Californias Largest Utility to Intentionally Shut Off Power Again
Climate Crisis Catches Power Companies Unprepared
Utilities are fighting to proceed the lights on amidst extreme wildfires, oestrus and flooding fueled by global warming.
The phone call to the Eugene H2o & Electric Board was startling. A group of homeowners, fearing a storm could knock down nearby power lines and ignite wildfires, was request the Oregon utility to plough off their electricity.
"I about fell out of my chair," said Rodney Cost, the utility'south assistant general managing director, of the people who were voluntarily request to live in the dark in September, during one of the worst fire seasons Oregon had ever seen. It was a sign of growing angst, he said. "We're seeing more and more widespread impacts of climate modify. It'due south clear it's impacting how we do our business."
Across the Usa, power companies are scrambling to continue upward with a barrage of extreme weather from a rapidly warming climate. In the Westward, that means trying to run into soaring demand for air-workout because of record rut, without sparking wildfires made more destructive because of tape drought. A desperate tactic pioneered in California, utilities intentionally shutting off power lines to avoid starting fires, has now spread to Oregon and Nevada.
On Wednesday, California's grid operator asked the state's 39 one thousand thousand residents to conserve electricity or face rolling power outages, the sixth fourth dimension it has done so this summer. The Texas ability grid operator has forecast that demand volition achieve a record high over the next week as a estrus dome bakes the state.
Nationwide, electric utilities, filigree operators and regulators take struggled to adequately prepare for the hazards of global warming, like storm surges that can knock out substations and heat waves that can cause power plants to falter, with many expecting that the biggest threats will not materialize for decades to come.
"It's off-white to say there was this widespread assumption that the impacts of climate change and extreme conditions would unfold more than gradually, and there would exist more time to prepare," said Alison Silverstein, an free energy consultant based in Austin, Texas. "Merely in the past few years, the entire industry has really been smacked upside the caput."
With rare exceptions, almost electricity providers nationwide still don't conduct detailed climate studies that would help them empathize all the ways that increased oestrus, drought, wildfires or flooding can ravage their power grids, researchers accept found.
The consequences are becoming increasingly plain. Last Baronial, California suffered its commencement widespread blackouts in ii decades, leaving 800,000 customers without electricity over 2 days, after a severe oestrus wave overwhelmed the grid. This summer, California'due south grid operator has warned the state faces the risk of farther outages equally a relentless drought has sharply reduced water levels in reservoirs and reduced output from the state'south hydroelectric dams.
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Texas was caught badly unprepared for a ferocious Feb storm that knocked out power for 4.5 1000000 customers and left more than 150 people expressionless. The state nonetheless does non cistron climate change into its energy planning, and even after Texas legislators approved upgrades to the grid this spring, scientists keep alarm that the arrangement remains vulnerable to failure under astringent heat waves and drought.
Several factors explain why power companies have been boring to defend themselves against climatic change.
Some utilities say early climate models couldn't precisely show how rising estrus, drought or flooding would affect specific locations, making planning hard. Regulators are oft reluctant to approve major grid upgrades that would enhance costs for ratepayers when the benefits are hard to quantify. And many utilities and grid operators have relied on historical weather conditions as they plan for the future. But with global warming fueling increasingly extreme weather, the by may not be the all-time guess of what's coming.
That's starting to change. Last year, California, for the first time, ordered the state's private utilities to cistron global warming into their long-term planning. In June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee held a technical conference to discuss the risks that climatic change poses to electric reliability.
Still, it will take years to revamp thousands of power plants and manual lines nationwide to cope with the dangers of a hotter planet.
In California, Pacific Gas & Electric is upgrading its transmission network to avoid a repeat of 2018, when a broken ability line sparked the Campsite Fire, which killed 85 people and forced the utility into bankruptcy. Simply PG&Due east has warned that completing the work could take a decade. In July, the utility told regulators that its equipment may take sparked the Dixie Fire, which has already burned 200,000 acres north of Sacramento.
And adaptation won't come up cheap. A recent report past ICF International, a consulting business firm, estimated that utilities faced a $500 billion shortfall in fortifying their systems against known climate risks.
To pay for wildfire protection, Pacific Gas & Electrical has asked California regulators to approve a $5.five billion rate increase for customers from 2023 to 2026, which could raise the boilerplate residential bill by roughly $430 per twelvemonth. PG&East is because burying ten,000 miles of power lines underground, which could price upwards to $30 billion more.
In the meantime, many residents are figuring out ways to continue the lights on when the utility tin can't.
Maureen Kennedy spent this spring investigating solar and battery power for her home in Inverness, northwest of San Francisco, because of growing feet over PG&Eastward's power shutdowns.
"Your utility is so unreliable that yous have to think about spending $eighteen,000 for solar and bombardment fill-in," said Ms. Kennedy, a retired real estate banker.
A spokesman for PG&E declined requests to interview utility executives.
Caroline Winn is the chief executive of San Diego Gas & Electric, which pioneered many of the techniques other utilities have adopted for wildfires. Her company has started receiving calls and visits from utility workers from Oregon and places every bit far away as Australia seeking guidance in burn down prevention.
But at present Ms. Winn worries about some other threat from climate change: sea level rise, which could flood four of the utility'south coastal substations over the adjacent several decades. "Climate is not staying the same," Ms. Winn said. "It's getting worse. This is not simply a California problem. This is a world problem."
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Ane utility that has embraced climate planning is Con Edison in New York, which got a devastating preview of the risks of a warming planet when Hurricane Sandy struck the Northeast in 2012 and 1.1 million customers lost power. At 1 point, the hurricane sent fourteen-human foot storm surges into Lower Manhattan, more than a human foot college than the worst-case scenario Con Ed had envisioned, and disabled a crucial substation.
"That tempest was a existent wake-upwards call for us," said Timothy Cawley, principal executive of Con Ed, which spent $1 billion edifice new storm walls and pumps and installing submersible equipment that could withstand flooding.
But Con Ed as well went further: The utility partnered with climate scientists at Columbia University'due south Lamont-Doherty World Observatory and consultants at ICF to set up a comprehensive climate risk assessment, modeling a diverseness of future scenarios for sea-level rise, heat waves and other hazards.
That helped Con Ed see risks it might have missed. For instance, the utility found that hotter temperatures wouldn't just mean more demand for electricity. Climate models propose that New York Metropolis could soon run across heat waves that last longer than ever earlier, which meant that many of Con Ed's transformers and cables wouldn't be able to cool downwardly overnight, as they were designed to do. The utility estimated that the cooling equipment at its facilities may need to be up to 40 percent larger by 2040.
Experts called Con Ed'southward climate report the golden standard. Only relatively few utilities take undertaken a similar exercise.
"A lot of utilities say they're doing vulnerability planning, but when yous dig into the details, they're yet basing their analyses on historical conditions conditions," said Romany Webb, a senior swain at the Sabin Heart for Climate Change Police force who has studied the climate risks utilities face. "Or they are only looking at a few climate impacts, while ignoring others, or focusing on just a few power plants and substations only non considering the risk to their systems equally a whole."
Utilities say they take these concerns seriously.
"Our manufacture is constantly working to suit to new and evolving threats to the energy grid," said Scott Aaronson, vice president for security and preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-endemic utilities.
Even if they do everything right, ability companies can notwithstanding find themselves assailed past the effects of climate change unfolding faster than anticipated.
Seattle City Low-cal, a public utility that serves 900,000 residents, conducted a detailed climate hazard assessment in 2015 later on realizing that its hydropower facilities were vulnerable to shifting precipitation patterns driven by climate alter. The utility is ofttimes cited every bit a model of frontwards-thinking in this regard.
But last calendar month, when a record-shattering oestrus wave that shocked even climate scientists hit the Pacific Northwest, the utility faced fresh challenges. As temperatures soared by 100 degrees, some of its secret equipment suffered outages, affecting roughly 1,700 customers. The utility had to rotate its repair crews more frequently because of the dangerous oestrus, slowing response times.
"The biggest challenge for us," said Ronda Strauch, the climate change research and accommodation adviser at Seattle City Low-cal, "is the pace of climate change relative to the pace at which we tin program and respond to the situation at hand."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/climate/electric-utilities-climate-change.html
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