California Air Resources Board

The Climate Heat Impact Response Program (CHIRP) is an incentive program created to mitigate the increased emissions that happen as a result of the Governor’s state of emergency proclamation.Extreme heat events such as prolonged heat wavesandwildfiresoften deplete California’s energy reserves and may lead topower outages. To alleviate pressure on the electrical grid, the Governor issues a Proclamation of a State of Emergency that allows backup generators, ships at berth and power plants to operate outside of permitted or regulated limits. Although the increased activity is necessary to avoid power outages, it causes asignificant increase inemissions, and unfortunately those emissions are primarily in disadvantaged communities. The Governor designated CARB as the agency responsible for mitigating the excess emissions, leading to the development of CHIRP to accomplish this goal.  

Calculation of Emissions and Mitigation Amount 

The additionalusage from emergency backup generators and power plants is reported to the California Energy Commission (CEC) and forwarded to CARB. Data for ships at berth forgoing plugging into shore power is directly reported to CARB as part of regulatory reporting requirements. Emissions are quantified by staff based on emission inventory methodologies. The mitigation amount is calculated at $500,000 per weighted ton of emissions, the cost-effectiveness limit in place in November 2021 when the Board approvedthe CHIRP mitigation framework. Weighted emissionsinclude oxides of nitrogen (NOx),reactive organic gas (ROG) and particulate matter (PM)weighed by a factor of 20 to account for diesel PM toxicity. 

Funding CHIRP 

CARB received CHIRP mitigation funds as a reimbursement by the CEC from the Distributed Backup Assets Account under the Strategic Reliability Reserve Fund, authorized by Assembly Bill (AB) 205.