California’s summer has only just officially begun, however, the state’s residents have been urged to save energy during a record-threatening heatwave via ‘flex alerts’.
According to a report in The New York Times, these requests are known as ‘flex alerts’—when operators of the state’s electrical system ask residents to avoid using major appliances, set their thermostat to 78 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius) or higher and turn off unnecessary lights all to avoid triggering blackouts.
The pleas were apparently heeded, with the flex alert Twitter account Tweeting after a seemingly successful deployment: “Your conservation efforts have helped keep the #powergrid stable.”
“Much of the western United States is struggling with increasingly hot summers, resulting in increased energy use. California’s energy grid is likely to be pushed to the brink—or worse—more frequently in the years to come,” reporter Jonathan Wolfe wrote for the Times.
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To better understand what this means, Wolfe spoke with Ed Hirs, an energy specialist at the University of Houston.
Asked why flex alerts were necessary, Hirs said, “In the late 1930s when the Federal Electricity Administration came into being, people started to take an interest in grid reliability and that became the goal, especially since everything has was done under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as we headed into WWII. The social contract with the utilities was: You provide electricity reliably and we will make sure you don’t go bankrupt.
“Things started to escalate when California passed the Assembly Bill 1890 in 1993. Everything was implemented in 1996. Later a similar thing happened in Texas, but no one in Texas did. learned nothing from California.
“So what people had seen was the massive overbuilding of power generation facilities. They had been built for peak hours, and the equipment would be idle for the rest of the year. In California, for about eight out of 12 months, he was inactive because the weather was so good. That’s why people live in California.
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“Every governor and every legislator wants to save voters money. What happened over time was that the market mechanisms that people put in place with AB 1890 brought down the wholesale price of electricity.
“But since there was an oversupply of generators most of the year, they tended to lower prices, so utilities didn’t spend money on adding generators or maintaining existing ones. So you started to have equipment failures. In addition, California has the initiative to shut down its nuclear and coal plants.
“These old base plants began to shut down, and energy providers tried to replace them with new renewable green plants and supplement them with electricity from Oregon, Washington, Wyoming and Arizona. Today, California imports about 35 per cent of its electricity daily.
“This is a big deal, because now it’s not just the reliability of the California grid you have to worry about, it’s your neighbors. This is what happened last August: the heatwave affected everyone.”
Read the rest of Wolfe’s interview regarding flex alerts with Hirs here.
