![]() There’s the second lesson: A shortage of electricity doesn’t work like a shortage of a physical commodity. Within 45 minutes of the alert going out, the state had cut more than 2,000 megawatts of electricity, roughly as much energy as it normally takes to power more than 1.5 million homes. State officials have said that an emergency cellphone alert that asked residents to reduce their power usage helped save it. When the state last suffered such a widespread heat wave two years ago, its grid lapsed into rolling blackouts. ![]() This week, nearly all of California’s crunch times have come during this late-evening period. Engineers have to fill in the missing supply with any other source of power. That creates a painful window, lasting from roughly 6 to 9 p.m., when it’s still hot outside, so people still have their air-conditioning on high, but when solar is no longer keeping the grid afloat. But that’s exactly when electricity demand peaks-especially on a very hot day. In other words, solar has almost entirely dropped off the grid by 7 or 8 o’clock at night. And it shuts off, of course, with the arrival of dusk. But in the afternoon, it begins to fade, literally, as the sun falls lower in the sky. to another, one megawatt is enough to power about 750 California homes at once.) In the middle of the day, nearly all of that solar capacity pumps electricity into the grid. (How much is a megawatt? While per capita electricity use varies widely from one region of the U.S. California has one of the cleanest grids in the country, with more than 15,000 megawatts of installed solar capacity. But if people across the West are cranking up their AC to fend off the warmth, then there’s simply less electricity to go around.Īnd here is the first lesson from this week: This particular problem is most acute in the early evening. In the past, California could deal with surging power demand by importing electricity from nearby states. Although California got the brunt of the heat wave, record-setting warmth stretched across the West, knocking down nearly 1,000 records and enveloping Nevada, Utah, and Montana. More important, climate change is also expanding the spatial extent of heat waves, meaning that pockets of hot air in the atmosphere are now physically larger-and therefore cover a much larger land area-than they once did. That’s one view of the future: To state the obvious, these unusually intense heat waves are going to become more common under climate change, which is making heat waves generally more frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting. Last Tuesday, California’s electricity use spiked to more than 52,000 megawatts, surpassing previous all-time records for peak power demand by more than 3 percent. That record-smashing heat led to grid-straining demand for air-conditioning. San Jose, Sacramento, and Redwood City recorded their hottest all-time temperatures, with the state capital hitting 116 degrees Fahrenheit. Last week, California broiled under one of its worst heat waves in written history. Because especially if you’re used to living in a world of physical commodities-and physical fuels-electricity is really, really weird. And that means we should start to cultivate the kind of commonsense understanding of the electricity system that many of us already have about, say, gasoline, or oil prices, or car engines. Electricity will propel our cars, cook our food, and heat our homes. In basically any world in which America addresses climate change and zeroes out carbon pollution from its economy, we will have to use more electricity. Electricity is, I hasten to add, extremely interesting. It came from the state’s electricity grid. It came from California, as usual, but it was not courtesy of Apple’s annual keynote, or indeed of any technology company. Last week, Americans had a rare view into what the future might look like.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |