Quote:If you are enrolled in our Medical Baseline Program and live in a High Fire-Threat District or have experienced two or more Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) outages since 2020, you may qualify.
I qualified because they know I have a CPAP and because I'm in Grass Valley, CA where the power goes out a lot. There is no low income requirement (anymore), anyone with a medical need in a flaky power area qualifies. She asked if I had a generator and I said I did. That would disqualify me, but then she strongly suggested that if I just didn't want to run my generator at night I'd still qualify for a battery. Fair enough, running a generator just for a CPAP is awfully expensive.
The other piece of this is I'm already on medical baseline billing so PG&E knew I'd have a medical need. I posted previously about getting medical baseline; takes a note from your doctor, saves about $1 / day or so and gets you special notification for power problems.
They will hand-deliver (!) the battery to me in a few weeks, I'll update when I get it. They asked me a couple of questions which were basically about sizing the battery I needed; whether it had a humidifier, the volts and amps. I didn't have the electrical specs so she said she'd just put me down for the default which apparently is big.
(The context here is PG&E has taken to shutting off power entirely for hours or days at a time when there's a significant fire threat because their poorly maintained equipment keeps setting California on fire. I asked the agent if there was a specific legal requirement driving this program and she said she didn't know of one, that they were just being proactive.)