Looming Fire Threat - Surging EVs - San Diego Utility Responds

San Diego Gas & Electric is knitting together one of the densest concentration of EVs in the nation.

The high stakes fire season is upon it even though forest fires fueled by drought has become a year around threat.

New business-changing innovations beckon - like the use of hydrogen technology to provide 10 hours of energy storage for fuel cells.

Caroline Winn, SDG&E’s CEO, and her team are addressing these and many more challenges as the utility business evolves and changes in real time. The massive California utility serves 1.4 million electric meters and 873,000 natural gas meters.

Here is what she told Grid Talk, the Department of Energy podcast, in a wide-ranging interview, smart grid.gov/gridtalk.

https://bit.ly/3gVJzDM

On Electric Vehicles

“In 2010... there were less than 800 battery and plugin hybrid cars in California. Now, I think the end of last year, California had more than 600,000 electric vehicles, more than an 800-fold increase. And our service territory has really experienced similar hockey-stick growth in EV adoption... We in San Diego make up about 10% of California’s population, and we have around 60,000 EVs on the road in our service territory.”

“...we’ve been at the forefront of the movement which I think is the key to achieving carbon neutrality. And getting there requires reimagining the transportation sector which in California, is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions with over 40%.”

Forest Fires

“The drought conditions are adding to the higher potential so we have gotten our teams ready early but you know, wildfires in California are almost a year-round type of event so we’re always

prepared but we have done a number of things different this year to prepare for a very active fire season.”

“We’ve invested significant amount of capital into our system over the past ten years to ensure that we mitigate the risk of wildfire but I think more importantly, we’ve also invested significantly in our tools to give us better situational awareness so now, we have weather stations throughout our entire service territory, probably one of the densest weather networks of any utility, and it’s giving us 30-second real-time data on the wind conditions, on the humidity levels.”