SACRAMENTO, Calif. — It was a 10-day test of California’s ability to keep the lights on and maintain its green-energy crusade, an unprecedented heat wave that pushed the state’s power grid to the brink of rolling blackouts.
And as far as California policymakers are concerned, the state did just fine. Despite one close call on the worst night, the Independent System Operator, which manages the grid, got through the relentless 110-degree weather without ever running out of electricity.
“We are squeaking by, and I think that is a remarkable achievement,” said Michael Wara, a Stanford University climate expert who has advised the Legislature on energy issues. “We are leading the the world in building a grid that is clean and reliable and always works, even in times like this.”
But with additional extreme heat waves surely in California’s future, some in the energy industry say last week’s near-miss should serve as a wake-up call, not a reason to throw confetti in the air.
Industry executives say the emergency alerts and pleas for conservation show that California’s drive for an all-renewable electricity system is leaving its residents dangerously vulnerable to blackouts.
“If you look at a state that’s the fifth largest economy in a world and has to call for 'flex alerts' for 10 consecutive days and declares it a success when the lights stay on, that strikes me as ... whistling past the graveyard,” said Todd Snitchler, president of the Electric Power Supply Association, an alliance of power suppliers.
Snitchler said California officials should consider whether they’re going too far, too fast, on renewable energy. Snitchler’s membership leans heavily toward traditional energy sources but includes renewables as well.
“Hopefully, this is an opportunity for some reality-based planning and some thoughtful conversation about how to ensure reliability will occur,” he said, “instead of continuing to go headlong into a reliability crisis.”
Invoking the need to combat climate change, the Legislature has declared that California’s electricity supplies must be 100% renewable by 2045. Many days, the state is well on the way there: Solar and other renewable sources account for one-third or more of California’s electricity portfolio when its sunny. There have been clear days when renewable energy makes up practically the entire grid.
The problem comes during severe heat waves, in the late afternoon and early evening, when solar power fades but it’s still too hot to turn off the air conditioning. That’s the crunch period, a stretch of several hours when California is most susceptible to power outages.
It happened in August 2020. A suffocating heat wave engulfed the West, subjecting several hundred thousand Californians to rolling blackouts, in which electric utilities rotate power cuts among blocs of customers, over the course of two nights. For most affected customers, the blackouts lasted an hour or so.
Other factors contributed, including some gas-fired plants that conked out during critical moments. But the sharp drop in renewable energy supplies, as night fell, figured mightily in the blackouts imposed by the Independent System Operator.
The blackouts were an embarrassment to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration. “We obviously cannot allow this to be a permanent state of anxiety,” he said a few days later.
The state’s green-power policies were on the defensive — not just in California, but in other jurisdictions that look to California as a leader.
“It became an international incident,” said Severin Borenstein, a member of the ISO’s board of directors.
Managers of the California grid say the state is on the right path toward eliminating carbon emissions without compromising grid reliability. But as last week showed, the next few years could be dicey.
“We’re still in the relatively early stages of this transition,” said Elliot Mainzer, the ISO’s chief executive. “There are going to be challenges. This is not easy.”
Under prodding from Newsom, the state reacted swiftly to the 2020 blackouts. “There was an all-government effort to see that this never happens again,” Wara said.
The Public Utilities Commission, for instance, ordered its regulated utilities to find additional sources of energy. The result: The grid has taken on enough new electricity since 2020 for about 6 million homes.
More than a third of that new power has come from industrial-strength lithium batteries — the energy source that California officials believe will be increasingly important in years to come.
Lithium batteries are rechargeable. They store up excess electricity generated earlier in the day — mainly from solar panels — and then spring to life during those critical hours of the evening, feeding energy back into the grid.
They were barely a blip in 2020, but last week a host of privately run “battery farms” provided the California system with roughly 3,000 megawatts of power daily, Mainzer said.
“That’s the largest concentration of four-hour lithium batteries of anywhere in the world,” he said.
And still just barely enough. California was expecting another 1,000 megawatts of batteries online by now, but global-supply chain problems got in the way, he said. Key suppliers in China have curtailed production because of that country’s drought.
Those supplies can’t arrive soon enough. Last week surely wasn’t California’s last brush with rolling blackouts.
Extreme heat is “a new normal,” Mainzer said.
That means more tests — and maybe more close calls, if not actual blackouts.
“This could happen again, not in 20 years but next summer,” Wara said. “There are going to be bumps in the road. It would be totally naive to think that there won’t.”
Newsom’s political nemeses were all too happy to make light of California’s struggles to stave off blackouts.
“The fear of blackouts is a direct result of a failed energy policy championed by the Democrat supermajority in Sacramento,” said Assemblyman James Gallagher, the Republican minority leader.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, ignoring the fact that the lights actually stayed on: “They can’t even keep the power on in California, are you kidding me?”
Newsom said California wouldn’t back down. He said last week — as he said after the 2020 blackouts — that California won’t retreat from its goal of an all-green energy future.
“Our problem is extreme weather,” said his spokeswoman Erin Mellon. “We are moving quickly on the transition to clean energy but while we ramp up sources like battery storage and geothermal, we are taking action to preserve capacity and ensure reliability.”
Maintaining this balancing act can create political headaches for Newsom. Earlier this year, amid rising protests from the solar power industry, he scuttled a proposal at the Public Utilities Commission to roll back the state-mandated subsidy paid by utilities to rooftop solar homeowners for the surplus electricity they send to the grid. The commission believes that the subsidy is too generous, considering that most rooftop solar users are comparatively wealthy.
The commission is expected to roll out a new proposal soon. In the meantime, solar advocates were quick to highlight the hundreds of megawatts of power homeowners provided to the grid during the heat wave.
Another big controversy for Newsom: nuclear power. Angering many environmentalists, and reversing his own earlier position, he pushed through legislation last month that would prolong the life of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant for five years, to 2030. The legislation also commits the state to loan PG&E Corp. as much as $1.4 billion to keep the plant going.
Diablo Canyon generates about 9% of California’s electricity, and Newsom argues that postponing the 2025 shutdown is essential to preserving grid reliability. Besides, he said, nuclear energy doesn’t emit carbon dioxide.
The state is also considering the possibility of delaying once again the scheduled closure of several high-polluting gas-fired power plants on the coast around Los Angeles. The plants — capable of generating enough power for more than 2.6 million homes — were supposed to close originally in 2020 but the State Water Resources Control Board has allowed them to run until December 2023.
Newsom has called that decision “a small step back,” and officials in his administration have recently indicated the plants might stay open beyond 2023.
Separately, the state purchased four new gas-fired generators last fall and had them installed in Roseville and Yuba City. The four plants, operated by the Department of Water Resources, fired up for the first time last week, generating a combined 120 megawatts of electricity.
That marks a modest reversal for a state that has gone out of its way to shun fossil fuels. California’s use of gas-fired generation has dropped by nearly 20% since 2013, according to the California Energy Commission.
Industry advocates say the state should think twice about turning its back on natural gas. Snitchler, of the Electric Power Association, said that as the crisis built last week, California had to unleash diesel-powered backup generators that emitted considerably more pollution than natural gas plants.
“You look at what actually has been powering California’s grid, it’s been a striking amount of natural gas-fired resources,” he said. “But policymakers have been pressing for years now to have those units go off the system.”
The biggest crisis hit Sept. 6.
Temperatures shot well past 110 degrees. The ISO declared a Stage 3 energy emergency alert and told its member utilities to prepare for rolling blackouts.
Across the state, energy consumption soared to levels never seen before — a record 52,061 megawatts — and “we were down to the last gallon,” Mainzer said.
Then came an eleventh-hour cry for help — a text alert from the California Office of Emergency Services that lit up as many as 27 million cellphones in 26 counties.
“Power interruptions may occur unless you take action,” the text said in part. “Turn off or reduce nonessential power if health allows, now until 9 p.m.”
It worked.
Electricity usage dropped by 2,000 megawatts — that’s enough power for more than 1.5 million homes — in just a half hour. Conditions on the grid stabilized. Except for about an hour’s worth of outages mistakenly imposed by Lodi and five other municipal utilities — the result of a communications snafu — the ISO got through the evening, and the rest of the week, without rolling blackouts.
As much as the text messaging helped, pretty much everyone involved in planning the future of California’s energy portfolio says emergency texts can’t become routine.
“A tool of last resort,” Mainzer said.
“They work for a while and they stop working,” said Borenstein, the ISO board member. “Fatigue sets in.”
Most California utilities have optional rate plans that encourage conservation during crunch times. About 97% of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District's customers have “time of day” rates that roughly double rates from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. in summer. PG&E’s SmartRate Plan offers a small discount on electricity most of the time — but will triple the rates when the grid is in trouble. About 47,000 customers have signed up — less than 1% of the total.
Those programs don’t go nearly far enough, Borenstein said. If the state wants to make conservation ingrained in Californians’ lives, then utilities must move to “dynamic pricing” rate structures that would instantly raise prices as demand increases. The idea is that these unmistakable price signals would encourage consumers to ratchet down their energy use, in real time.
These programs “actually respond to grid conditions,” he said. “We shouldn’t get in to the situation where we’re pleading with people and it’s voluntary.”
———
