E-mail Sherry Listgarten About this blog: Climate change, despite its outsized impact on the planet, is still an abstract concept to many of us. That needs to change. My hope is that readers of this blog will develop a better understanding of how our climate is evolving a...  (More) About this blog: Climate change, despite its outsized impact on the planet, is still an abstract concept to many of us. That needs to change. My hope is that readers of this blog will develop a better understanding of how our climate is evolving and how they want to respond, and will feel comfortable asking questions and exchanging comments on the topic. It is important that we develop a shared understanding of the basic science and impacts of climate change, to make sense of our actions and policy options going forward. My background is not in climate science, and I'm not even particularly green; my hope is that helps to make this blog more relatable. I studied math and neurobiology on the east coast before moving out here in 1987 for grad school in computer science. After working in the tech industry for about 25 years, I retired a few years ago to better align my time with my priorities. I love spending time outdoors, and feel deeply our responsibility to this incredible planet that we call home.  (Hide)

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The obvious ? is what to do when you lose power? As we saw with the recent Emerald Hills fire, a power outage can be a week+. A prudent person should be researching the best power alternative for their situation. Between back-up generators powered by diesel fuel, gasoline, propane & your home's natural gas and battery storage, my personal choice is using my home's natural gas. The generator will run as long as the elect outages exists - even weeks/months. Be prepared for the worst!

The problem with power outage (let's say since the day of the longest outage I can remember due to the plane accident in EPA), is that we are more dependent on electricity than we were then. We have more EVs that if they are not charged overnight they are useless to their owners for a day's commuting or what have you. Many more people are working from home, using internet and devices to work, zoom, communicate with other business contacts all over the world. Setting up a conference zoom with people in four different countries, different time zones, who are busy with their business and personal lives means that no power can be costly to someone who is trying to sign a deal, or be interviewed on foreign "live" tv or similar important uses. We have people being interviewed for jobs as well as doing the interviewing, doing college exams, or just speaking to a dying loved one in a hospital bed somewhere the other side of the world by skype. It just isn't the fact that the lights go out or we may not be able to cook or do laundry. It just might be life changing issues that are affected. The big picture is that we are more dependent on power than ever before.

One reader chimed in by email: "I cannot help but wonder if someday we might be able to utilize all the parked EV cars in a reverse direction by discharging them slowly to add a bit of power to the grid in the evenings during peak usage." My response: I completely agree. If we could get just 7 kW from 100,000 EVs (there are about 450,000 right now with a range of more than 200 miles), that would be 0.7 GW. And it's pretty easy for EV owners to very occasionally spare 3 hours x 7 kW = 20 kWh from a 60+ kWh battery. In five years, that could easily grow to 2 GW. That is enormous. I wonder what that much evening power costs. I wrote some about this and other uses of EV batteries here.

I don't have one of these but am contemplating... Web Link Initially I was supposed to drive out of town on Friday to a much cooler place, however the wildfire situation scuttled that plan. Knowing I was going to be away for a couple of weeks, I had already consumed all of the perishables in the fridge. With the heat forecast when I knew I couldn't get out of town, I did not replenish the fridge, so nothing will spoil. I have lots of camping gear with gas cooking alternatives, and flashlights and candles galore. I think of the possibility of losing power as if I am going camping, in my own house. Being a minimalist, and "hot weather savvy", I have filled the tub with water in case something happens with our water supply, and have many gallons of drinking water on hand. I can flush with water from the tub, as well as using it for cooling down if there's no power for a fan. The worst aspect to having no power is no internet to know if any other imminent disasters are going to happen. But I have a very old .mp3 player that also has an AM/FM radio, so it's charged up and I would only have to use it occcasionally if I smelled smoke or hear sirens. If there's no radio signals I will just have to trust my intuition. But it's time like these when it's maddening not to be able to access local police scanners -- which wouldn't function without power anyway. I assume the internet provider would also go down, so I have a supply of paper with words on them. They are called "books" and used to have a multitude of purposes inside the covers. I don't have an electric car, and am glad of it now. We really need to develop affordable solar cars. As a side note, if what's happening in Pakistan was happening here, we would be absolutely lost without outside help. Please give as generously as you can to a reputable agency that can help millions of Pakistanis right now.

September 5 update: Happy Labor Day, and I hope everyone is able to keep cool! The grid managed well yesterday, with clear evidence of customers reducing their electricity usage in afternoon and evening, keeping demand below supply. See how the dark shaded areas (demand) stay below the heavy dashed lines (supply). Today will be much tighter, and Tuesday even more so, as we hit record temperatures across the state and close in on record demand levels. The graph below shows a gap of up to 5 GW between supply and demand. An emergency alert (EEA-1) has been issued for 5-9 pm today. This is much more significant than the voluntary Flex Alert and means the grid operator will push aggressively for demand reductions during this interval. Please help out by avoiding use of air conditioners and other power-hungry appliances during this interval. As you can see below, the 6-8 pm interval is where our forecast demand most exceeds supply. Again, please stay cool, this heat can be dangerous.

Labor Day today. Most people are not working so I am not sure if that translates to office buildings switching off the a/c. I imagine that people are finding somewhere cool to hangout, shopping malls or big box stores, theaters, libraries (if they are open for cooling centers) or similar. The test would be a day when everyone is working in offices/schools and arriving home just at the time when power demand is highest, people want to do chores such as laundry, cook dinner, charge devices and importantly plug in EVs so that they will be fully charged for tomorrow. Some EV will need a good 8 hour or longer overnight charge. Some will want to stop off at a charging station on their homeward commute - possibly buying dinner while their EV charges. For many this is how they will prepare for using their EV the following day for commuting, errands, etc. If temperatures remain as hot tomorrow as they are today, it will be a very different story.

Ha, in case you are wondering, this power outage (10:30 pm on Labor Day) seems to be a Palo Alto special. Not a rolling blackout, just the usual (ahem) Palo Alto outage...

Let's thank Gov. Newsom that we still have that 2.3 GW of energy provided by the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. Looking ahead as we nervously monitor the CAISO graphs for energy supply to keep up with growing demand, I'd like to remind everyone to follow the science and learn what we can do to increase the supply of reliable carbon-free electrical power, slowing the degradation of Earth's climate. In addition to using less energy. Especially for high school and college-age students and their elders, learn the basics of chemistry and physics. That's important for understanding how nuclear reactors work, how modern reactor designs improve reactor safety, and how the physics of radioactive decay determines both the volume and required storage lifetime of nuclear waste. It's also important for understanding how energy storage works (thermal storage and hydrogen fuel generation and storage) both independently of nuclear energy and with assistance provided by modern nuclear reactor technology. Arguing about whether or not to include nuclear energy in plans for the future wastes time that we don't have in the here and now. We need to get on the same page with respect to understanding the science before such an argument will be productive.

September 6 update: Oof. I guess this is what they mean by record-breaking. I hope everyone is doing okay. Yesterday did not go so well on the grid. There was not enough conservation and around 6:30 pm an EEA-2 was issued, which is the level right before rolling blackouts. Prices were sky-high. (Normally this would be, say, $50.) The grid pulled out all stops. Look at this amount of batteries on the grid, well over 3 GW at peak power. For three critical hours, from 5:45-8:45 pm, the grid's battery storage discharged a Diablo Canyon's worth of energy. Incredible. When the grid operator issued the EEA-2, they called for a “demand-response” event between 6:30 and 8:30, which automatically reduced demand. It’s interesting to compare what the grid looked like at 6:20 pm, below, with reserves intact. And then at 7 pm. The sun is setting, capacity dropped by 2.5 GW, but demand only dropped by 1 GW. We are eating into reserves, hence the EEA-2 alert. We were just not able to conserve enough energy yesterday. I walked past Cubberley around 5:30 and the air conditioners were running full tilt in an empty facility. Maybe it’s because it was a holiday. Maybe today -- a working day -- will be better. But the heat is much worse and things didn’t cool off much over night. So … My prediction for today is -- rolling blackouts between 6 and 9 pm. Charge your electronics, make sure your flashlight has batteries in it. If you can charge a battery or UPS that you can plug your router into when needed, so much the better. Please share any other tips in the comments. And of course don't forget to cut back on energy use in late afternoon and evening. The most critical period looks to be 5-9 pm. I understand there were also localized blackouts last night. Maybe that was from overloaded distribution networks. I’m not sure. I will try to learn more. Anyway, stay safe everyone, I hope you are finding ways to stay cool.

How do we get electricity usage in unused facilities reduced? As you mentioned, air conditioning was running at Cubberley with no one there - that's just ridiculous. How do we get lights, AC, fans, etc. off in buildings that aren't occupied? I don't have AC at home, so there's only so much I can do to reduce my usage, but I'll do what I can between 4-9.

I hope everyone is doing their part to conserve. Rolling blackouts could be next. The SF Chronicle advice is wise. Evacuation is always part of the plan for weather related situations/emergencies. A rolling blackout could be a simple inconvenience to some, and a matter of health and safety to others. There are elderly people on oxygen, etc. etc. etc. and having an emergency kit and an evacuation plan could be a matter of life and death. Stay cool!

Thanks for the update! Yes, south PA along both sides of Arastradero from ECR up to Gunn High was blacked out from 10:30-1:30 last night. Too bad the sky wasn't clearer, as it was nice to view the stars without ANY local lights around.

Sherry Listgarten, At about 11 am earlier this morning, you wrote: The grid pulled out all stops. Look at this amount of batteries on the grid, well over 3 GW at peak power. For three critical hours, from 5:45-8:45 pm, the grid's battery storage discharged a Diablo Canyon's worth of energy. Incredible. I agree that the grid's battery response was impressive. However, I hope that you are not suggesting that grid scale batteries are sustainable over many hours, days, or weeks, let alone 24x7x52 reliable operation.

... and, we are having a rolling outage, at least in Palo Alto. It won't affect everyone, but it will affect some of you. I think that every effort was made to avoid this, but at the same time this isn't surprising. It was a very very difficult day to match demand and supply. But we will keep getting better at it. I'll do a full update tomorrow morning. I hope everyone is doing okay.

Remember that it was (checks notes) Vladimir Putin who forced California for 20+ years to spend billions on the most expensive and least reliable sources of “clean energy." It's going to get tough when they require 100% electric vehicles. We are not led by serious people.

Forget about privately owned vehicles for a moment. We have electric buses, electric utilities collecting vehicles, Caltrain, etc. How are we going to get them charged when the State is unable to guarantee power in hot weather? Will these public vehicles have special dispensation to enable them to be charged? I know BART and probably Caltrain have different circuits within the grid, but how about all the other public charged EVs?

And another outage today, Wednesday morning.

September 7 update: We made it through yesterday in what I would say was spectacular fashion. It was the hottest day in a record-setting heat wave, and the grid smashed the record for all-time peak demand, hitting 52,061 MW when the previous record was 50,270 MW in July 2006. And yet the grid managed to stay up with no call for rolling outages. This is due in large part to efforts that many of you made to conserve energy in late afternoon and evening. It made a huge difference. Trouble started brewing around 2 pm, when the grid operator (CAISO) issued a Stage 2 alert, which means we are in danger of having to use our reserves and we have to urgently reduce demand and increase supply. As you may recall, demand peaks around 4-5 pm, but then the sun really starts going down. Supply plummets and demand does not drop as quickly. So the strain on the grid actually increases. See this graph of Supply on the grid on September 6 and see what happens to renewables (largely solar) between 5-7 pm. The demand curve doesn’t go down so quickly, so the grid gets increasingly squeezed. At 5:17pm, CAISO declared a Stage 3 Emergency, which means there's nothing left but reserves on the grid. This is about as bad as it gets. This alert level means rolling outages are imminent. If needed, CAISO can use those to force demand to come down in a controlled fashion. In a last-ditch effort to avoid these, Governor Newsom issued a statewide alert at 5:45 pm urgently asking everyone to reduce demand. You may have received an alert on your phone. The grid also took advantage of its ability to cut back power to grid-tied appliances, using a demand-response event. You can see the decrease below as the grid fought to cut back demand as our solar supply dropped, particularly at 5:45 pm when the mobile alert was issued. Many of you contributed to this drop in demand of several gigawatts. As you can see in the first graph above, showing the power supply mix over the course of the day, CAISO also ramped up batteries, flexible hydropower, and imports during this critical period. The graph below shows that imported energy went from 4.5 GW at 3pm to 9 GW at 8pm. Imports like this were not available to Texas during its power crisis last winter because it chooses to operate its grid in isolation from other states. CAISO’s ability to import power keeps our energy cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable than it would otherwise be. A few cities with municipal utilities did reduce power via a rolling outage because of a mistaken communication from the Northern California Power Agency. At 6:29pm Palo Alto cut off power to several neighborhoods, affecting about 1700 households. Power was restored about 30 minutes later, shorter than a typical rolling outage. More information about that very problematic miscommunication can be found here. All in all, this was a truly remarkable accomplishment by all of you, and the grid operator, to keep things largely up and running during an unprecedented day of heat. Today and tomorrow call for more record-setting demand (well, if we ignore yesterday’s record), so please continue to cool your home off during the day and reduce power in the evening, particularly from 5-9 pm.

Sherry Listgarten, Thanks for the update and the informative data, including the numbers about imports that "went from 4.5 GW at 3pm to 9 GW at 8pm." Does CAISO tell the public where the imports came from?

Hey Chris. When I wrote this post I guessed the Pacific Northwest, since the heat wave didn’t extend that far. That seems to be correct, at least for September 5. (I don’t see data for September 6 yet.) As a reminder, here is a picture of the Western Energy Imbalance Market, which is the extended market that CAISO participates in that allows it to import and export power to other grid operators. You can see the import/export data for September 5 here. In particular, look at the Bonneville Power Administration, located in the Pacific Northwest. It joined the market only this year, and look at the impact it is making, exporting 4 GW of power during our critical evening period on September 5. Here are the prices it got (dark is the 15-minute market, light is real-time). Do you think they are happy about their decision to join? You can also see Powerex of Vancouver, in British Columbia, chipping in 2 GW at that time. They joined in 2018. Both Bonneville and Powerex are almost entirely (maybe entirely?) hydropower. Arizona Public Service also helped out a little later in the evening (a mix of gas, nuclear, and coal for the most part).

I think any case of even "minimal rolling outages" in a situation (rising temperatures) that has been predicted over and over for at least twenty years counts as a "fail" rather than "spectacular fashion". No need to over-cheerlead. The unintended consequence may be that more folks will now install fossil-fuel powered backup generators. We are considering this, as they seem to be cheaper for both equipment and installation than a battery system as I understand it.

And now the Mercury News is reporting that Tuesday's rolling blackout was just a mistake in communication: "...electric regulators said California avoided rolling blackouts Tuesday just in time for cooler weather. So why did several thousand people in Palo Alto, Alameda and Healdsburg lose power? Those Northern California cities and others may have inadvertently initiated rolling blackouts in error following a miscommunication with the California Independent System Operator Tuesday after it declared a rare stage 3 emergency..." :( :( :(

@Mondoman: FWIW, I specifically asked Palo Alto Utilities about that possibility and they said no, their action was in response to a specific CAISO request, and noted that it happened in at least six cities. They added that CAISO would be issuing a clarification to that effect. I have not heard back from CAISO on this issue. I will post any updates that I get here.

Yes, CAISO said there was a miscommunication by the Northern California Power Agency that was working with the city utilities. CAISO said they will try to be clearer next time to avoid such mistakes. And here is a writeup from NCPA about that.

Dear Sherry, Thanks for the additional info, especially the maps showing the larger scope including CAISO's regional neighbors. We are all fortunate that the drainages of the Columbia and Fraser rivers are not seriously impacted by drought. Yet. But (portion removed) Blogger's note: Chris is an enthusiastic proponent of nuclear energy. However, I object to posters repeatedly using questions and remarks in this comment space to promote a specific agenda. This does happen most often pro/con with nuclear, so please use this space for more of that: Web Link

Sherry, I hope you are doing a spreadsheet with all these reasons. Squirrel (today was a squirrel), geese, seagull, balloons, tree branches fallen, downed trees, equipment failure, poor maintenance, plane crash. It will be interesting reading to see which one tops the league table.

@Bystander, I am not, but you know who should be? The City of Palo Alto Utilities. And they should publish it every year. I do think they are making more of an effort to report on these outages. But a summary is important too. If they don't, I will, but I'd rather they do it. I would also like to see a postmortem on how the Northern California Power Agency misinterpreted a communication from CAISO that resulted in power mistakenly being shut off to thousands of homes. That is pretty inexcusable. Our utility should be asking to see that CAISO communication and following up on who was in charge at NCPA, etc. I will ask about this. Update: Just as I typed this, Palo Alto Utilities sent me this explanation of what happened. It looks like NCPA is taking this very seriously, as they should.

I am concerned about elderly/disabled folks who arent aware of the states requirements for advance notice of outages, but need them. There isnt time to get signed up during a climate crisis. I decided to bail, not a fan of extreme heat. I am afraid this is 'new normal". I fear for the safety of the elderly and disabled, and feel so bad for kids who have inherited what we have left to them. The old Cat Stevens song keeps running through my mind -- "Where Do The Children Play". Quite prophetic. I know this article is about the grid and all the numbers that go with it but Im not a scientist. Just a fellow Earthling trying to make sense of it all.

For those of you interested in where we got some extra power on that toughest of days, September 6, check out the exports from the Bonneville Power Administration, a new addition to the Western Energy Imbalance Market. That is almost 5.5 GW during our peak crunch time. Amazing. And they were getting some terrific prices, $1000+ per MWh on the 15-minute market and $500+ on the real-time market. It looks to me, for the 8 hours between 2-10pm, to be about 4500 MW per hour * 8 hours * $750/MWh = $27 million. This is why the state asks us to conserve...

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