California May Knock Out Power to 5 Million People Tonight
Ten Million Californians Averted a Blackout. Now They Face More
(Bloomberg) -- California officials warned that 5 million people could lose electricity in the latest round of rolling blackouts but said cuts could be averted if enough homes and businesses throttle back energy use.
The outages were expected to begin as early as 5 p.m. local time Tuesday, the operator of the state’s power grid said. An unrelenting heatwave gripping the state has pushed the grid to the brink of collapse in recent days and fueled wildfires from Los Angeles to Napa.
“We are deploying every resource available to keep communities safe as California battles fires across the state during these extreme conditions,” Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement declaring a statewide emergency. On Monday, he ordered an investigation into the reliability of the electric grid.
On Monday, grid operators warned they would have to cut power to as many as 10 million people, which would have been one of the largest outages in California’s history. But that crisis was averted as consumers throttled back their energy use. Advisers in the governor’s office made personal telephone calls to refineries, industries and the state’s port authorities, asking them to reduce their power consumption, said Steve Berberich, chief executive officer of the California Independent System Operator, which runs the grid.
“If we can get the same sort of response that we got yesterday, we can minimize this or perhaps avoid it all together,” said Berberich.
So far, it’s working. The grid operator earlier called for outages that would affect as many as 6 million people but scaled back the scope as conservation efforts mounted.
Since Friday, millions of people have seen their lights abruptly cut with little notice -- part of a last-ditch effort by the state’s grid operator to save the system from cascading power failures. The outages have drawn criticism from industry experts who say they weren’t necessary, and raised questions about the reliability of the state’s grid, which has become increasingly dependent on intermittent solar and wind generation in recent years.
The California ISO declared a “Stage 2 Emergency” at 2 p.m. Tuesday, the last step before rolling outages begin.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday blamed California Democrats for the blackouts, alleging without evidence that they “intentionally implemented” the outages.
This month is the first time California has resorted to rotating outages since the 2001 energy crisis. And it couldn’t be hitting the region at a more vulnerable time, with the pandemic forcing people into lockdown, leaving them with little choice but to endure the heat indoors. The cutoffs have been reminiscent of the mass blackouts that utilities carried out less than a year ago to keep their electrical lines from sparking fires during unusually strong windstorms -- all extreme weather events made more frequent by climate change.
Berberich of the ISO pushed back at Trump’s suggestion, saying, “There wasn’t any party affiliation or other kind of input into the decisions to shed load on Friday and Saturday night.”
One thing that has made California’s grid so vulnerable to soaring demand is the state’s rapid shift away from natural gas. About 9 gigawatts of gas generation, enough to power 6.8 million homes, have been retired over the past five years as the state turns increasingly to renewables, according to BloombergNEF. That leaves fewer options when the sun sets and solar production wanes.
Normally, California can import enough power from neighboring states when supplies are tight. But the sprawling heat wave blanketing the U.S. West is pushing power plants to the hilt across the region.
“California is in a tight spot,” BNEF analyst Brian Bartholomew said. “It’s retired a lot of gas. And the storage that’s supposed to help hasn’t yet come online.”
The relentless heat is also starting to take a physical toll on California’s power system. Transformers -- the metal cylinders sitting atop power poles -- can malfunction and catch fire if they don’t cool off at night. And temperatures in some parts of Southern California are expected to remain in the low 80’s overnight. During the 2006 heatwave, the state’s utilities lost more than 1,500 of these devices, with each knocking out service to one neighborhood in the process.
The heat wave gripping the West Coast stems from a stubborn, high-pressure system that has parked itself across the Great Basin spanning Nevada and other western states. It essentially acts as a lid trapping hot air, and there aren’t any indications it’s going to budge soon.
Such phenomenons, sometimes called heat domes, are getting worse because the Earth’s climate is changing. As the planet warms, the contrast between the heat at the equator and the cold at the pole decreases. That saps the strength of the jet stream, which otherwise would be able to shove the ridges out of the way. It explains in part why extreme heat has blanketed regions around the world in recent weeks.
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Extreme weather has taken a profound toll on electrical grids in recent weeks. Earlier this month, millions of people lost power across the U.S. Midwest after a wall of lightning, hail and deadly winds tore a path of ruin from central Iowa to Chicago. Days earlier, Tropical Storm Isaias darkened millions of homes from the Carolinas to Connecticut.
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.