Summary: I live in the San Francisco Bay Area (hereafter “SF Bay Area”). Although this has many relatively flat areas (like the Livermore Valley, where I live). It also has many mountainous areas (dark green in the map on the first page of this paper).
Although the 2024 overall population of the SF Bay Area is between six and seven-million, very few of these people live in the mountainous regions. Although the mountainous areas are all very beautiful, they can also be very challenging due to:
Very narrow, winding roads
Very few near-by neighbors
Poor power-reliability
High fire-risk…
Also, in spite of the third bullet, it is very expensive for the power companies (PG&E for most of the SF Bay Area) to service the distribution lines in these areas. Thus, lately, they have been looking at either solar + battery systems for individual customers or solar + battery microgrids for small clusters of these customers. The plan to provide these systems is the subject of this post.
