PG&E Testing Innovative DER Management System with Blue Lake Rancheria Microgrid

By Paul Doherty

PG&E is testing the capabilities of its nascent Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) with an existing microgrid in Northern California.

In late 2020, PG&E began integrating its DERMS with the Blue Lake Rancheria (BLR) microgrid in Humboldt County through a new EPIC project.

DERMS is a software platform that provides the ability to communicate with or control distributed energy resources (DER) such as smart inverter-enabled solar arrays, battery energy storage systems, or electric vehicles.

PG&E conducted an initial DERMS proof-of-concept demonstration in 2016-2018 with a small set of residential and commercial customers in San Jose through an Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) project.

EPIC is a statewide program established by the CPUC that enables California investor-owned utilities (IOUs) to develop and demonstrate smart grid technologies that further safety, reliability, resiliency and affordability objectives for the benefit of all electric customers.

In late 2020, PG&E began integrating its DERMS with the Blue Lake Rancheria (BLR) microgrid in Humboldt County through a new EPIC project. The goal is to establish affordable, strategic communications with the DERs that make up the microgrid, to provide advanced situational awareness and realize their full potential in providing enhanced resiliency and grid services.

“The effort involves designing, procuring, and deploying a production ready and scalable enterprise DER management platform to demonstrate and test the monitoring and control capabilities required to manage the BLR microgrid and its impact on the broader distribution grid,” said Omid Sarvian, product manager on PG&E’s Grid Innovation team who is leading the project.

BLR is a federally recognized Native American tribe and government, with a 100-acre tribal community, which hosts two operating microgrids and two others in design. BLR’s building complex includes tribal government offices, an event center, electric vehicle charging, a convenience store and fuel station, two restaurants, a hotel, casino, and energy and water systems. Certain facilities in its central campus are certified as American Red Cross emergency shelters within a national network of evacuation centers.

PG&E was a strategic partner on the original deployment of the BLR microgrid, which integrates a solar array and legacy diesel generation, battery storage, and control systems, allowing the BLR campus to operate connected with or islanded from the PG&E grid – meaning it continues to generate and deliver electricity to customers on its own -- and providing resilience in a region prone to natural disasters including floods, earthquakes and wildfires.

Full islanding functionality of the microgrid was achieved in July 2017 and the complex was fully islanded and served as a critical resource providing many essential needs to the local community during the 2019 and 2020 Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) impacting the area.

Jana Ganion, BLR’s Sustainability and Government Affairs Director, is the onsite project lead for the Tribe.

“Since the beginning of our microgrid strategy, we have been working toward more cooperative integration between microgrids and the wider distribution grid to achieve more grid services and local resilience,” Ganion said. “Affordable telemetry can help enable generation and storage assets to be more flexibly deployed across the point of connection between the microgrid and the regional grid, particularly in grid emergencies, and the Tribe is pleased to support this effort.”

DER sites can have smart inverters, energy management systems, microgrid controllers (which function like a computer, managing and getting data from the DERs), and an onsite gateway device (which is like the router – extending visibility into that data and allowing grid operators to ramp the generation resource up and down to keep power quality high).

The DERMS integration with BLR involves the development and deployment of dedicated servers and pilot remote site gateway devices to establish visibility and control capabilities with BLR’s smart inverter-enabled solar array and battery energy storage system.

The site gateways for the BLR microgrid DERMS demonstration are provided by Sacramento-based Congruitive, which develops software defined communications solutions that give both utilities and renewable energy producers the power to manage and control energy at every point on the grid.

Congruitive’s gateway solutions allow utilities, developers and energy companies to acquire, transport and present complex energy data across the grid, helping integrate solar, energy storage, microgrids, electric vehicles and other distributed energy resources at scale.

“We are excited to be conducting this first-of-its-kind project with Blue Lake Rancheria and our long-time partner, PG&E,” said Ken Munson, CEO at Congruitive. “Our C.IQ Gateway solutions are helping developers and energy consumers extract more value from interconnected DERs like microgrids, solar-plus-storage and EVs, while allowing utilities to integrate these devices into their operations for improved grid reliability and customer safety.”

Initial results of this demonstration, which PG&E hopes to share by mid-2021, will then move into a production system that will help its customers fulfill potential telemetry requirements for utility monitoring at a lower cost than existing methods.

The DERMS aims to reduce the cost of telemetry to DERs interconnecting onto PG&E‘s distribution grid.

The current costs are at a minimum of $150,000 per DER for telemetry back to the utility through either the installation of a miniature remote terminal unit (Mini RTU) or a recloser.

This project aims to significantly lower the cost to about $20,000 per DER. PG&E anticipates there will be somewhere between 50-100 DERs requiring telemetry every year, equating to approximately $10 million in savings per year for these interconnections.

“Robust DER monitoring and control capabilities are required to fully realize the benefits of DERs for providing grid services such as resilience and distribution capacity deferral, and through this project we are working to create the ability for PG&E grid operators to communicate with and have visibility into microgrid DERs from our control centers,” Sarvian said. “The goal is to develop a replicable, low-cost, centralized system to communicate with both grid-connected DERs and remote grids which can increase resilience for our customers and reduce overall wildfire risk exposure by removing miles of powerline from high-risk areas and replacing them with locally-cited, low-carbon resources.”

Given the rapidly evolving energy landscape and the impact of climate change in California, the continuation of technology innovation programs like EPIC is critical to the continued advancements of grid capabilities in helping meet California’s ambitious clean energy goals, and furthering the safe and resilient operation of the electric grid.

The EPIC 3 program cycle now underway is the final triennial cycle in the current EPIC program, and a CPUC proceeding is currently underway to determine whether PG&E and the other California IOUs will continue to administer their respective portions of the EPIC program.

Learn more about PG&E’s technology programs and projects at www.pge.com/EPIC