On Friday and Saturday, hundreds of thousands of Californians had cut their power for a sprint that evening. And more of this could be in store in the coming days than record-breaking heat slaughter on the state en wildfires burned out of control.
State officials have said the need for the shutoffs shows the shortages of sustainable power. On Monday, Stephen Berberich, president of the California Independent System Administrator (CAISO), the agency that made the call to introduce the rolling shutoffs, accused the California Public Utilities Commission for failing to provide sufficient power capacity on hot nights after sunset. That is when electricity produced by the state’s solar panels drops to zero, but the demand for air conditioning remains high. The implication, that the transition from fossil fuels has made California’s energy less reliable, could work in the gas industry’s favor because the state is assessment of proposals to keep various natural gas plants in Southern California online.
“We can not sacrifice reliability as we move forward in this transition,” Gavin Newsom of California sei on Monday. “And we will be much more aggressive in focusing our efforts and our intent to make sure this is the case.”
But despite Berberich’s and others’ claims, there is no evidence that sun actually failed at all. In fact, energy experts have noted that on the basis of the available energy reserves the state should be able to process the increasing demand for electricity that causes increased use of air conditioning amid the heat wave.
“I think the explanation here is just human error,” said Leah Stokes, an expert in renewable energy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The system administrator messaged. People say, ‘Oh, it’s problems with sustainable, blah blah blah updates are bad,’ because they have some kind of political motivation to do so. But actually it seems that CAISO … no need to order rolling blackouts. “
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The heat wave causes a peak in the demand for energy, and the state simultaneously loses some sources of power, causing what CAISO called a ‘perfect storm’ of events. But the biggest energy sources that went offline this past weekend were not solar energy plants. CAISO’s own data shows that on Friday when the blackouts were announced, the solar supply remained fairly consistent, but the state natural gas supply underperformed by 400 megawatts.
“It was actually gas that failed,” said Shana Lazerow, a staff advocate at Non-Profit Communities for Environmental Justice for a Better Environment. “We need to talk about how gas is unreliable.”
Wind energy also underperformed over the weekend, producing about 1,000 megawatts below expectations from state analysts. That is not very surprising, because wine is notorious difficult Predict, because of the many factors that can affect their functioning. But even this dip should not have been enough to trigger the call for running power shutoffs. Traditionally, network companies have opted to maintain an operating reserve of at least 3% of energy demand. Below could and rolling blackouts be triggered. But this weekend, reserves only came down to 8.9%.
“We can handle some variability,” Stokes said. “We had the energy reserves that managed this … but it looks like they just jumped the gun.”
The response to these blackouts, Lazerow said, would need to roll out more renewable energy, no less. But that rollout needs to include various energy sources and storage, which is the real key.
“[Conservatives] do not make it wrong to say that sun alone does not cut it, because the sun does not always shine. But California also has really ambitious mandates and visions to include storage – long-term storage, short-term storage, batteries, pumped storage – in our system. We just haven’t brought that online yet, ‘she said.
If the state was close to putting more storage capacity into operation, it could be charged to use in an emergency scenario where demand was too high to keep up with the energy supply. The same goes for microgrids, which improve energy resistance because they can operate separately from the central grid when it experiences unusually high demand.
“We have been fighting for years for more clean energy microgridics,” said Jessica Tovar, organizer of energy democracy at Local Clean Energy Alliance. “But the fossil fuel sector and its friends, the monopolistic utilities, have opposed us to bring them back … It’s their fault that our vulnerable communities do not have those four-dimensional measures.”
Finding solutions is crucial. Although Californians only lose power for about an hour at a time, these rolling blackouts can pose dangers to vulnerable communities and leaving them a fixture of life on a warmer planet will only make matters worse.
“There are a large number of people who rely on electricity to live. Think of people on respirators rather than search engines, ”said Lazerow. “We have members of the community who are diabetic and need to keep their insulin cool. Fas communities that do not have as much access to backup energy sources as generators, these blackouts are particularly challenging. ”
Even if the heat waves had caused an insurmountable spike in energy demand, Stokes said moving renewable materials would be just the wrong response.
‘Let’s really be, why do we have hot waves right now, all over the western US? It is because of climate change, ”she said. “Parts of California … have more than 2 degrees Celsius heat [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit]. These are places that historically did not need air conditioning, and they do so now because they see for days on a series of record high temperatures, so people need more electricity. And that’s because we’ve been burning fossil fuels for over 100 years. ”
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