California Governor Demands Probe Of Power Blackouts

Speaker 1: 00:00 As California remains in the grip of a prolonged heatwave governor Gavin Newsome signed an emergency proclamation aimed at freeing up more energy capacity and reducing the need for rolling blackouts. The blackouts are compounded by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and effected thousands of households across the state. Over the weekend at his press conference today, Newsome also blasted the independent energy agencies overseeing the state's energy sector. He cited their failure to anticipate and warn against service disruptions over the weekend, calling them quote unacceptable. And unbefitting of California Newsome said he held an all hands meeting with top energy advisors and the heads of agencies on the heat induced energy shortages. You can't control the weather, but you can prepare for the weather events. And let me just make this crystal clear. We failed to predict and plan these shortages, and that's simply unacceptable. I am the governor. Speaker 1: 00:57 I am ultimately accountable and will ultimately take responsibility, have taken. I share your responsibility to immediately address this issue and move forward to make sure that simply never happens again here in the state of California and a letter to the California independent system operator, the state public utilities commission and the California energy commission Newsome demanded an investigation into why residents and government leaders failed to get timely warnings and why actions weren't taken to ensure a flow of reliable power. He said, we can expect more and more of these heat waves as climate change worsens here and across the world. And that the state needs to find ways to better deal with heat going forward. Speaker 2: 01:39 The rolling power outages put tens of thousands of San Diego in the dark last Friday and Saturday here to reflect on the governor's response to the blackouts is energy analyst, bill powers, he's principal of powers engineering and chairman of the nonprofit clear California, local energy advancing renewables bill. Thank you for joining us. You're welcome. So now, what is your reaction to the governor's announcement today of, of steps to increase energy reliability? Speaker 1: 02:09 Well, I think he was right to complain about not having advanced warning of blackouts and that there's absolutely no reason those blackouts should have occurred in any case. And the, the fact that they did occur was really a failure. I think, of the independent system operator. Speaker 2: 02:31 He did say that he was taking responsibility, but he is implying criticism of the grid operator. Right? Kallai so, Speaker 1: 02:39 Yes. And this was a failure of the ISO in my opinion, until we see the data, it's going to be difficult to say exactly what happened, but keep in mind for those of us that have lived in San Diego for years, that we've had a number of big blackouts in our community over the last 10 to 12 years, one was in Speaker 3: 03:00 September of 2011. There was another, that occurred in 2010, which were either caused by a simple error by the ISO or by a failure to anticipate that when you have a heat wave coming, you need to operate the grid in a somewhat different manner than they typically do, which is just whoever gives us the lowest price delivers the power. Speaker 2: 03:20 Aha. Well, you told the New York times that there should have been enough energy to meet the peak demands on Friday and Saturday. So, so what do you think caused Cal ISO to call for these rolling blackouts? Speaker 3: 03:33 I think that the, you need to operate the grid in a different way in a heat wave than you do on a typical day with typical demand, it's fine to operate the grid based on lowest price most of the time. But when you're faced with a heat wave, you have a moan that capacity that is at the disposition of the ISO to dispatch, you have some older units that require a day to come up to speed. You can't just turn them on and get power from them. So you have to anticipate Thursday, mid day, that Friday, mid day, you're going to have a heat wave began, and you're going to need some of your, your backup units that are more expensive to run up and running at full power. At that time, Speaker 2: 04:14 We did have quite a bit of notice didn't we have this heat wave. Speaker 3: 04:19 Well that's, I mean, that's the irony of all. This is that the governor was complaining that ISO and the people of California didn't get warning any California. You can go onto the ISO website and look at their graphic for 24 hours in advance and see that it's a pretty accurate 24 hour in advance forecast and the heat waves coming. So you need to get your ducks in a row. And those units that take a long time to come up to speed, need to be coming up to speed the day before. And I don't think that happened. I think there we have all this capacity on paper. That's ready to go, but it's only ready to go. If you have the presence of mind to get it rolling in time to use it when you need it. Speaker 2: 05:01 You think that there could be something about the energy pricing strategies that had an impact on when blackouts were called for Speaker 3: 05:10 Absolutely. I mean that the idea, what we saw it in just in our neighborhood is that Los Angeles department of water and power, a public utility subject to the same heat had enough reserves available if they were actually sending power to ISO during the heat wave. And why is that? Well that's probably because LA DWP is prior to prioritizing reliability for its users over lowest price during special conditions like heat waves. And the ISO is almost certainly not doing that. And so led WP is not leaving assets on the table that won't be available at an instant. Whereas I think the ISO is, and that the good news that will come out of these rolling blackouts is the whole state is now looking and putting a bright light on ISOs operations. And I think ISO is far too wedded to this idea that, uh, this ideology that you always want to get the lowest price, 8,760 hours a year, it's fine to go for the lowest price most of the time, but not during heat waves. Speaker 2: 06:18 So it's a lot to do with market forces. I mean, I have to ask you, you are a staunch advocate for moving to sustainable energy, which we must do to avert climate change disaster. And these blackouts naturally raised the question of whether our changing energy mix is less reliable to meet peak demand. You know, what can you say to those who question the ability of sustainable energy like wind and solar to meet our needs? Speaker 3: 06:42 Well, it's the, we need to set the framework of what happened prior to against Saturday that the ISO is responsible for projecting the expected average peak load for the year. The Friday peak was a less than the average projected peak. And so that the whole system is designed to project a peak accurately conservatively, and then have adequate reserves available to cover that under virtually any circumstance. So the peak was actually projected the average geek was projected to be somewhat higher than what we experienced on Friday. So for those of us that work in this business, it is inexplicable that there was any rolling blackout on Friday, even more inexplicably, that there were any rolling blackouts on Saturday, and it's even questionable why they called stage alerts stage one, two and three, because we had the reserves. And so the idea that solar or wind or anything else, uh, that is, uh, it's a red herring. I mean, the system's designed to provide reliable power with a lot of solar, with a lot of wind under these conditions. Somebody dropped the ball and the person or persons that dropped it, we're at ISO. And I think it's going to be important for the press to stay on it. Speaker 2: 07:57 Good. Good. What would you like to have heard the governor say today then Speaker 3: 08:02 I would have liked to say that the independent system operator is responsible for maintaining the flow of electricity under all foreseeable conditions. The conditions we experienced on Friday and Saturday were completely foreseeable well within what we expected this summer, but for whatever reason, we didn't get the assets online to cover ourselves for that P and I want to know why, and I'm going to have it. He did say he was going to have a report done that looks at ISO and public utilities, commission energy commission. But what we've seen from these reports in the past is they peel back one or two layers of the onion, but they don't get deep enough to look at the institutional problems that expose us to these kinds of unexpected blackouts. It has nothing to do with climate change. What happened on Friday, and it has nothing to do with the availability or reliability it's solar or wind. It has everything to do with mismanagement of the grid during a peak. Speaker 2: 09:04 Okay, well, something to keep our eye on. We've been speaking with energy analyst, bill powers of powers engineering. Thank you so much, bill. Thank you. Alison San Diego gas and electric is asking San Diegans to conserve power this week during the flex alert between three and 10:00 PM. Here's STG communications manager, Denise Menard. We know that we're definitely going to have this intense heat through Thursday. And if we, as a collective, don't come together and reduce the use of energy and the distress that we're putting onto the grid right now, then we could have more, we could have more of these rolling outages and conservation means setting your thermostat to 78 degrees, turning off lights, unplugging appliances that aren't in use and refraining from using major appliances to see a map of SDG and E's planned power outages, go to SDG and e.com/outages.