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High temperatures are bringing electricity anxiety to sweltering cities.
High temperatures from Southern California to the East Coast are putting the nation’s electric grids on alert.
PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest electricity market which stretches from Chicago to Washington, D.C., issued emergency alerts this week, as it tries to fulfill record demand from people running their air conditioning on full blast even as power plants get stressed by high heat. While there are not yet any imminent fears of rolling blackouts, these warnings from system operators show that electricity supply is getting tight.
The East Coast is expecting quite high temperatures Thursday, with forecasted highs in the upper 90s in Washington, D.C., Newark, and Philadelphia, all major cities in PJM’s market, with high humidity throughout. In New York City, which is part of New York’s electricity market, the National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning. The NWS has warned that the region — which includes PJM territory in New Jersey — will experience “oppressive heat and humidity” through Saturday.
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On Wednesday night and Thursday morning, PJM instructed generators in its East Coast and Southern regions to “review plans” to see if any maintenance or testing that would take them off the grid could be “deferred/canceled.” It also issued an emergency alert calling for as much electricity generation capacity — i.e. power plants staying online — on the grid as possible.
That alert, known as EEA1, “signals that PJM foresees or is experiencing conditions where all available resources are scheduled to meet firm load, firm transactions, and reserve commitments, and is concerned about sustaining its required Contingency Reserves,” according to its emergency operations manual. In other words, PJM thinks there’s enough generation to meet its expected demand, but is worried about maintaining reserves in case either demand or supply gets out of whack.
High temperatures since June have been challenging the nation’s electric grids, with Texas grid authorities asking for voluntary conservation by consumers in June as they set a new record demand for electricity in generation. During the unrelenting heat wave in Arizona (the forecast high in Phoenix today is 113 degrees, the 28th day in a row temperatures have risen above 110), state utilities set new demand records but have not yet had any major reliability concerns. Now there are few places in America where the grid isn't being besieged by heat.
In California, where the inland part of the state especially has been experiencing extreme heat (Bakersfield’s forecast high Thursday is 103), the state’s electric grid has either declared a low level emergency or been put on watch three times in the last week. On Wednesday, the state’s system operator said that “due to some resources going offline, continued excessive heat in interior Southern California, and transmission congestion restricting movement of power to parts of the state where it’s needed,” it had been put on watch for Wednesday evening and had initiated “demand response” programs that encourage energy conservation.
While the California grid has remained stable, the issues it had Wednesday are known concerns when temperatures rise. Hotter conditions can lead to more-than-expected issues with power generation as plants go offline due to mechanical issues and the extreme need for electricity as parts of a power market experience extreme heat can overtax transmission infrastructure.
California is also a global leader in solar power production, which means that the evening hours when the sun goes down but temperatures stay high can be particularly tight. The state has installed a massive amount of energy storage on the grid, however, that can be charged when it’s sunny and electricity is cheap, and discharged in the evening. At 10 p.m. Tuesday night, California's batteries were putting out about 3,500 megawatts, while its entire renewables fleet, which is largely wind at that hour, was producing 5,800 megawatts (meanwhile there was some 25,000 megawatts of natural gas on the grid).
The California Independent System Operator also warned that it was “seeing some supply uncertainty this evening, because of heat potentially pushing up demand, and high electricity demand across the western U.S.”
Heat waves across a broad section of the country are especially concerning for grid operation because they can inhibit imports that some grids need to stay online if an entire region of the country is experiencing high electricity demand.
Globally, this month will likely be the hottest July on record.
Read more about heat waves and electricity:
The Next 2 Years Are Critical for New York City’s Electricity
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Almost half of developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
The solar energy industry has a big farm problem cropping up. And if it isn’t careful, it’ll be dealing with it for years to come.
Researchers at SI2, an independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, released a study of farm workers and solar developers this morning that said almost half of all developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
Unveiled in conjunction with RE+, the largest renewable energy conference in the U.S., the federally-funded research includes a warning sign that permitting is far and away the single largest impediment for solar developers trying to build projects on farmland. If this trend continues or metastasizes into a national movement, it could indefinitely lock developers out from some of the nation’s best land for generating carbon-free electricity.
“If a significant minority opposes and perhaps leads to additional moratoria, [developers] will lose a foot in the door for any future projects,” Shawn Rumery, SI2’s senior program director and the survey lead, told me. “They may not have access to that community any more because that moratoria is in place.”
SI2’s research comes on the heels of similar findings from Heatmap Pro. A poll conducted for the platform last month found 70% of respondents who had more than 50 acres of property — i.e. the kinds of large landowners sought after by energy developers — are concerned that renewable energy “takes up farmland,” by far the greatest objection among that cohort.
Good farmland is theoretically perfect for building solar farms. What could be better for powering homes than the same strong sunlight that helps grow fields of yummy corn, beans and vegetables? And there’s a clear financial incentive for farmers to get in on the solar industry, not just because of the potential cash in letting developers use their acres but also the longer-term risks climate change and extreme weather can pose to agriculture writ large.
But not all farmers are warming up to solar power, leading towns and counties across the country to enact moratoria restricting or banning solar and wind development on and near “prime farmland.” Meanwhile at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike are voicing concern about taking farmland for crop production to generate renewable energy.
Seeking to best understand this phenomena, SI2 put out a call out for ag industry representatives and solar developers to tell them how they feel about these two industries co-mingling. They received 355 responses of varying detail over roughly three months earlier this year, including 163 responses from agriculture workers, 170 from solar developers as well as almost two dozen individuals in the utility sector.
A key hurdle to development, per the survey, is local opposition in farm communities. SI2’s publicity announcement for the research focuses on a hopeful statistic: up to 70% of farmers surveyed said they were “open to large-scale solar.” But for many, that was only under certain conditions that allow for dual usage of the land or agrivoltaics. In other words, they’d want to be able to keep raising livestock, a practice known as solar grazing, or planting crops unimpeded by the solar panels.
The remaining percentage of farmers surveyed “consistently opposed large-scale solar under any condition,” the survey found.
“Some of the messages we got were over my dead body,” Rumery said.
Meanwhile a “non-trivial” number of solar developers reported being unwilling or disinterested in adopting the solar-ag overlap that farmers want due to the increased cost, Rumery said. While some companies expect large portions of their business to be on farmland in the future, and many who responded to the survey expect to use agrivoltaic designs, Rumery voiced concern at the percentage of companies unwilling to integrate simultaneous agrarian activities into their planning.
In fact, Rumery said some developers’ reticence is part of what drove him and his colleagues to release the survey while at RE+.
As we discussed last week, failing to address the concerns of local communities can lead to unintended consequences with industry-wide ramifications. Rumery said developers trying to build on farmland should consider adopting dual-use strategies and focus on community engagement and education to avoid triggering future moratoria.
“One of the open-ended responses that best encapsulated the problem was a developer who said until the cost of permitting is so high that it forces us to do this, we’re going to continue to develop projects as they are,” he said. “That’s a cold way to look at it.”
Meanwhile, who is driving opposition to solar and other projects on farmland? Are many small farm owners in rural communities really against renewables? Is the fossil fuel lobby colluding with Big Ag? Could building these projects on fertile soil really impede future prospects at crop yields?
These are big questions we’ll be tackling in far more depth in next week’s edition of The Fight. Trust me, the answers will surprise you.
Here are the most notable renewable energy conflicts over the past week.
1. Worcester County, Maryland –Ocean City is preparing to go to court “if necessary” to undo the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval last week of U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project, town mayor Rick Meehan told me in a statement this week.
2. Magic Valley, Idaho – The Lava Ridge Wind Project would be Idaho’s biggest wind farm. But it’s facing public outcry over the impacts it could have on a historic site for remembering the impact of World War II on Japanese residents in the United States.
3. Kossuth County, Iowa – Iowa’s largest county – Kossuth – is in the process of approving a nine-month moratorium on large-scale solar development.
Here’s a few more hotspots I’m watching…
The most important renewable energy policies and decisions from the last few days.
Greenlink’s good day – The Interior Department has approved NV Energy’s Greenlink West power line in Nevada, a massive step forward for the Biden administration’s pursuit of more transmission.
States’ offshore muddle – We saw a lot of state-level offshore wind movement this past week… and it wasn’t entirely positive. All of this bodes poorly for odds of a kumbaya political moment to the industry’s benefit any time soon.
Chumash loophole – Offshore wind did notch one win in northern California by securing an industry exception in a large marine sanctuary, providing for farms to be built in a corridor of the coastline.
Here’s what else I’m watching …