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The Domaine Carneros winery in Napa, California, partnered with global electric solutions provider Schneider Electric to transform their onsite solar and generator installations into a full fledged microgrid. Schneider Electric invited CleanTechnica up for a look at the microgrid, a tour of the facility, and some time to talk with their executive team about the installation.
Disclaimer: Schneider Electric paid for the author’s travel and accommodations to attend the event at Domaine Carneros.
Increasing Grid Instability
Napa, California, is located just north of the San Francisco Bay in an area that’s renowned for its wine growing. In recent years, it has also become synonymous with massive wildfires sweeping across the region, causing waves of electric grid outages. In response to the increased risk of wildfires, utilities have implemented proactive Public Safety Power Shutoffs during which they disconnect higher risk sections of the grid to minimize the potential for a downed power line starting a wildfire.
As a result of these practices, many areas of California are seeing much more frequent power outages. In Southern California where I live, we had eight outages in the first few weeks of 2025 alone, with the longest being just over 24 hours long. For homeowners, these power outages are inconvenient, but for businesses, they mean a loss of revenue and potentially the loss of significant amounts of money if in-process operations are underway when the power goes out.
“Deploying a resilient and energy-efficient microgrid solution has been critical to the winery’s operations in light of an increasing number of Public Safety Power Shutoffs and extreme weather events that have posed significant threats to the winemaking industry in California,” said Jana Gerber, North American President of Microgrids for Schneider Electric. “The system allows the winery to manage energy from its solar array, battery, and generator, providing backup power. All of this is managed through our microgrid controls, which allows for seamless power to be provided to the winery.”
Sustainable Operations
Running Domaine Carneros sustainably has been a part of their DNA for decades. Back in 2003, the family-owned winery installed what was at the time the largest solar installation at a winery. Their sustainability efforts run the gamut from reducing the amount of glass in their bottles by 8% to reusing cardboard boxes in their winery. In 2020, they partnered with EDF Renewables to integrate their solar installation with a large energy storage installation.
To squeeze as much as possible out of their existing assets, they partnered with Schneider Electric in 2023 to revisit the installation, upgrading it to a fully integrated microgrid. As part of the upgrade, they opted to repower their 2003 solar installation. Upgrading the old array to new, modern panels doubled the output and allowed them to install a new set of modern inverters that played more nicely with Schneider Electric’s microgrid equipment.
A microgrid is defined by its ability to island itself from the grid. In the event of a grid outage, it disconnects from the grid, and allows the facility to maintain its operations, keeping them running. At Domaine Carneros, the Schneider Electric microgrid serves as the intelligent brain to make everything play nicely. It works with their diesel generator, solar arrays, battery bank, and the grid to maximize reliability.
It takes into account variables like the weather, forecasted energy consumption, solar energy generation, and the state of charge of the local energy storage installation. Schneider Electric’s deep bench of experts combined with vast array of solutions made it the perfect partner.
Solar Savings
Maximizing the generation from the roof and ground-mount solar assets allowed them to reduce the amount of time they had to run their onsite diesel generator. In 2024, the updated solar array provided nearly 80% of the winery’s energy needs in a year with higher than average wine production.
At a cost of $2 million USD, they took advantage of the federal ITC credit and the California’s Self Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) to lower the upfront cost. They paid for the balance, and as a result, realize the full savings from the solar energy produced, reduced diesel consumption, and increased reliability provided by the microgrid. They initially expected a 10-year return on investment after incentives, but that has dropped to around 7 years thanks to higher grid prices for electricity.
The winery has been saving more than $100,000 a year from the system over the last few years, largely as a result of the energy produced by the onsite solar install. In addition to the tangible savings in the form of energy production, they also get the benefit of resiliency and the ability to keep their operations running in the event of grid outages. This is much harder to quantify, but it has a significant value to the company, to their employees, and, of course, to all their wine-loving customers.
Standardized & Scalable
The microgrid installation at Domaine Carneros in Napa, California, is just one example of how renewables are saving customers money and improving the quality of their operations by keeping the lights on when the grid cannot. In California, the grid is increasingly unstable, with no signs of improving in the near future.
But microgrids have historically been too expensive to be considered realistic solutions for small and medium sized businesses like family-owned Domaine Carneros. Most microgrids are one of one solutions, meaning they are custom designed and built to meet the exact needs of each customer.
Schneider Electric aims to change this and has been working for the last few years with its experts to standardize microgrid hardware and designs. The company plans to offer a core set of four standard microgrid systems sized to allow them to drive the volume of production of those components up, driving the cost down.
They have streamlined their manufacturing and suppliers around these four specific sizes. Schneider Electric is one of the only companies in the world with a full testing, validation, and integration lab for microgrid components. It tests and simulates grid events along with a wide array of scenarios hardware might encounter in the real world. Vetting hardware ahead of time allows Schneider Electric to move into the customer space with confidence, recommending only hardware that the experts are confident in.
Through this testing, Schneider Electric has built up a deep bench of modular components it can drop into its standard system designs, much like you would drop LEGO blocks into the construction of a house. Components are now known variables, reducing the cost and time needed to implement one of Schneider Electric’s new standard microgrids.
Of course, if the customer does want something that’s not offered in one of these standard system sizes, Schneider is up to the task and can easily do that as well. But it will inevitably extend the timeframe required to take the system from concept to implementation and drive the cost up at the same time.
Overall
It was fantastic to see the work being done by Schneider Electric to not only install microgrids to solve customer problems today, but to really drive a new standard for microgrids to make them more affordable and more practical for more customers in more parts of the world.
I talked with Schneider’s North American President of Microgrids Jana Gerber at the event about the prospects for Schneider Electric’s microgrid business. She stated that while their current installed base isn’t large, they are projecting a 20 to 25% CAGR for each of the next few years. That’s a healthy amount of growth in a sector that’s ripe for disruption.
Microgrids and the integration of renewables with energy storage is something we are seeing in everything from your campsite electrical system running on a portable power station and a small solar panel all the way up to residential houses, apartment buildings, hospitals, government facilities, military bases, and so much more.
The future is electric, and thanks to companies like Schneider Electric and Domaine Carneros, that future is happening now, right before our very eyes.
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