Giving Compass' Take:

• To curb wildfires in California, PG&E shut down the power, and in response, residents are utilizing solar power during these blackouts.

• How can donors help residents that still need power? What are the alternatives for residents that don't have access to solar? 

• Read more about the planned outages in California. 

Hundreds of thousands of homes in California lost power early on Wednesday as windy, dry weather increased the risk of fire, prompting the electric utility, PG&E, to shut down the grid to avoid any chance of the type of power-line accident that sparked the deadly wildfire in the small town of Paradise less than a year ago. It may take days for the power to come back on. But at some homes, solar and battery storage systems are keeping the lights on.

“Between the solar and the batteries, we could go on indefinitely as long as there’s some sun,” says architect Richard Schuh, who lives and works in the hills north of the town of Sonoma in an area without power.

“We had solar the whole time, but the solar was shut down because it’s connected to the grid,” he says. “So we weren’t able to use that even though it was still generating power.” They installed the battery earlier this year. When the utility warns that it may need to cut off power, the battery gets an alert so that it can automatically fully charge in advance. When the grid is down, the system operates independently, continuing to store power from the house’s solar panels.

“When the grid goes down, everything shuts down with it,” says Anne Hoskins, chief policy officer at Sunrun, a company that sells solar power systems and home batteries.

As more people install batteries, that can also help reduce the risk of fire by easing stress on transmission lines. “The more people that we can get engaged in helping to provide energy at what we call the ‘edge of the grid,’ the less has to be transported through forest areas and over system distribution and transmission lines that we know are really in need of repair,” Hoskins says.

Read the full article about Californians using solar power during a blackout by Adele Peters at Fast Company.