
Clean energy jobs
There was a moment, a year ago, when California’s August heat wave blackouts prompted statewide soul-searching about the need to make the grid stronger, ASAP.
Somehow it’s August again. Heat wave after heat wave has hammered the West, reservoir levels are low, and more heat and fire are coming. So what has the concentrated might of the world’s fifth-largest economy achieved to defend itself?
Not much at all, according to the latest assessment from Gov. Gavin Newsom. The state fell behind schedule on activating large-scale power plants, while also failing to significantly expand small-scale participation in demand reduction, Jeff St. John reports.
The end result is that California faces an energy supply shortfall of up to 3,500 megawatts during the net-peak period on days with extreme heat, the emergency declaration stated — worse than the shortfall that agencies projected in May.
“There is insufficient time or supply to install new energy storage or zero-carbon energy projects” to meet that shortfall, the emergency declaration states, indicating that its move to waive regulations to speed new resources may not yield significant changes until next year.
The litany of disappointments is almost as long as the state’s scenic coastline.
In theory, tapping customers to reduce grid demand lets you move quicker than if you had to build an actual power plant. But regulations slow down the turnaround, Jeff notes:
California’s slow process for enrolling new customers in demand-response programs has also held back growth, said Jennifer Chamberlin, CPower’s executive director of market development. It takes two years for CPower and other demand-response providers to move from signing up new customers to having them approved as a grid resource in California.
“We needed to start in 2020 to qualify 2022 megawatts, even though you can stand up new resources in a couple of months,” she said. “The commission has done nothing to streamline that process.”
All of this ends up in a place where the technology capital of the world has to more or less beg people to donate grid flexibility so the power system doesn’t break.
That actually worked last time, but that’s not a strategy you can count on time after time.
As those conservation calls become more frequent, they’re likely to become less effective. CAISO has already issued five separate calls for voluntary conservation during days of triple-digit temperatures over the past two months, but its most recent calls appear to have yielded much lower participation, according to preliminary data.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the kind of limited, short-duration rolling outages we saw last year aren’t anywhere near as devastating and deadly as the prolonged icy blackouts Texas experienced months later. Like a vampire, California’s electricity shortage only appears when the sun goes down.
But that’s not much to look forward to. Unless you’re in the business of selling battery systems for home backup, in which case, this mess is as good an advertisement as you could ask for.
(Lead image: Manish Upadhyay/Unsplash)
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Julian Spector is senior reporter at Canary Media.
Clean energy jobs