![]() ![]() With their SunPower systems, homeowners will pay 10% less for electricity than they would from SoCal Edison and have the same electricity rate for the next 25 years, Brost said. As climate change leads to more extreme heat events that prompt California residents to crank their air conditioning and max out the grid, the need for resiliency is increasingly imperative. What makes them a microgrid is that all of the homes are connected to each other and pool their power into an energy island that’s able to provide backup power in case of an impending blackout.Īlready, a grueling week-long heat wave in September brought the state to the brink of mass blackouts. The homes are resilient because the electricity is locally generated with solar panels and stored on site, not only with individual homes’ batteries but a large community battery that can store their excess power. “With this project, we’ve got even lower cost, super reliable energy, but on top of it, you’re getting all these other benefits like resiliency.” “If I asked most people, ‘What do you want in your electricity provider?’ They’d say they want low cost or affordable, reliable energy,” said Matt Brost, vice president of new home sales for SunPower, which is providing the solar panels, battery energy storage, management system and installation for the microgrid homes. Residents who are frugal with their electricity use might not need to pull any power from Southern California Edison, though people who are heavy electronics users most likely will, Hansen said. Whether a homeowner is able to completely power their space with solar, however, depends on their usage. Each house ranges in size from 1,400 to 2,900 square feet, which determines the scale of its solar array and battery system. The homes are available in a variety of floor plans and range in price from $490,000 to $590,000. KB Home is building the houses in the Menifee microgrid community. The nation’s sixth largest home builder, KB selected the Menifee development because it was large enough to be a good experiment and could also be isolated from the main electricity grid in the event of a power outage or natural disaster, Hansen said. “How can we get this to work? How does it work? What’s the best way to run it? What’s the best way to operate it? What’s the best way to build it so that we can, in our future communities, take what we learn here and implement it in other places?” Hansen said. The car company Kia and the Southern California Edison power utility are also partners in the project. LA-based KB Home and SunPower, headquartered in San Jose, received $6.6 million from the agency to pay for the microgrid’s batteries and research that the University of California-Irvine and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab will conduct. SunPower is providing the battery storage system for the Menifee microgrid community. ![]()
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