Meeting Continuous Power Needs

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) is one of the nation's largest utilities and operates in west coast regions with large populations of people and businesses. PG&E is focused on meeting their customers’ expectations and keeping the Customer Average Interruption Duration Index (CAIDI) as low as possible, or in other words, minimizing the average outage duration time for customers.

Because of an aging infrastructure that doesn’t support current power demands, PG&E relies on mobile power generation, particularly during periods of transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure changes and upgrades. In this article, from Utility Products, you can learn how Aggreko provided a 7 MW/12 kVA power generation solution that energized more than 1,500 PG&E customers in San Luis Obispo County for 13 hours while upgrades were completed at the Cholame substation.

When a utility company partners with a power generation provider, planned outages can be avoided for end-user consumers. With the use of portable generators that can be interconnected to the grid, customers don’t see interruptions and the CAIDI is kept to a minimum. But what about the unplanned outages? Certainly, some of them cannot be predicted. However, in order to keep them short, PG&E has emergency plans for when a big storm is on the horizon. In the video below, you can see an example of how Aggreko provided a stand by mobile power solution in Benicia when a big storm was expected for the weekend. With Aggreko’s generators positioned, loaded and ready to go, lights would be back on shortly in the case of a large scale outage, without causing big interruptions for the final consumers.

Click play and check the out this television report from ABC Local 7 to learn more:

ABC TELEVISION REPORT

Aggreko provided a stand-by power solution to PG&E

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