FONTANA
Moving forward with green energy.
Fontana is the second largest city in San Bernardino County and the 19th largest in the state of California, founded in 1913. Fontana began as an agricultural village in 1913 and by 1942 had grown into a bustling industrial town. Fontana is a modern city that offers its residents and visitors a wealth of community activities, a thriving local economy and central access to major business centers.
What exactly is a microgrid?
A microgrid is a self-contained power system that supplies electricity to a specific geographic area, such as a college campus, medical complex, shopping mall, or neighbourhood.
One or more types of distributed energy (solar panels, wind turbines, cogeneration, generators) are used to generate electricity within microgrids. Furthermore, many new microgrids have energy accumulators, which are often batteries. Electric vehicle charging stations are also available.
About Gridscape
Gridscape is a leading innovative energy solutions company specializing in developing and implementing standardized innovative products and solutions for Microgrid and EV charging systems. Our solutions provide energy savings, operational efficiency and enable our customers to save energy, operate efficiently and achieve sustainable development goals.
Gridscape EnergyScopeTM Dashboards
Inherently Integrated with EV charging infrastructure.
Full Energy Management including demand charge reduction, TOU arbitrage, grid services, interconnected network of microgrids.
The Project
As part of the CEC grant funded project (EPC-17-052: Commercializing Virtual Wide Area Urban Microgrids for Grid Resiliency and Disaster Readiness), a virtual wide-area urban microgrid (V-WAM) network will be deployed at five sites in Fontana (City Hall, Police Department, Senior Centre, Public Works, and Community Services) to demonstrate how each of the following key aspects is improved through an innovative approach:
Standardized microgrid configurations;
Adaptable business case; and
Virtual wide-area urban microgrid. The total microgrid size is of 1550 kWh that will save energy cost and GHG emission as well as provide resilience to the facilities.
As of now, the City has approved the design for the three sites and remaining sites are in the approval process.
1
The project will save approx. $194,501 in energy costs annually.
2
The project will also offset 981 MT of GHG annually.
3
The project will reduce the peak demand and will contribute to additional cost savings.
Why should you use a Microgrid?
A large city like Fontana, which includes city hall, police headquarters, community centers, and PWD they need to have power supply 24×7 to keep running since they are community resources. Cities have to meet their climate action plan, and utility. Â This must also help them in cost savings since cities are always under budget crunch.
Design
The project will be based on following figure system integration architecture for Gridscape projects with minor modifications/alterations.
Below is a single line drawing for one of the sites at Fontana.
Project Financing
Gridscape Solutions, in partnership with Electric Power Research Institute, Inc. (EPRI), TRC, and the City of Fontana was awarded a grant from the California Energy Commission (CEC), which is funded by the Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) program, an electricity ratepayer surcharge authorized by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).
Other Project Details
The following is a partial list of the solar microgrid projects deployed or in the process of being deployed by Gridscape in 2021
