‘Heat Storm’ Causes Rolling Blackouts
High temperatures across California (what some are calling a heat storm) have caused a spike in electricity usage. California’s Independent System Operator which controls the electrical grid declared statewide Stage 2 Emergency about 5 p.m. “If system conditions don’t improve, the ISO will call a Stage 3 with rotating power outages,” a press release states.
Then, at 6:30 p.m., according to the Sacramento Bee, the ISO declared a State 3 emergency.
The Bee states,
The California Independent System Operator, which runs the state’s power grid, declared a Stage 3 emergency alert around 6:30 p.m., the first time that had happened since 2001.
Spokeswoman Anne Gonzales said the grid managers were “shedding” about 500 megawatts of power, blacking out between 50,000 and 75,000 customers. She didn’t immediately know where the blackouts had struck.
The ISO had requested that consumers reduce use today in anticipation of the coming crisis.
PG&E…was directed by the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) to turn off power to about 200,000 to 250,000 customers at a time in rotating power outages given the strain on the power grid during the statewide heatwave. Other power utilities in the state are being directed to take similar actions.
The power will be turned off in rotating blocks until about 11 p.m. Power could be out for about one hour for each block.
Californians are being urged to continue to conserve power until 11 p.m. tonight to reduce power usage as supplies run tight during the peak period today.
Rotating outages are not Public Safety Power Shutoffs, which are conducted during specific high fire threat conditions.
Due to the emergency, PG&E will be unable to notify customers in advance of the power shutoffs, which could occur anywhere within PG&E’s service area.
Daniel Swain, climatolgist and well-known author of the Weather West news site, posted a piece today stating, “A very intense and prolonged heatwave now appears likely for a large portion of California over the next 7-10 days, and this event will likely have wide-ranging impacts from human health, wildfire, and electricity demand perspectives. I suspect this event will probably end up being one of the most significant widespread California extreme heat events in the past decade, if not longer.”
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Welcome to the new normal.
New normal it is. Cell towers will be down, and those of us on satellite TV will have news, but cannot communicate. The Ham radio and CB radios are the key. Yo can buy a very powerful ham radio, and be informed. Communicate to our fellow prepers to maintain a supply food and other necessities. In the meantime, we should all be prepping now. Those who can raise pigs, raise them. raise corn for pig and chicken feed. hay where we can for beef. Those who can process and preserve food need to do it. Root cellars are essential, as are canning supplies, salt, sugar, honey, etc. people who can sew clothes, do so, especially for winter. Let’s go!
Chill out bro, the power might not even go off and you are telling me I need a root cellar. And sewing clothes. Wtf is going on here?
This is not new. Just another sorry way pge does business. Too big, need to break them up. Lower prices and cut overpaid executive salaries. Let them share in hard times like everyone else.
I kind of think PG&E is saying that the inland/ Central Valley is using a lot of power and want people on the coast to bail them out.
Shelter in place will now be swelter in place.
Seriously? 2020 and they can’t give any kind of notice your power will be shutoff?
Right? FFS When I called on my cell, their stupid message mentioned nothing!
they’ve been asking for days to reduce power strain – meaning – We will have to shut off power if you don’t conserve. There isn’t an infinite amount of power. During a heatwave everyone runs their air conditioners which are huge power strains. Think of office buildings. Simple logic, and no you aren’t special to get a notice. People didn’t listen, and they let it go on for as long as they could and at 6pm the system was too strained. Listen in advance, don’t expect to have your hand held.
Conserve power, lower the setting on your gavitas.
Nevada and Arizona seem to manage just fine.
Most casinos have no customers with cash in Nevada.
Arizona will get theirs as their nuke plants depend on water from Phoenix, AZ.
AZ is hard hit with COVID-19 though. But, the energy wasting office complexes and malls I bet are running empty so they are shipping power our way if the plants are not down for maintenance or refueling.
remember the lesson we received from George Carlin,”Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things”.
Good think California isn’t zero emissions yet! The grid is strapped right now without millions of future vehicles attached !
who can afford it when Bezos and Gates have won the Monopoly board game.
I think its bullshit that we pay for power and PG&E can’t stop shutting it off
Yeah, I hate when we get inconvenienced just to save lives, huh?
Wow.
You selfish bastards can have dialysis later. San Ramon needs to run their ACs and pool filters.
News Flash you don’t pay for what you don’t use!!! When the Power is shut off you’re NOT PAYING A THING!!!!
That may not be literally true. Like all utilities, there’s a cost shared among every user just to keep the system in place — this includes shareholder profits, CEO bonuses, etc. BUT it also includes the cost of simply maintaining the infrastructure, workers wages and benefits, debt service, building capital improvement funds, and in the case of private corporations, advertising and lobbying. So there’s a base rate that you pay whether you use any electricity or not. Some of it is gouging, but some of it is necessary. I believe that all basic utilities necessary for a decent life — and that includes electricity — should be publically owned, not profit-making entities.
But….But
We deliver Energy!
The most expensive energy in the US!
To give an idea of how hot it was along the central coast, Salinas hit 102, 18 degrees above the record. I have never heard of someplace breaking a record by that much, or even close.
Happens in Eureka all the time. But keep in mind that record is for that specific day. Who knows how long they have been keeping records . Go SMUD
They have installed ‘smart meters’ in many places and yet must resort to this?
I have opt out.
They haven’t read my meter for 6 mos. but keep charging me 10.00 a month
for what they don’t do.
Do some of you people not read the whole article before commenting? It clearly says that the California Independent System Operator (the government) ordered PG&E and the other utilities to shut down the power. Sorry folks this one is on the state.
Perhaps you crying , whining people should remember the climate catastrophe humankind is currently engaged with. Possibly ask yourselves , “do I want to sit here and cry about PG&E? Or do something to change the world so that my children and grandchildren will have life”? Nope- let’s just complain about not getting enough energy to ruin the environment we live in.
The state looked at available power generation and determined that it wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, so told utilities to start shedding load now, rather than waiting until something got overloaded and a much larger, longer, unpredictable, possibly cascading blackout happened. The lack of generation capacity is not the state’s fault, but rather a continued lack of investment by the utilities.
Hmmm… The State shares a great deal of the responsibility. It has legislated control of the business plans of utilities in exchange for the monopoly it allows them to have. That the government shirks their duties by fiasco committee arrangements is on the government.
The CAISO is not a government agency, it is a nonprofit and their work is analogous to air traffic control.
Almost everything in the public sphere is being mishandled these days, but there are some real underlying problems that now have a momentum of their own. Our ever-increasng demand for more and more of the ‘resources’ still left is a big one. Hard limits await in this age of catastrophe and deconstruction, currently well underway.
PG$E sucks! People should start squirreling away money to pay for solar panels and battery set up. We need to be able to disconnect from the grid when we want. They charge outrages amounts for electricity and it’s robbery.
You are free to do that! Or you could, you know, maybe just whine about it.
And don’t forget, future events like these will affect you in the future.
You think pge is expensive? Try to set your house up off grid.
This ^^^
True that…We have solar and yikes the batteries alone are crazy expensive.
It’s not just initial cost, but ongoing cost too. I’ve done the math a couple of times, and batteries cost more than buying the total amount of power they will store over their lifetime.
I’ve lived off-grid for almost 20 years and agree that it costs more, but I’ve never had a power failure in that time other than those planned for equipment replacement. The key to it costing less is to learn to be content with less power and to organize your usage to coincide with the sun. Like doing laundry in late morning on sunny days, not at night. However, cell phone and internet are still vulnerable to the grid going down. CB radios aren’t.
what CB radio do you have and what did you do to get good range?
California is removing repeaters
Kym’s annoying site won’t let me post links right now. Search my comment and you’ll see what’s going on.
PG&E is expected to make about $2 billion profit starting in 2021, and by 2023 $6billion which will allow them to start paying dividends to share holders.
All that money is money that should go to maintenance, new green energy production, lower rates etc.
Remember that our governor G Newsom has taken over $750,000 from PGE. and PGE was the largest donor to him in the last election.
And don’t forget that the governor has sole power to appoint PUC commissioners and hence all of their rulings is on him. Raising the cost of electricity to pay for PGE bailout, that’s on Newsom.
What to be done? Best advice is to vote Newsom out. Not much else you can do.
Good luck on building a new power plant in California. Normally there is excess power and any new plant, if you could build it, would be unnecessary unless there was a heatwave.
Neil, the heat waves are here to stay. Go Solar or go home. It’s no longer an option.
Solar systems and battery storabe have their own draw backs and have been responsible for fires. Nothing is as easy as “no choice.”
Since time began there have been heat waves. PGE just likes the control – and doesn’t want lawsuits. Down south SCE doesn’t turn off the power because its hot
What the article fails to mention; is that the blackouts of the early 2000’s were caused by greed, not lack of power.
Remember Enron? They created a financial market to trade the energy created by our public utilities, then used fake emergencies to shut down certain power plants….creating an artificial energy deficit….so they could raise the price of the power….and sell it at a high premium profit. They were caught red handed, and this is all accepted fact.
See “Enron. The smartest guys in the room” documentary for the full story of how we the people allowed our public utilities to be taken over by Globalist Capitalist who used the fake emergency, rolling blackouts to RIP US OFF.
Some communist bullshit drill.
What a fucking joke! These assclowns had decades to bury the power lines, wtf are they waiting on?
Pg&e too fucking stupid to hire a grant writer? The feds would have paid for it but Wtf ever!
Well gee, let’s stack electric vehicles on the overloaded grid… perhaps building power plants rather than decommissioning them might be prudent.
Power plants bad. Dams bad. Gasoline bad. Logging bad. Smoking weed good.
Obviously.
The weather west web blog, which was mentioned in this article is an excellent source for weather information in California. Daniel Swain, the author is a research climatologist who writes about atmospheric rivers, the interconnectedness of weather phenomenon that can be thousands of miles apart, climate change, and similar interesting stuff about weather and climate in California. The people who post comments on his blog are also very interesting and often post photos of exceptional cloud formations.
After the 64 flood we didn’t have power for a month. Some how we survived.
About heat and impacts on the grid.
Abstract
Climate change may constrain future electricity supply adequacy by reducing electric transmission capacity and increasing electricity demand. The carrying capacity of electric power cables decreases as ambient air temperatures rise; similarly, during the summer peak period, electricity loads typically increase with hotter air temperatures due to increased air conditioning usage.
As atmospheric carbon concentrations increase, higher ambient air temperatures may strain power infrastructure by simultaneously reducing transmission capacity and increasing peak electricity load. We estimate the impacts of rising ambient air temperatures on electric transmission ampacity and peak per-capita electricity load for 121 planning areas in the United States using downscaled global climate model projections. Together, these planning areas account for roughly 80% of current peak summertime load. We estimate climate-attributable capacity reductions to transmission lines by constructing thermal models of representative conductors, then forcing these models with future temperature projections to determine the percent change in rated ampacity.
Next, we assess the impact of climate change on electricity load by using historical relationships between ambient temperature and utility-scale summertime peak load to estimate the extent to which climate change will incur additional peak load increases. We find that by mid-century (2040–2060), increases in ambient air temperature may reduce average summertime transmission capacity by 1.9%–5.8% relative to the 1990–2010 reference period.
At the same time, peak per-capita summertime loads may rise by 4.2%–15% on average due to increases in ambient air temperature. In the absence of energy efficiency gains, demand-side management programs and transmission infrastructure upgrades, these load increases have the potential to upset current assumptions about future electricity supply adequacy.