San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) announced new roadmap for how San Diego’s electricity grid will develop over the next decade and enable its customers with latest technology and service choices.

SDG&E claimed that it works alongside community and business leaders to invest time, talents and resources to help improve the quality of life for its neighbors and customers. It offers support to programs that help meet community needs and address issues facing its diverse communities. The newly charted Smart Grid Deployment Plan details how the organization will allocate energy resources more efficiently and deploy new technology to give customers a much greater level of control over their energy usage. The plan also offers a framework for discussion of its region’s energy future.

The organization also claimed that the newly formulated energy plan was created after having detailed discussions with more than 25 stakeholder groups in the areas of environment, academia, business, customer advocacy and government to better understand their priorities and preferences related to the smart grid.

Various groups have acknowledged that SDG&E has shown great leadership. It has engaged stakeholders to develop a plan that delivers what they want, including bill management tools, electric vehicles and the ability to use rooftop solar. The new framework will evaluate all of their plans thoroughly and with equal rigor so that the best elements are adopted across the state and any weaknesses or gaps remedied.

SDG&E’s new outline stresses for a smarter grid that is driven by consumers. For instance, residents in the San Diego region are increasingly deploying solar panels atop their houses and the burden now falls on the utility to power the grid on cloudy or hazy days when solar power is unavailable or greatly diminished. San Diego is also seeing a tremendous growth in the usage of electric vehicles and the grid must be able to accommodate the power needs of these new vehicles.    

Customers are already buying the technologies that require a smart grid, so SDG&E asserted that it can’t wait to develop a grid that ensures it meet their needs.

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Nathesh is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Nathesh's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell