The 2021 Caldor Fire Event
The Caldor Fire ignited August 14, 2021 in El Dorado County, ultimately burning 221,835 acres. PG&E initiated PSPS shutoffs across the Sierra foothills as the fire spread. AQI peaked at 318 (Hazardous) on August 16—precisely when affected communities most needed backup power. Standard solar-forward microgrids that failed to model smoke derate exhausted their stored energy within 72 hours.
AQI & Solar Capacity — Aug 14–18, 2021
Left axis: Air Quality Index. Right axis: PV output as a percentage of nameplate capacity. As smoke thickens, solar generation collapses while community demand remains unchanged.
Death Curve vs. Survival Curve
Modeling a 15 kW PV + 100 kWh battery system serving a 10-home cluster (avg. 75 kWh/day load). Both systems start at 100% SoC at PSPS onset. The critical difference: Scipionic's RaaS software monitors SoC in real time and sheds non-critical loads when reserves drop below 35%.
Battery SoC (%) — Death Curve vs. Survival Curve
Scipionic RaaS — Day 4 Actions
- Medical devices — ON
- Well water pumps — ON
- Refrigeration — ON
- Emergency lighting — ON
- HVAC — SHED
- EV chargers — SHED
- Pool pumps — SHED
Standard System — Day 4 Status
Critical threshold
No intelligent load management. System continues drawing 75 kWh/day from a 28 kWh remaining reserve. Complete discharge by midday.
RaaS Control Plane — Community Fleet
Operator view of a 50-node cluster in Nevada City, CA. Use the controls below to simulate a utility PSPS shutoff and a low-battery load shedding response—the two critical events in a multi-day wildfire islanding scenario.
Financial & Equity Comparison
Adjust the community parameters below to compare traditional utility undergrounding costs against a RaaS microgrid deployment with stacked federal and state incentives. This is the financial model behind the grant application.
The RaaS entity owns the hardware. The resident pays a monthly service fee. No lien, no capital improvement, no Prop 13 reassessment trigger.
The SRE Advantage
Site Reliability Engineering disciplines—originally developed to manage planetary-scale distributed systems—translate directly to microgrid operations. Scipionic's control plane is built on these principles, bringing enterprise-grade reliability to community energy infrastructure.
Smoke Derate Simulation = SRE GameDay
This simulation engine is a GameDay exercise—deliberately injecting a wildfire event to verify that the system degrades gracefully. Just as SREs inject failures into production to validate runbooks, Scipionic validates islanding behavior before deployment.
RaaS Control Plane = Distributed Telemetry
Every node emits SoC, load, and PV yield metrics in real time. The control plane aggregates fleet-wide telemetry with sub-second latency—the same distributed tracing and metrics pipeline used in cloud infrastructure, adapted for energy systems.
Load Shedding Tiers = Runbook-Driven Automation
The three-tier load shedding protocol is a codified runbook. When SoC drops below threshold, automated actions execute in priority order—no human decision required. This is incident response at machine speed.
Contractual Power Guarantee = Energy SLA
The RaaS service agreement defines a baseline power availability target for critical loads—an energy SLA backed by the control plane's automated enforcement. Communities get the same contractual reliability guarantees as enterprise cloud customers.