A pedestrian looks at a sign posted on the door of a hardware store during a power outage in the city of San Francisco, California. | Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
SACRAMENTO – The exact root cause of California’s rolling blackouts is not yet clear, as more power outages are avoided, and that has allowed everyone to point fingers.
Energy experts on Monday cited a litany of possible causes for the rotating outages that affected hundreds of thousands of California residents Friday and Saturday nights: demand for balloons, inadequate transmission, an overload on renewable energy and the influx of new energy providers not the same obligation to maintain reserves as traditional utilities do.
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While California secured another round of rolling blackouts Monday night, the state’s network held a second straight night, calling cooler than expected weather and widespread preservation. It also came when Govin Newsom asked all the state’s electricity players why the outages happened and had to do with blowback from frustrated residents.
California has maintained planned blackouts in recent years as a measure to prevent wildfires. But it was Golden State’s first round of rolling blackouts related to supply since 2001, when Enron and other energy traders manipulated the California market.
Earlier Monday, the California Independent System Operator blamed Friday’s outages on “high heat and increased demand for electricity.” However, some energy experts noted that demand was not particularly high than normal, as is typical for weekends, and CAISO had predicted that it would have sufficient reserves on hand for 80 percent of the California grid it manages.
“What’s strange about what happened is that they were adequate until they were not,” said Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s climate and energy program and member of the state Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery Commission. “It seems that certain energy plants for some reason were unable to deliver on the promises to make reservations as well as to supply energy.”
Because the Friday outage began at 6:30 p.m., when sunbeams were heating up and plants were running on gas, gas is the likely immediate culprit, Wara said. “The timing of all this suggests difficulties with gas installations,” he said.
California could increase maximum exorbitant prices or increase fines for non-performance as a way to encourage plant maintenance, he said.
CAISO CEO Steve Berberich said Monday that a power plant of unspecified fuel and size “tripled” on Friday, causing the facility to go offline. While the details were not disclosed, certain types of natural gas power plants can operate under hot conditions, and gas units are typically the only ones with so much capacity.
Business groups, in turn, were quickly blaming unsustainable energy suppliers; Saturday’s outbreak occurred after 1,000 megawatts of wind energy and a 470-megawatt gas installation recently went offline.
“Hot weather and a cloudy day could not shut down the fifth largest economy in the world,” Lance Hastings, president of the California Manufacturers and Technologies Association, said in a statement. “While we support the goals of sustainable energy in California, we absolutely need systems industry that allows us to continue operating and producing products for our residents and the world.”
Others were more explicit about their support for gas, including an executive at NRG, an owner of gas plants and other energy sources in states across the country – including 4,000 megawatts of gas and solar in California.
Travis Kavulla, a former member of CAISO’s Western Energy Market governing body and vice president of NRG’s regulatory affairs, said the ability of gas to provide consistent power around the clock “proves the point that, at least for now, it is an essential resource. “
Also play the debt game: Berberich, who said that lasting memories are not to blame, but that CAISO has been warning for several years that the PUC does not require utilities to have enough reserves ready for extreme events.
Meanwhile, PUC spokeswoman Terrie Prosper suggested that CAISO mismanaged the situation. She said neither investors’ utilities nor community aggregators were to blame. Both “purchased the resources needed to meet the forecasts,” she said. “The question we are addressing is why certain resources were not available.”
And former PUC president Loretta Lynch, who served as president of the agency during the 2000-01 electricity crisis, slammed CAISO on Monday for not being transparent about what ultimately led to the rolling blackouts. They claimed that utilities had enough capacity, including reserves, to meet the demand. Lynch and Kavulla both said that not all CAISO data is archived, which leads observers to print screenshots and other web pages for preservation.
CAISO is the ultimate decision-maker on business-to-business networks, as the operator has visibility into its combined infrastructure and how electronics are transported across California and across states. CAISO is one of several independent system companies and regional transfer organizations throughout the country, which follow reliability standards set by a non-profit governing body related to reserve margins and other criteria.
“The ISO doesn’t know how to control it. They can’t keep the lights on when there’s a lot of power,” Lynch said. They suspect that as in the Enron-driven crisis of their day, so-called electricity ‘planners’ – as intermediaries between utilities and generators – do not always submit accurate logs of when and how much electricity will be supplied, which has sometimes resulted in market manipulation. In an extreme example, Enron traders forced plants offline in the late 1990s and early 2000s and shorted artificial supplies.
“What about the network system that does its job and runs a market that is not manipulated, runs a grid that is not burned because they do not call the reserves? The question is, why do they not have it? ? “Lynch asked. She said investigations led by Newsom on Monday from CAISO and the state’s energy agencies should be conducted by an entity independent of market players with control to fully publish the network’s data.
An advocacy advocate said the PUC should do more to promote voluntary conservation programs, which he said have fallen by half in the last five years.
“I do not think we know enough about all the details, but we do know what we have is a lack of response to demand – that is a direct PUC responsibility – and a lack of new tenders, which is up to them,” he said. V John White, Executive Director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies.
The head of a trading group representing all types of generators pointed to several factors, including the general issue of the intermittency of solar, but also simultaneous heat waves across the West that prevented California from importing power.
“There’s just less energy in the system to distribute between the different regions,” said Jan Smutny-Jones, CEO of the Independent Energy Producers Association. “That’s not normally a problem, but if it’s hot then it is.”
One of the victims of the latest round of running blackouts in California said Newsom should prioritize reliability, but that he should not sacrifice the state’s clean energy goals. He could, for example, stimulate energy storage, in addition to preserving gas-burning speaker plants.
“The last rule is that people do not want lights to go down,” said former Gov. Gray Davis. “People also want a carbon-free future. Sometimes those two aspirations come into conflict. A worse approach is, in my opinion, the power you need in reserve, even if it’s some carbon, to keep the lights on. “
Newsom launched a survey on Monday, avoiding pointing the finger at one factor in particular, and promising to pursue the state’s low-carbon targets while improving reliability.
“We are not back from that commitment; just the opposite,” he said. But in the process of transition, in the process of, understandably, the desire and need to shut down polluting gas plants, in a desire to move from the old to the new in that transition, and the need to shut down, comes the need to have more insurance. “
However, a political strategist who previously advised Davis in his handling of the 2000-01 energy crisis said he should open up his rhetoric against the often accused Pacific Gas & Electric, despite the lack of evidence that the utility played a role in ‘ the weekends outages.
PG&E claimed over the weekend that the shutoffs were in the direction of CAISO, and took pains to distinguish them from wildfire-related shutoffs. “These outages are not Power Shutoffs for public safety, which are mentioned under specific circumstances with high fire threat, and they are not related to problems with PG & E’s equipment or the ability to supply local energy,” the company said in a statement. statement.
“I’ve seen this movie before, and I just think Newsom should continue to talk about how we are restructuring that delivery system in the PG&E territory,” said Garry South, who was Davis’ political adviser. “One of the ways he’s buying himself some time is by going back to the theme that PG&E is a proven bad player and the state needs to think seriously about what we do with that utility and what we do in that area of service to consumers. protect and, honestly, protect people’s lives. ”
