions worth of perishable products at risk. Additionally, PG&E’s fire-prevention blackouts, left the the city without power for days on end, providing another substantial financial risk.

In many municipalities such as Gonzales, PG&E substations are the determining factor in a grid’s ability to supply power. The necessary expansion process usually takes three to five years due to PG&E backlogs, not including the difficulty of approving upgrades. Furthermore, simple expansions do not introduce the redundancy required in increasingly volatile climates where resilience is essential to reliable and scalable power.

The introduction of a micro-grid, in parallel with existing systems provides an opportunity to engage diverse energy sources and community energy stakeholders. For Gonzales,

With a mix of roughly 80 percent renewable energy and 20 percent natural gas, the power will be cleaner than what PG&E supplies at present. That lines up with the city’s climate action plan calling for sustainable energy development and reducing carbon emissions to meet its economic and social goals. Gonzales is planning a wastewater treatment plant methane capture facility that could supply its natural-gas units with carbon-neutral fuel in future years

By facilitating collaboration between municipal utility, large electricity customers as anchor tenants, and a microgrid developer to fund and manage the solar, battery and natural-gas-powered system, Gonzales is pioneering a model that could provide reliable, clean energy solutions, and inspiration far beyond its city limits.

Through establishing a “multi-customer municipal utility energy services agreement” many of the more complex barriers to microgrid development in California could be alleviated, according to concentric Power, CEO Brian Curtis. Specifically the price involved in establishing new systems can be offloaded from often already overwhelmed local municipalities.

“We’re flexing the power of a municipal utility to act as a load-serving entity,” explained Dustin Jolley, founder and principal of OurEnergy, the technical advisory firm and project developer that advised the city on designing the plan and the 2019 request for proposals for the Gonzales project.