♪ Man: People have come to expect that electricity is a right, and it's a huge responsibility to be able to provide power to the 10 million people in the County of Los Angeles.

♪ Narrator: Peak electricity hours in California are expected to increase 60% between 2020 and 2045, while total electricity is expected to surge by 96%.

♪ On top of that, climate change brings in more frequent and severe weather events, leading to downed power lines, possible blackouts during hot summer months, and increased wildfire risks.

[Siren] ♪ Public agencies, private utilities, and local communities across Southern California are working to implement new technologies and incorporating new ways to stay safe and keep the lights on.

♪ Announcer: This presentation is made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy; and the Orange County Community Foundation.

♪ Narrator: The grid's vulnerabilities are both common and consequential.

When power lines fall, trees topple onto equipment, or vehicles strike utility poles, the immediate threat goes beyond power disruption.

These incidents can ignite fires that transform routine failures into disasters, leaving communities in darkness for days or weeks or, worse, causing widespread devastation that permanently alters landscapes and lives.

Estrada: Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians, we're located here in Southern California, Riverside County.

We reside on about 8,000 acres of land that's held in trust by the United States.

Us living in the foothills of the San Jacinto Mountains are kind of prone to an area for fires.

Woman: I've been a resident here since birth.

I live on the Soboba Indian Reservation.

All the way until I was in my 20s, we didn't have running water.

We didn't have any power.

We used kerosene lamps, wood stoves, and a fireplace.

We have through us, there's Southern California Edison, and we have, you know, poles that deliver the power to each home out here.

If we got Santa Ana winds, the transformers would blow out, and so we'd go off for quite a few days, you know, until those Santa Ana winds settle down a little bit just so they can get them up and running again.

♪ Estrada: For the longest time, we were called at the end of the grid.

It's kind of like the worst of the energy available.

We would get the tail end, and a lot of times, we were prone to brownouts, blackouts, or even loss of energy because of wind events.

Man: We have a number of elders and other individuals within the community that have medical needs.

You know, they're especially left at a disadvantage.

♪ Morillo: It gets triple-digit out here.

For myself and my children, we deal with it pretty good, but it's just when it's in the evenings to go to sleep, that's the hardest part, when the house is already still, like, at, like, 90 degrees inside.

♪ Narrator: About 90 miles south in La Jolla, San Diego, residents are facing different terrain and climate change impacts in their community.

Woman: Over here, and you can see this low-lying wire that goes across and all the way up the street and also goes between the houses.

Can you see where it goes to the roof of these houses?

That's really dangerous.

Woman: Climate change has definitely affected La Jolla.

We've definitely noticed warmer heat waves in the summer and heat waves in the winter.

It was warmer and drier a couple months ago when we did have a brush fire in La Jolla.

It's definitely a concern.

[Flames crackling] Emerson: We are just putting together fire councils and taking a look at those kinds of things, working with the fire department, CAL FIRE, SDPD to take a look at what's going on in the community, how we can reduce issues.

You know, it's very hilly and we have lots of canyons, so you go every place from the beach to that, to a low canyon that's full of eucalyptus trees, so your fire hazard is going to be different in different areas.

Frausto: With the change in timing of fires, we've had more and more, and there's been more dry brush, and they've been coming closer and closer to the coast, and so there is a lot of talk about wildfire danger, evacuation routes, preparation.

We don't get big Santa Ana winds like they do in more eastern parts of the county, but we do get winds.

We do get sparks and ashes, and just a couple of months ago, there was a brush fire that started off of Gilman Drive, which is just a mile and a half or so from here.

Tania Thorne: Maya, we're here in La Jolla, where a fire broke out here off of Via Alacante and Gilman Drive around 2:30 P.M. this afternoon.

You can see behind me that there is tons of dry vegetation as well as those structures that are sitting right on top of that hillside.

Frausto: Luckily, thanks to our San Diego firefighters, it was quickly put out, but it did alarm a lot of people in La Jolla.

Emerson: We were all under evacuation, and nobody could get out.

I packed up my dogs and the important things in my house.

My husband couldn't get in, and I looked out front and La Jolla Shores Drive was like a parking lot, so I just went back inside the house.

There's nothing you can do.

You just sit there and wait.

♪ Man: The Academy of Sciences, Engineering says that the two biggest infrastructure that human has built in the last century was the communication system and the power electricity system, and both systems actually started around the same time, about 140 years ago.

♪ Narrator: Our power system operates on 3 fundamental components--generation, where electricity is produced; consumption, where it's used in homes and businesses; and the grid that connects them, transporting energy across vast distances.

The traditional grid relies heavily on centralized fossil-fuel generators, like coal and natural gas plants.

These facilities feed electricity into high-voltage transmission lines that carry power across hundreds of miles to substations.

There, transformers reduce the voltage to levels appropriate for local distribution networks that serve our communities.

This conventional architecture, while efficient, contains inherent vulnerabilities at two critical points.

If a power plant stops generating electricity or if transmission infrastructure, such as towers or transformers, becomes damaged or disconnected, entire regions can lose power.

These single points of failure reveal the limitations of a system that wasn't designed with resilience against climate change in mind.

Southern California's historically mild climate has changed significantly since the first power lines were built across the state.

Climate change has diminished the protective fog and mist along the coast and reduced annual rainfall.

♪ Marrone: You know, you have the electrical infrastructure.

You have the water infrastructure.

Are the homes hardened against wildfire?

Are you able to manage the forests and the wildland and do fuels reduction?

Because what we've effectively done is remove fire from the natural environment that existed 150 or 200 years ago here in Los Angeles County.

Mother Nature would thin the forests and thin the wildland naturally.

We don't allow that to occur anymore.

Because we have people living adjacent to the wildland areas, we now effectively put out every brush fire that starts.

You don't have the clearing that you used to have 200 years ago, when the fire would naturally move through the mountains.

We just came off the hottest year in Los Angeles County.

We had low fuel moistures and no rain for 8 months.

Conditions were ripe for a wildfire, but none of us knew that the conditions were right for a community conflagration because we've never been challenged like this.

[Flames crackle] Man: So today, obviously, November 11, flying a Matrice 300 out here on Harbison Canyon.

I'm Josh.

I'll be the pilot today.

Narrator: Spanning over 220,000 miles of distribution lines, California's power grid delivers electricity to more than 13 million homes across the state, but with immense wattage coursing through an aging and vulnerable infrastructure, utilities have at times sparked disaster.

Man: Utilities use aviation assets in multiple ways.

You think about terrain and accessibility and how to get to places, sometimes, especially in San Diego County, we have a lot of varying terrain where it's difficult to get to, whether you're on foot or in a vehicle.

Sometimes the better option is going to be through the air.

The drones can identify when there are things that are potentially looking like they're going to be failing or can be an issue or it could be a cause for concern that could spark a wildfire.

Low: The design and the control of the grid needs major changes in order to allow massive renewable generation into our energy system.

♪ Man: As recently as last year, when FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Association, released their national risk index, they still said San Diego County is the highest fire risk in the entire United States.

There's 3.6 million people who live here in Southwestern California, so we're very populated, and it takes a lot of power lines to serve that many people.

Just here in our service territory, we have over 20,000 miles of lines altogether.

Our droughts have been more extreme, and ignitions that decades ago may not have had a major impact on the community now are having major impacts, so we have to understand this, and we have to mitigate the potential of that happening.

♪ Narrator: The City of San Diego started undergrounding in the 1970s, and approximately 1,000 miles of overhead utility lines remain.

♪ D'Agostino: SDG&E has been developing and evolving the grid into some very high-risk areas, and this is where we anticipate any type of emergency that we face on the electric system.

Man: We've implemented numerous weather stations throughout the service territory to do real-time monitoring of the weather.

We're converting overhead power lines to an underground system.

Not only does it help mitigate the wildfire risk and the public safety shutoff risk, but it helps with the esthetics of these communities.

D'Agostino: What we have developed here in San Diego is a new system that we called the wildfire Next Generation System, WiNGS, where we look at assets-- SDG&E equipment, where are there power lines, where are there power poles.

This is the level of science and granularity that needs to be understood.

When it comes down to prioritization of strategic undergrounding and those different areas, having a safe system that's going to be resilient not only to the climate of today, but what we anticipate the climate to be like 30, 50 years from now is really important things for us to be thinking about now.

♪ Frausto: The general process for undergrounding is multi-layered and takes a lot of time, so first, they'll trench and lay whatever conduits they need to, and then they will pull the wires through.

It's not only a utility project, but then other services, like Internet, they have to switch over their transformers or their boxes.

Once that's all done, then they have to flip the power from the overhead lines to the underground lines.

Man: Everything's going underground, you know, little by little, you know.

By the time I'm old, everything's going underground.

Like, if you go to Downtown, you don't see poles there, much poles.

Everything's going underground, you know?

Emerson: So La Jolla is part of the City of San Diego, but La Jolla itself as a community really has several different distinct areas.

One is called Bird Rock, which is to the south, and then you have the Village in the middle where all the shops are and restaurants and some of the bigger hotels, and then you have La Jolla Shores, which is down here where we are today.

Bird Rock had most of its undergrounding done a long time ago.

It's taken a long time in the Shores.

Frausto: Undergrounding delays at the city level usually come down to, in this neighborhood, the construction moratorium that happens during the summer because this area is really heavily impacted by tourists, so to make traffic easier, any trenching work, any digging work has to stop by Memorial Day and can't resume until after Labor Day.

Emerson: I love the Shores.

It's wonderful.

My parents were very involved in the community.

My mother helped establish the La Jolla Shores Association and write the plan district ordinance for the area.

La Jolla Shores Association is sort of like a town council.

It does everything for the La Jolla Shores area, and we go from the beach all the way up to Gilman Drive, which runs parallel to Highway 5, all the way up to Mount Soledad.

We oversee what's known as the Throat, which would have been the area that you came in to come into La Jolla Shores, so we really oversee this whole part of the community.

Frausto: The city has provided a map of the undergrounding which shows throughout San Diego the different phases and areas that are affected.

La Jolla Shores is currently undergoing Block One, Phase One, which is the western part of La Jolla Shores.

The eastern part of La Jolla Shores did have undergrounding, but that has been since completed, so now we're in the Western.

We're finishing up the western portions.

Emerson: Some of the houses were not connected, as all the other ones were, to the poles and to the power lines above, and so they've had to go into those particular houses and dig trenches and put in the conduits so that they can pull the lines for those particular houses, and there have been anywhere from a couple to a half dozen in each block that they've had to do that.

Frausto: So this lengthy process does require that the power is shut off every now and then.

The neighborhood behind me, the neighbors behind me, they will receive notices on their door alerting them to a temporary power shutoff.

It doesn't last more than, I would say, an hour or two.

That's been happening more and more recently while the work has been getting closer and closer to completion.

♪ Narrator: While burying power lines represents a critical defensive strategy against wildfire threats, communities are simultaneously embracing another approach--microgrids, where energy generation and storage happen locally, creating power islands that can operate independently when the larger system fails.

Vivanco: This is the first solar microgrid project that was completed in 2016.

The Soboba reservation specifically is composed of approximately 8,000 acres of land.

A lot of it is very untouched, especially the back canyons being up against the San Jacinto Mountains bordering Forest Service.

In 2023, it was approximately 1,600 megawatt hours that were generated for this project specifically, and it saved approximately $6 million in, you know, funds that would have been paid to a utility.

Low: Microgrid becomes very important for how people actually get electricity, so in rural areas and developing countries, there are more and more systems that just consist of a few solar panels with battery storage.

That has been life-changing for many of those places.

♪ Estrada: We'd ultimately like to have our own energy company and provide to our members, and then, you know, the residual we could sell to local communities, but I think energy sovereignty is important for us.

Man: So Grid partners with utilities to ensure the safe interconnection of our solar systems.

We plug into the grid.

These aren't off-grid systems.

These are folks that still have access to consistent power from Southern California Edison, PG&E, or other utilities within California.

So when you adopt solar and battery storage, you're able to maintain power, even when the grid goes down, so there is that energy-independence factor when pairing these two technologies.

In a future of increased heat waves, increased planned power shutoffs, consistent power is really a vital opportunity for homeowners to benefit from our technologies.

Man: So we partnered with the Soboba tribe a few years ago on an EPIC grant through the CEC, the California Energy Commission, to build out a microgrid facility at their fire station.

The project is really intended to support community resilience in the event of shutoff events that the tribe experiences.

Man: So the microgrid serves us two.

One is, day-to-day, it offsets our utility costs like any solar project would on your home or a business.

It collects, obviously, solar energy through the covered solar panels, provides day-to-day electricity for the fire station.

Outside of that, during an emergency, it provides a battery backup that the solar panels feed.

Turek: So the microgrid we installed at Soboba Tribe is really to support the facility itself during shutoff events.

At the same time, it can serve as a community resilience center for tribal members to make use of, things like food distribution, temporary shelter, powering of certain medical devices and equipment.

♪ Low: Some of the biggest challenges for microgrid today, one is reliability.

When there's not enough solar generation, for example, there's no long-duration storage technologies that is mature enough to be deployed at scale at this point.

Currently, the most practical mechanism is still to build the microgrid that will hopefully satisfy most of the energy demand within the community but still connected to the macrogrid as a backup.

♪ Narrator: One additional ingredient to a microgrid will be the integration of personal electric vehicles.

Carmakers have been equipping their EVs with bidirectional charging capabilities that can power an owner's home or feed electricity back to the grid.

The professor and his students are currently working on a way to make this more efficient.

♪ So this is the smart charger prototype that my former student George Lee built.

The real meat of the smart charger technology that he developed is here, so this, he uses off-the-shelf and some of them open-source chipsets to build a brain for this dumb charger so that this charger becomes capable of real-time sensing, communication, computing, and also actuation.

This is one example where if you can control intelligently the system--in this case, the system of large-scale EV charging facility within the garage--then you can provide EV charging at scale to the drivers but in a way that is not only much cheaper for the drivers, but also can potentially provide grid services to the grid to help stabilize the grid, and therefore, if we can figure out how to do that organically, holistically, the system can become much more active, much more efficient, and also much more secure.

Narrator: In vehicle-to-grid systems like the professor's, the owner's electric car would charge and store electricity during the parts of the day when the grid is less stressed.

Then during outages and periods of time when the grid is using more energy, the EV apportions a part of its battery life to the home and grid, creating a more resilient system.

Low: Storage is going to be a big part of the future decarbonized energy system.

Adaptive EV charging garages become intelligent and valuable resources that can help provide grid services, help stabilize the grid, help the grid balance supply and demand at different times at different points of the grid.

♪ Narrator: The state's electrical grid is at the center of the battle between climate change, aging infrastructure, and the need to power our homes, cars, and businesses.

♪ Morillo: When the power goes out for myself, I just stay at home.

I don't go anywhere.

I just kind of weather it out.

I would like to see them-- you know, something that everybody can understand, this is what it's going to help us with and how, you know, it'll make improvements so we don't have to worry about those outages.

♪ Emerson: Many of the newer developments that are north of La Jolla, like Carmel Valley and stuff like that, are actually built with all the utilities underground, so that's really forward-thinking.

I think that's a really good idea, especially in fire-prone areas, and everybody's looking at that now after what happened at Pacific Palisades.

♪ Marrone: Many of the power providers are doing a good job of hardening their grid, of trying to reduce the incidence of wildfire started because a power line goes down.

On January 7, we did have an ignition, and we couldn't put it out.

More work needs to be done in the hardening of the grid-- covered conductors, utility poles that can withstand wildland fire, PSPS to shut the power off before it gets windy.

It's really for that community's safety, for those individuals' safety.

We have municipal-owned utilities.

We have investor-owned utilities.

They're all doing their best because no one wants to see this occur.

Low: I should emphasize, there's not a single silver bullet that's going to solve all problems.

There will be a mix of technologies and systems that will be in the final decarbonized energy system.

♪ Narrator: These solutions aren't perfect, but they're meaningful steps toward a more flexible, resilient grid, one that can withstand a hotter, drier future without leaving vulnerable communities behind.

♪ In the aftermath of the most destructive wildfire Southern California has ever faced, the need for bold, adaptive approaches to our energy future and infrastructure has never been more urgent.

♪ [Wind blowing]