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Photographer: Noah Berger/AP
California is bracing for more power outages after as many as 2 million residents were plunged into darkness late Friday in the state’s first rolling blackouts since the 2001 energy crisis.
Grid operators in the state said they expect to have enough power supplies to meet demand Saturday, but issued a warning that they may be short on energy resources on Sunday starting at 5 p.m. local time.
The power shortage comes as a heat wave is expected to blanket California through the middle of next week, sending temperatures soaring past 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) in some areas.
“We’re seeing a once-in-a-decade heat wave,” said Brian Bartholomew, an analyst at BloombergNEF. What happened Friday “could be a preview of the actions the state’s grid operator may need to take in the days ahead.”
The sudden and largely unannounced outages in California on Friday began after a power plant malfunctioned and are a stark reminder of the fragility of power grids in the face of extreme weather. Searing heat has gripped cities around the globe in recent weeks, including Brussels, Paris and New York. Earlier this month, violent winds in the U.S. Midwest and a tropical storm in the Northeast left millions with power, in some cases for as long as a week.
Read: Blame Climate Change for Heatwave Misery: Green Insight
California grid operators said that a 500-megawatt generator tripped offline unexpectedly during peak demand hours Friday and that a 750 megawatt unit that was out of service didn’t return until after the peak hit. If both had been in service, grid operators wouldn’t have had to call for outages, said Anne Gonzales, a spokeswoman for grid manager California Independent System Operator.
“We did call on all of our reserves,” she said. “There was record breaking heat. At 7:30 p.m, the sun was going down and the demand was holding. There is nothing nefarious going on here. We are just trying to run the grid. The peak demand was steady in late hours and we had thousands of megawatts of solar reducing their output as the sun set.”
The heat and the blackouts are hitting at an especially vulnerable time for the region with Covid-19 forcing people to remain at home. Less than a year ago but before the pandemic, regional utilities deliberately cut off power to millions of customers in an effort to prevent their power lines from igniting wildfires amid unusually strong winds — another consequence of increasingly extreme weather brought on in part by climate change.
Read More: One Million Lost Power in Storm That Spawned Chicago Tornado
Friday’s outages in California started at about 6:30 p.m., when the state’s grid operator determined through a complex calculation that power reserves had fallen below a critical threshold and called a Stage 3 grid emergency, which triggers what it describes as “load interruption.”
The last time such a declaration was made during the electricity crisis of 2000 and 2001, hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses took turns going dark, power prices surged to a record and the state’s largest utility was forced into bankruptcy.
Late Friday, the state’s system operator put the call out to the state’s utilities to cut demand by about 1,000 megawatts. That’s enough to power about 750,000 homes, by California ISO’s estimates, affecting more than 2 million people based on the average household size.
Regions around the world have been grappling with extreme heat, including parts of Europe and the eastern U.S., where temperatures last month were expected to set records for New York and Boston.
Last month was tied for the world’s second-hottest July on record and the hottest ever in the northern hemisphere, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But few authorities, if any, resorted to rotating outages.
In addition to mass blackouts to protect the grid, a prolonged hot spell could trigger scattered outages as aging utility equipment fails in the heat. Transformers -- the metal cylinders sitting atop power poles -- can break down and even catch fire if they can’t cool off at night. During a 10-day heatwave in 2006, California utilities lost more than 1,500 of the devices, with each knocking out one neighborhood in the process.
The bulk of Friday night’s shutoffs came from PG&E Corp., the state’s biggest utility, which estimated the outages affected as many as 250,000 customers.
“Unfortunately, because of the emergency nature of this, we weren’t able to notify customers in advance,” Jeff Smith, a company spokesman, said by phone. The outages occurred for 60 to 90 minutes on a rotating basis through the utility’s Northern and Central California service territory, he said.
Edison International’s Southern California Edison utility began shutting off customers shortly before 7 p.m., with about 132,000 powerless as of 7:45 p.m.
Sempra Energy’s San Diego Gas & Electric utility said shutoffs were “widespread” across its territory in San Diego and southern Orange counties.
Soaring Prices
Electricity prices already hit two-year highs as weather forecasters called for extreme temperatures. Spot power prices surged past $1,000 a megawatt-hour across California on Friday evening. Natural gas prices in Southern California more than doubled on the increased need for the fuel for power production, BloombergNEF reported.
Grid operators will monitor the situation throughout the weekend and into next week, Gonzales said. The odds of rolling outages on Saturday and Sunday might prove lower as demand is typically weaker outside of work hours.
“We don’t expect one, but we are prepared for one,” California ISO’s Gonzales said.
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