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California avoided another round of blackouts on Tuesday as energy conservation efforts helped avert a power shortage as excessive heat continued to plague the state.
The independent California system operator, which manages most of the state’s electricity grid, declared a Level 2 electrical emergency around 2 p.m. and urged residents to conserve energy as much as possible.
But conservation measures and an increase in wind power production have helped prevent the state from reaching a Stage 3 emergency, when grid managers order utilities to impose DC outages. The system operator announced just before 8 p.m. that he had lifted the emergency status.
It was the second day in a row that homes, businesses and government agencies came together to significantly reduce their electricity use, helping to avoid what would have been the third round of rotating blackouts since the heatwave began on Friday. .
“It was astounding,” Steve Berberich, CEO of the system operator, said of Monday’s conservation efforts.
The operator of the system, a nonprofit organization normally under the radar, has taken center stage in recent days as California grapples with its worst power shortage since 2001. But the operator of the system does not actually buy electricity or force utility companies to do so. These decisions are overseen by regulators from the California Public Utilities Commission. Berberich said the commission failed to ensure that the state had enough electricity on hot summer nights after solar power became largely unavailable.
President Trump called the energy crisis a political problem in a tweet on Tuesday that Democrats in California had “intentionally implemented continual blackouts – forcing Americans into the dark.”
Still, the policy did not force grid operators to demand continuous power cuts on Friday or Saturday, Berberich told reporters.
“There was no party affiliation or other kind of input into the decisions to get rid of the (electricity) load on Friday and Saturday night,” he said.
Governor Gavin Newsom appoints members to the system operator’s board of directors, but he has also pushed back Trump’s diagnosis.
“Cal ISO is a federal regulatory agency, and they are the ones responsible for reducing the load orders,” Newsom said Tuesday, when asked about Trump’s remarks on Twitter.
California has already been in hot weather without experiencing energy shortages, notably in July 2006, when the grid recorded a record 50,270 megawatts of electricity demand. No continuous power outages occurred at that time or when demand hit an all-time high again in 2017.
But a significant factor in recent days has been the extent to which other western states in the United States are also facing excessive heat, preventing California from relying on out-of-state electricity imports to fill its deficit. energetic. Additionally, a number of coal-fired power plants in Western states have closed in recent years as the country attempts to switch to more climate-friendly sources of energy.
Other factors that have shaped the current crisis include problems with tripping power plants and weather conditions sometimes limiting the use of solar and wind energy.
Still, Berberich has resisted any suggestion that renewables are to blame for the shortage. Instead, he said California should invest in even cleaner electrical infrastructure, including a slew of batteries capable of storing solar power for use when the sun isn’t shining.
“We need to be more thoughtful about what the grid looks like now,” Berberich said. “The grid is very different from what it was 10 years ago.”
The utilities commission has already put in place rules that explain why solar output declines at night, but officials can still adjust the regulations in light of the current crisis. Commissioners have ordered 3,300 megawatts of new power to support the state grid, but it won’t be available for a year.
A spokeswoman for the commission said the agency was still trying to figure out how the recent shortage came about and promised a full investigation – as Newsom demanded.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. initially predicted power outages in its territory on Tuesday night that would last about two hours. The company also published a search tool on pge.com/rotatingoutages for residents to see if their address would be affected.
The heatwave could start to ease on Wednesday with a significant drop in temperatures arriving Thursday, according to the National Weather Service. An extreme heat warning remains in effect for the Bay Area until 9 p.m. Wednesday, but thunderstorms that caused lightning strikes on the dry slopes, causing fires on Sunday and Monday, are not expected to return.
Grid managers have asked all Californians to save as much energy as possible between 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. Residents can help by setting their air conditioner to 78 degrees, drawing blinds, turning off unnecessary lights, unplugging electrical appliances, and only using major appliances before 3 p.m. or after 10 p.m.
San Francisco Chronicle editors Joe Garofoli and Michael Cabanatuan contributed to this report.
JD Morris is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @thejdmorris
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