Power grid couldn’t meet high demand in heat wave; regulators left asking why

California regulators plan to publish an analysis in the coming weeks about how California arrived at its worst power supply shortage in 19 years during the recent heat wave.

“The reality is that it is not helpful to speculate on the root cause until we have a chance to do a complete analysis,” Edward Randolph, the California Public Utilities Commission’s deputy executive director for energy and climate policy, said at a commission meeting on Thursday.

The commission also voted to approve seven clean energy contracts to increase electricity reliability. The contracts were required by its procurement rules

After electricity demand rose across the state during a heat wave in midAugust, PG&E implemented rolling blackouts that affected thousands of Californians Aug. 14 and 15 to compensate for a power supply shortage. PG&E and the state grid operator also warned of the possibility of blackouts for much of the following week, but those blackouts were prevented partly because of emergency energy conservation efforts that kept demand from overwhelming the grid.

“There was not enough available supply to meet demand,” Randolph said, adding: “Based on our planning process, there should have been.”

The initial analysis will include examination of the processes used to forecast electricity demand, the rules followed by regulators, what resources should have been available to meet demand, whether those resources were actually available and how much energy they produced, and how conservation helped grid performance, Randolph said.

“The analysis will help each agency know” where to look to ensure that the outages do not happen again, he said.

State energy forecasts and planning reserves have not sufficiently accounted for heat storms caused by climate change, which means the power grid does not have large enough reserves and relies too much on unreliable outofstate power imports, regulators from the state utilities commission, the California Independent System Operator and the California Energy Commission said in a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Though some analyses have blamed California’s use of unreliable wind and solar power for the grid shortage, Randolph insisted that clean energy is not the problem. Regulators have long been aware that they cannot fully rely on wind and solar power to meet peak demand in the evening hours, he said.

“Clean energy and reliability are not conflicting goals,” he added.