Californians dodge blackouts — but heat endures
As many as 10 million Californians averted what would have been an unprecedented series of rolling blackouts Monday night after temperatures fell, people turned down air conditioners and officials called off the outages.
They may not be so lucky on Tuesday. The heat wave that’s pushing the region’s power grid to the brink is continuing with vengeance. Sacramento is forecast to hit 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Los Angeles will climb to 97, up 10 degrees from a day earlier. If those projections hold, the threat of rotating outages will loom.
Since Friday, millions of Californians 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, prompted California Governor Gavin Newsom to open an investigation 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.
“Let me just make this crystal clear: We failed to predict and plan these shortages — and that’s simply unacceptable,” Newsom said in announcing the probe.
In the case of Monday, however, it was arguably a matter of over-planning.
By 2:30 p.m. that day, grid manager California Independent System Operator was warning that an unprecedented 3.3 million homes and businesses could see their power go out. That’s up to 10 million people, or a quarter of the state’s population, based on the average household size. A few hours later, the agency scaled back its plans to hit about 1 million customers. Then it delayed the start of the outages.
And just before 8 p.m., it lifted an emergency declaration altogether.
The grid operator credited cooler-than-expected weather and electricity demand that came in lower than projected.
“We are grateful to families and businesses across the state that answered the call to reduce electricity use,” Steve Berberich, the president and chief executive officer of California ISO, said in a statement. “The heat storm is not over, and we still expect exceedingly hot temperatures” on Tuesday and today, he said.
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.