California Can No Longer Wing It With Power Grid
Climate change upends planning for how to meet electricity demand while transitioning to renewable energy.
California faces a rewiring job without much of a blueprint.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
The world’s fifth-largest economy is winging it through the summer with the help of backyard generators, sweaty citizens and the kindness of neighbors.
Wildfires aside, the main problem with California’s power grid concerns the peak. Unlike, say, the systemic breakdown that hit Texas in February, California’s summer troubles revolve around meeting that last several thousand megawatts of peak demand on a particularly hot evening.2As variable solar power drops away, California relies heavily on dispatchable generation — chiefly natural gas plants — and imports to meet the surge in demand on the grid. A combination of especially high demand and curtailed supply because of extreme weather strained its ability to meet that last summer, leading to brief blackouts, and raised fears of a repeat performance this summer.