Blackouts: None needed as weather, demand ease; more possible Tuesday
California electric grid managers scrambled Monday to both explain and reckon with the rolling blackouts that have loomed over the state as a power shortage persists during an extreme heat wave.
Another round of outages had threatened to hit more than 3 million homes and businesses on Monday evening, but no outages were ultimately necessary because the day’s energy shortage turned out to be far smaller than originally feared.
The California Independent System Operator initially projected a 4,400megawatt power shortfall but lifted the energy emergency for the day
shortly before 8 p.m.
Lower than expected demand, possibly due to conservation efforts, along with lower temperatures helped narrow the shortage, grid managers said. Rolling blackouts are still possible on Tuesday and Wednesday.
As the potential for further rolling blackouts has continued, deepening California’s most intense electricity crisis in nearly two decades, the head of the state’s main grid operator claimed that state regulators had not heeded warnings to procure more power. Gov. Gavin Newsom declared an emergency and called for an investigation into the grid’s failure to provide reliable energy.
“The situation we are in could have been avoided,” said Steve Berberich, CEO of the system operator, which oversees the flow of power throughout most of the state.
Berberich made the comments at a meeting of the system operator’s governing board, when officials revealed the initial projected energy shortage of as much as 4,400 megawatts on Monday — roughly twice the capacity of the huge Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in San Luis Obispo County. He said grid managers had told regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission “over and over and over again” that energy imports “were drying up” and they needed to secure much more, but “that was rebuffed.”
But the amount of power Californians demanded in recent days is “consistent with the level the agencies have for August,” commission spokeswoman Terrie Prosper said in an email. Power companies had procured enough energy to meet forecasts, she said.
“The question we’re tackling is why certain resources were not available,” Prosper said.
Grid managers have blamed the power shortage on several factors. Chief among them is the heat wave that started on Friday and has broadly impacted the western United States. The widespread nature of the heat has limited California’s access to energy from other places while also causing a big spike in electricity use as people try to stay cool. Additionally, a power plant unexpectedly tripped offline on Friday, and weather variability has at times sharply limited the availability of wind and solar power, grid managers said.
The situation was not a complete surprise to the system operator, which warned in its summer 2020 electric supply outlook that problems could arise. In the outlook document, the system operator indicated that California’s hydroelectric dams had belowaverage capacity after the state received much less rain and snow this winter than it would in a normal year. And electricity use peaks late in the day when solar power generation is “near or at zero levels,” the document said.
Grid managers might have to rely on neighboring areas to supply power during peak periods, the outlook warned. But it also noted that if a heat wave proved sufficiently widespread outside the grid’s jurisdiction, “the availability of surplus energy to import ... could be diminished.”
Berberich acknowledged that California had endured a punishing heat wave in 2006 without rolling blackouts and said the reason why is simple.
“There was a lot more generating capacity on the system in 2006 than there is in 2020,” he said.
One plant that has closed since 2006 is the San Onofre plant in Orange County. The only remaining nuclear plant in California, Diablo Canyon, is scheduled to close in the coming years, and Berberich told reporters he would not push to extend the facility’s life.
Still, Berberich admitted that the system operator had fallen short, particularly on providing advance notice of the blackouts.
“We believed that there would be adequate supply to cover the demand,” he said. “We were wrong, and as a result, there was little or short notice given to the utilities.”
Newsom condemned the blackouts in a Monday letter to Berberich and California energy officials that called the outages “unacceptable and unbefitting of the nation’s largest and most innovative state.”
“We failed to predict and plan these shortages and that’s simply unacceptable,” he said at a Monday news conference. “People should have been told sooner and that is exactly the purpose of this investigation.”
The governor on Sunday signed an emergency proclamation that lets some energy users tap into sources of backup power in an effort to relieve some pressure on the grid.
Newsom said his administration was working to get more extra power plants and hydroelectric electricity online, cut its energy exports to other states and use backup generators from the wildfirerelated emergency power shutoffs over the next three days to help close the gap.
“We are all experiencing rather extraordinary conditions,” he said.
Newsom suggested that renewable energy might be part of the problem, saying at his own news conference that while he embraced the goal of transitioning away from fossil fuels, the state could not “sacrifice reliability.” But Berberich said “renewables are really not a factor” in causing the blackouts. He said the state should actually invest even more in “an overbuild of renewables,” along with “a fairly extensive deployment of batteries.”
Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the state’s largest utility, confirmed that no blackouts were needed Monday evening, though the utility has said that outages on other nights this week are possible as the extreme heat continues.
Company spokesman Jeff Smith said that when deciding how to distribute outages, which should not last longer than 90 minutes per customer, officials take into account who has been impacted in prior blackouts.
“The idea is to share the challenge, so that no one group of customers is impacted more than another,” he said.
The system operator is asking all Californians to voluntarily conserve as much energy as possible from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. through Wednesday.
The rolling blackouts are a wholly separate issue from PG&E’s fire safety power shutoffs that left millions without electricity last year. PG&E is still planning to turn off power this year when dry windstorms make its power lines likely to cause devastating fires, as they have several times since 2015. San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Alexei Koseff and Annie Vainshtein
contributed to this report.