California avoids huge blackouts as grid managers lift emergency, but Monday could be bad
California’s electricity grid narrowly avoided rolling blackouts for a second consecutive night Sunday after hovering on the brink of power outages for hours.
The Independent System Operator, which runs the grid, said it was lifting its Stage 2 emergency as conservation efforts reduced energy demand despite record-breaking temperatures in much of the state. The Stage 2 emergency — the last step before rolling blackouts are imposed — had been in effect for nearly three hours before it was rescinded.
Earlier, the ISO said blackouts could have hit up to 3 million households in one of the largest blackouts in California history.
The crisis on California’s troubled electrical network is far from over. The heatwave is expected to continue beyond Monday. In addition, forecasts of gusting winds has prompted PG&E Corp. to warn it could deliberate shut off power in parts of its service territory Monday evening to reduce the risk of sparking a wildfire.
The ISO struggled all day to maintain power on the grid, hoping to avoid a repeat of the two nights of rolling blackouts in mid-August. Earlier Sunday, it said it needed massive conservation to bridge a predicted shortfall of 4,000 megawatts.
“Without really significant conservation and help from customers today, we’re going to have to have rolling outages. This is an appeal for people to help us out,” the ISO’s vice president for operations, Eric Schmitt, told reporters. “Today is sizing up as our most challenging day of the year. We have very severe conditions on the grid.”
The ISO was struggling to avoid a repeat of mid-August, when triple-digit heat resulted in two nights of rolling blackouts, the first since the 2001 energy crisis.
Complicating things, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced that the Creek Fire in the San Joaquin Valley forced the closure of a 915-megawatt hydro power station, “further constraining grid resources.” John Phipps, the ISO’s director of real time operations, said wildfires also knocked about 700 megawatts worth of solar panels out of commission, putting the grid a total of 1,600 megawatts short of expectations.
The situation was changing practically minute to minute. At one point in a conference call with reporters, ISO officials said they’d recovered about 800 of the megawatts that were lost Saturday. Just minutes later, though, Phipps said “we lost another generator” due to wildfires, erasing about 600 megawatts from the grid.
On Saturday the ISO procured about 300 megawatts each from SMUD and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to help ward off blackouts. This time help might not be coming as the heat wave has worsened in the past 24 hours.
“We help each other when we can,” Phipps said. “Everybody’s seeing tight supplies.”
Another Flex Alert, in which Californians are urged to postpone using large appliances and raise their thermostats, was in effect from 3 to 9 p.m. Monday.
“California has always been the canary in the coal mine for climate change, and this weekend’s events only underscore that reality,” Newsom said in a prepared statement. “Wildfires have caused system failures, while near record energy demand is predicted as a multi-state heat wave hits the West Coast for the second time in a matter of weeks.”
Newsom issued an emergency proclamation Thursday suspending certain air-pollution rules to enable generators to produce additional power supplies. Meanwhile, the ISO secured an order from the Trump administration Sunday that allows a handful of plants in Southern California to operate at full capacity “notwithstanding air quality or other permit limitations.” The federal order should add about 100 megawatts to the grid.
PG&E warns of wildfire blackouts Monday
And then there’s the possibility of blackouts due to wildfire risks.
Pacific Gas and Electric warned of “public safety power shutoffs” in 17 counties Monday night as fierce wind gusts are expected to intensify wildfire risks. A total of 103,000 homes and businesses could be affected.
The utility said power could be cut off Monday evening to parts of the following counties: El Dorado, Placer, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, Lake, Napa, Nevada, Plumas, Shasta, Sierra, Yuba, Sonoma, Tehama, Tuolumne, Kern and Humboldt.
The National Weather Service warned of “critical fire weather conditions” through Wednesday, with winds gusting to 50 mph in the mountains and 35 mph at lower elevations.
Already the windblown Creek Fire prompted a harrowing helicopter rescue for dozens of people late Saturday. The fire had burned through 45,500 acres, with zero containment, as of Sunday morning, according to Cal Fire.
The ISO’s Schmitt said the power grid agency was evaluating what the implications of a PG&E wildfire blackout would mean for the grid as a whole. “We’ll do our very best to configure the system to handle it,” Schmitt said.
It would be the first blackouts imposed by PG&E for wildfire safety since last October, when the utility engineered a series of power shutoffs covering millions of Californians. The move infuriated Newsom and other public officials while the company was struggling to get out of bankruptcy.
To make matters worse, a faulty PG&E transmission line was blamed for sparking the giant Kincade Fire in Sonoma County despite the blackouts.
This story was originally published September 6, 2020 at 10:43 AM with the headline "California avoids huge blackouts as grid managers lift emergency, but Monday could be bad."