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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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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
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Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.