


Why power grid flirts with disaster
Chief of the nonprofit that runs the system discusses challenges, trade-offs, the effects of climate change.

I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. I’ve looked at all the data. The big picture is that we’re operating too close to the margin and don’t have any room for error.
We are susceptible in exactly the conditions we saw on Friday and Saturday night [Aug. 14 and 15] where you have high net loads — those are the loads at 7 p.m. after the sun has gone down. We knew coming into the day on Friday that we were going to be tight, but that’s not unusual. We’re often tight. And imports generally take care of the gap. In this case, because it was hot in the West, we weren’t able to get the imports we would normally get. Renewables are not at the heart of the issues we had on Friday night.
On Saturday, there was some movement of wind around the time of the net peak. Wind did move 1,000 megawatts up and down and back up, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you weren’t so close to the margin.
The gas fleet performed pretty well, in my estimation, and everything else performed pretty well. This was a matter of running out of capacity to serve load.
If you do a spreadsheet model of all the capacity on the system you get a very large number. But that counts solar as being wholly deliverable across all 24 hours, which is not the case. Solar has virtually no value in the net peak hours, in the evening.
I was in the control room on Friday, and I watched everything that went on, and I think the operators did exactly what they were supposed to do to protect the grid. They ended up making a trade-off of shedding 500 megawatts of load to make sure you don’t end up blacking out the entire state of California, or potentially the rest of the Western grid.
There are a lot of people that suggest we should just deploy our operating reserves to serve load. You simply can’t do that. You must protect the broader grid at all times. And if you deploy your operating reserves to serve load, and the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant trips offline, the grid’s going to collapse.
That’s exactly right. You pay a smaller price to avoid a bigger one, basically.
I think there is a trade-off between how much money you want to spend on the electric system and the risk of outages. Obviously you want to minimize outages. But I think building the system to protect against any and all contingencies, such as heat across the entire West — I think there’s a trade-off to be had. Every once in a while you’re going to have a disruption.
I take a different conclusion. I think you have to make sure you’re provided for across all hours. You don’t necessarily have to have a gas fleet to do that. As an example, you could deploy batteries.
What you do have to plan for charging those batteries and serving electricity load at the same time. Just deploying batteries won’t fix it. You have to have a comprehensive strategy. Maybe you charge them at night with the wind. But I don’t necessarily come to the conclusion that you have to keep a big gas fleet.
What you have to do is adequately serve all hours, and there are other strategies to do it other than having a gas fleet. My view is that we need to better do that strategy.
I would advocate to have the Public Utilities Commission order additional procurement right now, immediately, to build up our capacity margins going into next summer.
I think we have to come to terms with the fact that the world is warming, and we’re going to have more of these hot spells. That absolutely has to be looked at.
It’s not unusual for us to get hot in California. In 2017, we saw 50,116 megawatts of peak demand. You can do that if the rest of the West isn’t hot because you can get the imports to fill in the gap. But if you’re going to have these West-wide heat waves like we have now, we can’t assume we’re going to get those imports anymore.
We talked earlier about what’s an acceptable outage level. There probably is some. But if you’re going to have these continued heat waves, you’re going to have more of these outages. And I think that’s untenable, from a real perspective and also from a political perspective.
Absolutely, you would have gotten rid of the friction on imports. You wouldn’t have imports or exports, you’d just have electricity flowing around. But as you can imagine, I’m kind of fatigued about that regionalization battle.
I’ve had discussions with the governor’s office and the Public Utilities Commission about that very topic. How do we operationalize what we just did? Because we were calling around for megawatts. The Navy took some ships off of shore power, and Tesla helped out, and the oil refineries helped out.
We have markets and compensation for those things. I think we have to work with the regulators and the utilities to get those programs working so that people will come. But we have the markets for it. Let’s get it online and let’s get it aggregated.
Yes, it is something we’re interested in, and we’ll do our best to encourage it. But keep in mind, what we do is create markets and dispatch based on what we get in the market. We need programs that bring virtual power plants to the market. I think the utilities and their regulators need to figure out how to deploy that more broadly, and get these people who responded over the last few days into those programs.
The outage numbers are frankly lower than they normally are, so I don’t see evidence of withholding. We haven’t seen anything unusual in the patterns of imports and exports. But it will take a deeper dive. So immediately, I don’t see any evidence, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. And I think we need to do our best to look into it.
The penalties and the trouble you can get into by trying to manipulate our markets are very extreme. And I do think people have learned their lesson. I could be wrong. We will do a look into it. Our Department of Market Monitoring will, I’m sure, be watching and looking into this very closely.