PG&E Details Strategies for Accelerating Electrification, Meeting Climate Goals and Stabilizing Costs

Energy affects everyone, everywhere, so addressing the intersection of climate change and energy was a natural focus for a summit during San Francisco Climate Week. 

The Energy Summit on April 23 brought together a diverse group of representatives from the energy industry, auto industry, technology developers, advocates and policymakers. Key topics were virtual power plants, vehicle-grid integration and policy issues, spread over several conversations.  

Michael Delaney, vice president of Utility Partnerships and Innovation at PG&E, set the tone in his on-stage discussion with Canary Media’s Jeff St. John.

“We have a commitment to get to net zero by 2040,” Delaney said, restating the goal the utility set for its energy systems laid out in its 2022 Climate Strategy Report. Delaney added that three key pathways will help the utility meet that goal:

• Accelerating electric transportation and buildings while delivering more clean energy more quickly;
• using dynamic load management to deal with increased demand, driving more effective utilization of existing power; 
• implementing innovation.

All that is expected to be done while driving customer electricity rates down. 

One tool discussed by Delaney was use of distributed energy resources, independent energy production and/or storage, such as solar and battery storage, that can be used to supplement PG&E power. He proposed that the focus of any added distributed energy resources should be on its cost-effectiveness.

Vehicle-To-Everything (V2X)

A new tech tool that has potential to help utilities to meet increasing electricity demand without having to build new power plants is using the stored energy in existing vehicle batteries, the subject of an afternoon discussion. As the number of EVs capable of bidirectional charging has increased, this has the potential of “making outages invisible to our customers,” said Kristin Landry, PG&E’s product manager of Vehicle-Grid Integration.

Today, with the right equipment sets, EVs can power a customer’s home in the event of a broader grid outage. In the near future, the aggregated energy in vehicle batteries could also become a virtual power plant to support the grid if electric vehicles plugged-into bi-directional chargers are opted into a program allowing the power draw.

Panelist Lynn Ames, head of Utility and Energy Market Development at General Motors, said vehicle-to-grid (V2G), where electrons storied in a car batteries are returned to the grid for general use, could be “a way for our customers to even make money.” 

GM is currently working on a program in which up to 1,000 PG&E residential electric customers with the approved vehicles and equipment sets can participate to test V2X capabilities and potential.

When asked about challenges for V2X, Ames said there was a fundamental mismatch in the perspectives of global auto companies thinking in 5- to 10-year product plan cycles and hyperlocal utilities that don’t work on the same kind of timelines for this technology. As an example, she called for utilities to scale up their programs, while the PG&E representative noted that PG&E’s V2X program is the largest of its kind in the United States — a mini-program of sorts that is intended to prove out the capabilities and inform a scaled deployment.

Policy direction

The final panel of the Summit featured climate science and policy experts discussing the role of federal, state and local policy in the clean energy push.

The group’s discussion reached an informal consensus that, given the current direction of the federal government, there are actions that could be taken at the state and local level to advance clean energy, such as procurement requirements, tax credits and streamlining of permitting. That said, they also suggested “keeping what’s good and working” of existing federal programs.

A variety of reforms were offered by panelists, including allowing more competition with utilities, creating and funding school programs to train the workforce needed for clean energy expansion and connecting with and enlisting a younger generation that “gets” the imperative for a move to clean energy.

The Summit closed with a fitting recap of California energy initiatives by the chair of the California Energy Commission, David Hochschild. He highlighted the rapid adoption of non-fossil-fueled energy in the state, its adoption of electric vehicles, a growing charging network and more electrified buildings.