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WASHINGTON – The scorching temperatures and drought hitting the western United States create a perfect storm for the power grid, exposing how future extreme weather events will increasingly push a slightly stretched power system to the brink of collapse.
As Oregon, California, New Mexico and other states grapple with record heat and dwindling water supplies, Americans rely even more on power and water systems . Yet the same factors that increase demand for electricity can also limit the ability to generate it.
From generation in power plants to transmission lines that carry electricity to homes and businesses, just about every part of the power system performs less well in extremely hot and dry conditions. This raises important questions about the nation’s preparedness for a future in which climate scientists say global warming is expected to make extreme weather events even more frequent.
“This topic is currently high on the agenda of every utility,” said Omar Al-Juburi, digital power grid consultant at Ernst & Young. “We’re going to come to a point where the current infrastructure and the way we operate today will continue to be strained by these extreme heat waves.”
In Portland, Oregon, temperatures this month hit 116 degrees Fahrenheit – an all-time high – just a year after the state experienced unprecedented Labor Day wildfires.
“It’s scary because it means you don’t know what happened,” said Bob Jenks, executive director of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board. “This means that the past is no longer predictive of the future.”
A Portland-area utility company even had to install additional cooling systems to prevent its own equipment from overheating. These cooling systems themselves use electricity, much like the air conditioners that Oregonians are now buying in droves. Jenks said this means that the next time the region experiences a heat wave, more air conditioners will be used, demanding even more power and putting more strain on the system.
The severe drought that plagues vast areas of the West, with falling lake levels and drying up of river beds, poses another challenge to maintaining electricity for Americans. Fuel-fired power plants such as coal, natural gas, and even nuclear power plants often depend on water to cool their systems.
The less water nearby or available for pumping elsewhere, the less safely these plants can produce electricity, according to energy analysts.
A water shortage can even take a power plant offline – a scenario that has only happened infrequently and for short periods of time, such as at the Millstone nuclear power plant in Connecticut. But federal regulators are studying how to respond if this problem worsens or becomes more widespread.
“Researchers have shown that drought threatens water supplies to coal and nuclear power plants in the Upper Midwest and Southeastern United States, New England as well as the western United States.” said Joe Smyth of the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group.
When drought sets in, the most severe impact on electricity generation is felt by hydroelectric plants, dams that generate electricity from natural resources, many of which are owned and operated by the federal government. . These plants provide key resilience to the electricity grid through their ability to quickly scale up or down generation to meet demand, sometimes in just seconds.
In the current drought, a lower water level in the Colorado River is already affecting the production and delivery of electricity, said Tracey LeBeau, who heads the Western Area Power Administration at the US Department of Energy.
“Less water often results in less water flowing through the turbines and creating electricity,” said LeBeau u. “Right now in many areas electricity is in more demand due to the higher temperatures. So it’s really a double whammy for us.”
These effects are particularly pronounced at Lake Mead on the Colorado River. The country’s largest reservoir by volume, the lake provides the water source for the iconic Hoover Dam, which supplies Arizona, Nevada and California.
This week, Lake Mead’s water levels fell to an all-time high of less than 1,070 feet, 18 feet lower than last year. The Federal Bureau of Reclamation said falling water levels had already cut power output from the dam by a quarter and is expected to get worse.
The scorching heat and forest fires that often accompany drought also have ramifications for other parts of the electrical system.
A 2012 study by the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory examining the long-term impacts of drought on power systems in the southwest said that during heat waves, transmission lines carry electricity. less effectively. Gas-fired power plants don’t perform as well, and even solar panels produce less electricity under these conditions, according to the study.
“The extreme weather is also affecting us when it comes to wildfire danger – right now,” LeBeau said. “Over the past week, we’ve had wildfires that got dangerously close to our transmission lines carrying this federal hydropower to customers.”
California offers a heartbreaking example. In recent years, the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, has forced preventative outages because extreme heat and power lines risked a dangerous combination, especially during wildfire season.
“As climate change increasingly induces extreme weather events, we must invest in building a more resilient grid to transport this electricity,” President Joe Biden said on Monday during a visit to La Crosse, Wisconsin. .
The challenge of meeting energy demand during extreme weather conditions is likely to be compounded as the country seeks to increasingly rely on electricity to tackle climate change, a transition known as name of “electrification”.
Rather than burning carbon dioxide-emitting gas or oil to power vehicles, stoves, and heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, the Biden administration is seeking to switch these devices to electricity. If the electricity used comes from renewable sources such as hydro, solar or wind power, the process can be essentially carbon neutral, thus contributing to the fight to limit climate change.
Yet all of this electricity has to come from somewhere. When renewable energy sources aren’t enough, energy experts said, backup tends to be the dirtier options: old coal and gas-fired power plants, or even oil-fired generators in heavy-duty situations. ’emergency.
Burning these fossil fuels produces even more greenhouse gas emissions, worsens climate change by trapping heat in the atmosphere, and sets off a vicious cycle that can increasingly test America’s electricity grid at times when Americans depend on it the most.
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