PG&E Picks Six Community Microgrids for $30 Million but Names Only One of Them
- Emergency & Local Government Microgrids News
Marin Holt
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- 6 minutes read
- Second-round funding: $30 million
- Award range per project: $2 million to $6 million
- Pescadero system: 1.5 MW solar and 2 MW battery
- PG&E program allocation: $79.2 million
Pacific Gas and Electric selected six community microgrid projects for $30 million under California’s Microgrid Incentive Program. The utility announced the second round on September 17. It identified only one of the six.
The named project sits in Pescadero, on the San Mateo County coast. WestLight Energy, a local community choice aggregator, leads it. The design pairs about 1.5 MW of solar with a 2 MW battery. It serves more than 200 customers. PG&E says the system will run the town for at least 24 hours during a wildfire or storm outage.
The other five sit in Humboldt, Sonoma, Butte, Placer and El Dorado counties. PG&E did not publish their names, their capacities, their individual award amounts, their construction schedules or their islanding durations. Across all six projects the utility counted more than 2,200 customers.
What the utility did disclose
Individual awards run from $2 million to $6 million. PG&E caps total support at $14 million per project, covering microgrid hardware, site acquisition and engineering. Each project draws up to $1 million beyond that for the interconnection studies the utility requires before a microgrid islands safely.
The statewide Microgrid Incentive Program holds $200 million. Regulators routed $79.2 million of that to PG&E. The utility awarded $43 million to nine projects in the first round in 2025. Add the two rounds and they account for $73 million of the $79.2 million. PG&E did not describe the remaining balance or say whether a third round follows. That subtraction is ours, not the utility’s, and the company has not confirmed the two rounds draw on one pot.
Why It Matters
Front-of-the-meter microgrids in disadvantaged communities rarely finance themselves. A $2 million to $6 million grant decides which towns get one and which wait. Five communities now know money is coming and still cannot read the terms attached to it.
The gap matters to anyone preparing the next application. The useful comparisons are capacity per grant dollar and islanding hours per grant dollar. Pescadero is the only project PG&E released enough detail to measure: roughly 1.5 MW of solar and 2 MW of battery for more than 200 customers. Developers scoring their own designs against the winners have one data point and five blanks.
Critical Perspective
PG&E released a number and withheld the terms behind it. Six awards of $2 million to $6 million leave a spread of $12 million across the round, and the utility did not say which community sits at which end. The one project it described, Pescadero, is also the one with a community choice aggregator running it. Whether the other five carry that kind of local sponsor is unstated, and sponsorship is usually what decides if a community microgrid survives its own interconnection study.
The $1 million allowance for interconnection studies is worth reading closely. PG&E pays for the studies that PG&E requires, which keeps the grant from being consumed by the utility’s own process. It also means the published award figures and the real cost of connecting these six microgrids are not the same number. None of the six has a construction schedule on the record, and the first round’s nine projects from 2025 have not been reported as energized.
Sources
- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pge-advances-deployment-of-community-microgrids-announces-new-grant-agreements-and-second-round-of-funding-awards-302881464.html
- https://microgridmedia.com/pge-community-microgrids-30-million-round/
- https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/09/18/utility-scale-project-roundup-utah-solar-texas-tech-power-california-microgrids-and-storage-and-massachusetts-community-solar/
