Bloom Energy launches Quick Deploy Microgrid Program to prepare for future wildfire seasons

California — Bloom Energy announced a new Quick-Deploy Microgrid Program to help customers prepare for future wildfire seasons with permanent AlwaysON Microgrids for their facilities.

This program will enable customers to deploy a resilient microgrid infrastructure prior to the anticipated start of the 2020 wildfire season as well as receive clean electricity at a predictable cost to mitigate the impact of utility rate increases.

California recently instituted intentional outages called Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) with the objective of reducing wildfires and improving public safety. As such, businesses are increasingly taking power security into their own hands, considering the “cost of not having power” instead of just the “cost of power.”

These blackouts have been deemed as California’s “new normal” for the next 10 years or longer. Since October 2017, these PSPS events have resulted in a reported 2,374 outages affecting 2.3 million customers. And these are long outages – the longest planned event during the two-year span lasted six days, and the average duration was nearly two full days.

As a result, companies are turning to microgrids as a solution to safeguard their operations. Bloom Energy is a leading microgrid provider with 89 microgrids deployed globally.

Bloom Energy also announced a new Power Outage Map, which allows users to see the number of blackouts and customers impacted in California since October 2017.

Bloom Energy, working with Bluefire Studios, a company that monitors utilities throughout the country, created the outage map, which currently has data for all blackouts that affected at least 100 customers in California during the two-year-plus period, and is planning on expanding to additional states and other outage-prone areas. Businesses in California can now assess their risk on a city-level in a matter of seconds to inform their energy resiliency strategy.

It’s not only engineered power shutoffs that are leaving Californians in the dark: since October 2017, the outage map shows there have been more than 50,000 blackout events in the state affecting the equivalent of approximately 51 million customers.