California Distribution-Aware Resilience Engine

The views

• Top 10 Recommendations (map) — the curated picks with illustrative microgrid service extents, click-through briefs: weather, history, news, permitting & opposition.
• Recommendations Report — the written, printable version: per-pick rationale, sub-score bars, satellite stills, and sourced news.
• Resilience Surface (H3) — the statewide opportunity heatmap; recolor by any sub-score, tilt to 3-D, overlay vulnerable supply paths.
• Statewide Map — RIZ cells, clusters, and microgrid candidates.
• Energy Infrastructure — substations + gas pipelines + featured sites on satellite (read the buildable space).
• Community Receptivity — population, homes, elected officials & their positions, county/permit friction (social license).
• Who Loses Acute Care — 10/20/30-min drive-time catchments; population at risk in an outage.
• Community Colleges — 115 colleges as candidates; where to build (suitability) + what to build (real De Anza sizing).
• De Anza Evidence — the measured anchor: per-array solar availability, multi-year campus load, the $40.96/kW demand tariff, and the resilience sizing — all from real telemetry.
• Methodology & Honesty Receipt — the scoring formula, the confidence ladder, full data lineage, and an honest inventory of every constant once invented and now backed by real data (7 of 8 retired).
• Campus Energy Panel — 27 real California campuses (25 CSU + Berkeley + UCSD) with annual energy + 359 mapped buildings; the institutional-microgrid panel beyond hospitals.
• Animated Demand (24h) — watch UC Berkeley's 13 instrumented buildings pulse through a typical weekday from real hourly meters: labs never sleep, classrooms breathe with the schedule, housing peaks at night.
• Full Site List — all 566 hospitals ranked.

How sure are we? (the confidence ladder)

Every number carries its provenance — we never present a modeled value as observed:

• Measured — real telemetry (De Anza campus meter + per-array solar; RMI hospital). Ranks highest.
• Modeled — empirical CALMAC load archetypes + the De Anza→community-college archetype; flagged modeled, ranks below measured.
• Screening — the statewide composite (FHSZ severity, interconnection, gas, water). Directional — flags zones for investigation, not a siting decision.

Missing data lowers a site's confidence; it is never imputed as zero.

Method

Every acute-care hospital in California is scored across five geospatial dimensions — wildfire exposure, criticality of the facility, proximity to water/wastewater infrastructure, distribution-grid interconnect feasibility, and the consequence of an outage. The composite score ranks sites; high-scoring clusters within fire-exposed distribution territory are surfaced as resilience investigation zones (RIZ).

Where multiple high-priority sites and substations co-locate inside a RIZ, the engine proposes a microgrid candidate — a footprint worth a detailed engineering and economic study. An economic-priority index weights each site for portfolio triage.

Real data layers

• Loading layers…

The economic reality

Real microgrids fail when their only value is backup power. In the Oakland EcoBlock case, the community-microgrid tariff (CMET) paid value only during outages — “no value during blue sky” — and a residential, retrofit project never penciled out. The projects that do pencil share specific traits, and this engine screens for exactly those:

• Critical facility (hospital / fire / police) — justifies resilience value → we anchor on hospitals.
• Frequent-outage / PSPS area — raises the resilience premium → wildfire / PSPS exposure signal.
• Everyday value (demand-charge, arbitrage) — essential, not a bonus → economic-bridge revenue streams.
• Buildable site — open land / new construction beats a dense retrofit → buildability screen.

Buildability — and the rebuild advantage

A dense urban core can score high on need yet have no room to install solar, storage, and switchgear — so the engine deprioritizes over-developed sites and favors campuses and sites with open land.

The strongest buildability case is post-disaster rebuild. Where a wildfire has destroyed an area — including its electric distribution system — the grid must be rebuilt anyway, so distributed resilience can be designed in from the start. That is new construction, not retrofit (the cheaper side of the EcoBlock lesson), during an open rebuild decision window. (The Palisades burn is one such example, not a target.) The engine carries a rebuild_active flag to surface these zones once parcel/permit rebuild data is wired.

Grounding: “Why a Microgrid Didn't Pencil Out in this California Advanced Energy Community” — Microgrid Knowledge (Oakland EcoBlock).