Residential Microgrid: the house that keeps running when the grid does not.

What it is

One electrical design, five pieces of equipment, and a house that decides for itself.

For a century a house had one source of power, the wire from the street, and everything inside it was a load. That is no longer true in the hills and canyons County Line works in. A current custom home in Malibu, Hidden Hills or Montecito can have a Generac standby generator on a pad, a battery on the garage wall, solar on the roof, a Tesla Wall Connector that can push power from the car back into the house, and an electrical panel that knows which circuits matter. Each of those is sold separately by a different company. A residential microgrid is what you get when an electrical contractor designs them as one system, with one set of rules for what happens the moment the utility drops.

The word comes from the utility world, where a microgrid is a section of the grid that can island itself and keep running. A residential microgrid is the same idea at the scale of one property: a boundary at the service entrance, sources behind it, loads behind it, and a controller that disconnects from the utility, keeps the sources and loads in balance, and reconnects when the grid is back. The transfer switch, the battery inverter and the smart panel are each a piece of that controller. Getting them to agree is the electrical work.

This matters here more than almost anywhere in the country because the outages are a policy, not an accident. Southern California Edison and LADWP de-energize lines in high fire hazard areas during wind events under Public Safety Power Shutoff rules set by the California Public Utilities Commission, and a shutoff can last several days once the inspection of every line is counted. A house in the Santa Monica Mountains, the Conejo hills or the Montecito foothills will spend days every year without utility power for as long as those lines run where they run. This design is the electrical answer to that fact.