The Palisadian-Post has partnered with locally founded environmental nonprofit Resilient Palisades to deliver a weekly “green tip” to our readers. This week’s tip was written by Ryan Craig.
If you are a Spectrum customer, live west of Temescal Canyon and were home on October 12, you were likely left without any Spectrum services, including telephone, internet and television. The result: packed coffee shops in the Village and many frustrated Palisadians.
What happened? Very early that morning, an RV exploded under an overhead power pole that carries Spectrum fiber. While the resident of the RV survived, the Spectrum’s overhead cables did not. This left residents west of Temescal without any service until late in the day.
The fact that thousands of Palisadian families depend on a single line underscores our geographical isolation. As every Palisadian knows—especially during rush hour—there are only two ways in and out of our community. That makes us less resilient and vulnerable to the vagaries of natural disasters and exploding RVs.
The unproductive day of October 12 reminds us that we need to become much more resilient. While Resilient Palisades doesn’t yet have initiative for dealing with the cable company (can you imagine dealing with the cable company?) we have one for a lifeline that’s even more important than internet and TV: power. The Pali Microgrid aims to increase our resilience to power outages by partnering with LADWP.
What is the Pali Microgrid? The Pali Microgrid will connect hundreds of Palisadian homes with solar and battery storage in order to:
Reduce load on the grid. Critically important in the Palisades as LADWP is seeking additional distributed energy resources (DERs) to meet our community’s growing demand for electricity.
Increase resilience by islanding from the grid in the event of brownouts and blackouts. Highly relevant for the Palisades given more frequent outages (according to data provided by LADWP, 19 major outages in the El Medio Bluffs alone since 2018).
We are taking a two-phase approach to establishing the Pali Microgrid. The first phase consists of installing solar and storage across as many homes as possible. We are accomplishing this with a group purchasing program, leveraging volume to get best possible pricing from installers. In other communities where this has been attempted, pricing has been as much as 30% lower.
In 2022-23, Phase Two will consist of joining solar and storage homes into a microgrid.
To learn more about Phase One of the Pali Microgrid, sign up at resilientpalisades.org.
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