Hundreds of Thousands Without Power in California
The big storm that hit California and the Pacific Northwest this past weekend has left hundreds of thousands of customers without power.
Three of YouSolar’s customers who lost utility power late afternoon yesterday are now living their lives independently – of utility power. In fact, these customers did not even notice that the grid went out.
Given the amount of damage to the regional power system and while the storm continues, it is unclear when power to these customers will be restored.
YouSolar pre-charged all of our customers’ battery systems ahead of the storm. They entered the outage situation with full batteries. But equally important, these customers have 40 or even 50 kilowatt-hours to meet the needs of their homes.
Size matters, but many battery system vendors still try to sell customers a 10 kWh battery while suggesting it will take them through a multi-day outage. These claims fail elementary math. 500 watts is a very basic load (a few lights and the internet) for someone hunkering down in their homes during a power outage.
Northern California is being hit by widespread power outages like here in the wine country,
where many of YouSolar’s customers are.
Absent solar – and there ain’t much sun now in most of California – a minimal 500-watt load will exhaust a typical 10 kWh battery in only 20 hours. Then, the lights will go out, and the internet router will fall silent.
It is now noon, and we are almost 18 hours into the current outage.
One of our customers with a 50 kWh battery has a constant 2.5 kW load (the customer loves his pool!) So, even with that large a storage system, power would go out in about two hours from now if it wasn’t for the small generator that is part of this system. It turned on this morning and topped off the batteries.
Big batteries are essential for riding through a storm, but batteries are not energy sources – they only provide storage. So, during an extended outage without sun, a small generator or an EV integrated into the PowerBloc becomes critical. Generator integration comes standard with the PowerBloc, and EV integration is planned for this year.
We are experts in independent power, and our customers love it; as one of our customers wrote us this morning:
