By law, the state must obtain all of its power by 2045 from clean sources, including sun and wind, which are cheaper than ever but unpredictable and difficult to fully harness. And these trends could grow as utility companies blamed for wildfires face increasing hostility from consumers. More than 100 “micro-grids” have sprouted across the state, producing and sharing their own energy. Scores of small towns and counties have cut the cord and now operate their own mini-utilities, buying power directly from wholesalers. Many homeowners already run their lives with power generated on their own roofs. Millions of customers have turned their backs on utilities in the past decade. Power now runs into and out of the grid from multiple sources, all the time. The 100-year-old system in which power flows one way, from mega-utilities to their millions of customers, is coming apart.Some of the system’s vulnerabilities-even its lethality-have been laid bare by wildfires, when power was interrupted by flying tree limbs and communities were devastated by blazes sparked by broken equipment. Its hundreds of thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines throughout the state, serving virtually every home and business, are at full capacity, operating well past their designed limits. The grid is aging, large pieces of it having been installed to serve a state with a few million people, not today’s 40 million. Before the state completes its shift to a modern, safe, sustainable energy grid, it has to decide precisely how that should be accomplished. Utility executives, policymakers and regulators are peering into a future where California has shed fossil fuels and is fully buzzing with electricity. The complex system that powers the world’s fifth-largest economy is at a turning point. The houses were outfitted with tools for use with the advanced electricity system glowing on California’s horizon, prepping residents for a near future when things worth having will carry the prefix “smart”-as in smart appliances installed in smart homes attached to the smart power grid.Ĭalifornia is in the midst of a similar, and hugely transformative, experiment: an effort to redesign the future of electricity generation, distribution and use to meet a surging demand. The rows of nondescript subdivision homes, inhabited by UC Irvine faculty and staff, afforded a high-tech peephole from which to observe how humans interact with electricity.
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