summary of PG&E battery meeting?

[Flora Brain]

I wasn't able to attend the PG&E meeting last Wednesday, but I'm hoping to learn what was said. 

Can anyone provide a summary or recap of key points that they shared? 

Many thanks!

Flora

[John Williams]

The take-home is that the project as designed only provides load shaving -- that is the batteries will provide extra electricity when the demand temporarily exceeds the capacity of the transmission line.  The has two consequences: (1) PG&E will be able to hook up more customers, and (2) PG&E will be able to use the smaller capacity transmission line from Rio Dell to Honeydew when the line from Garberville is down, and this should improve our reliability (my guess is that it will decrease the duration but not the number of outages).

The system as designed will not provide power from the batteries when the power is out -- the generators will still be used in the winter, as before.  

The audience indicated a lot of support for re-engineering the set-up so that it could function as a micro-grid during outages, especially extended ones, but the current design would not provide that.  I think it remains a possibility in the future.