CAISO Approves PG&E Oakland Clean Energy Initiative
PG&E’s Oakland Clean Energy Initiative (OCEI) will provide a green and innovative option that uses local clean-energy resources, including energy storage, energy efficiency and electric-system upgrades, to ensure transmission grid reliability in Oakland when the current power plant at 50 Martin Luther King Jr. Way is retired.
PG&E will open a two-month request-for-offers process this spring to invite providers of distributed energy resources to propose innovative and competitive solutions for the portfolio.
Roy Kuga, vice president of Grid Integration and Innovation for PG&E, thanked the system operator’s staff for its hard work reviewing PG&E’s proposal.
“The Oakland Clean Energy Initiative represents an innovative, tailored portfolio of distributed clean energy resources combined with traditional transmission substation upgrades that meet the local reliability needs in this area of Oakland, enabling the retirement of the aging, jet fuel-powered plant,” Kuga said.
The system operator has a Reliability Must Run contract with the existing plant’s owner, Dynegy, to purchase power during peak periods. In spring 2017, the system operator identified the 40-year-old plant’s eventual retirement as a risk to local transmission reliability, and said it would consider alternatives including new transmission lines through heavily populated areas of Oakland, a new fossil-fuel plant or a portfolio of local clean resources.
PG&E and the system operator worked collaboratively over the last several transmission-planning cycles to study how distributed clean energy resources could become part of the solution, Kuga said.
The system operator determined in its transmission plan that the OCEI would be a clean and affordable option to new transmission or a new fossil-fuel facility.
