Amid hurricanes and wildfires, the legacy grid, not clean power, is failing local communities

The latest bout of extreme heat is proving that we can increasingly and reasonably rely on renewable energy and storage to save us from catastrophic power outages even as the planet warms.

A heat dome such as the one that engulfed the San Francisco Bay Area in early October with temperatures soaring to over 100 degrees might well have put California’s power grid on the brink in the recent past. In fact, that’s exactly what happened in August 2020 when rolling blackouts led to unfortunate politicizing of renewable energy and misleading charges of unreliability in the run-up to that year’s presidential election. But you aren’t hearing the same claims from the anti-renewable energy peanut gallery today.

Time and again, it is not the underlying source of generation, but rather the surrounding infrastructure, which has often proven to be the key vulnerability. Be it the Marshall fire in Colorado, Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the Southeast, or the Lahaina fire in Maui — all regions where fossil fuel power plants are prevalent — it is the legacy grid and not clean power generation which has failed local communities.

It is time for the public to recognize this fact.

It’s true that more than 9,400 PG&E customers were left without power for part of one day during the most recent Bay Area heat dome due to PG&E’s Public Safety Power Shutoff program in select areas. But it would have been considerably worse were it not for California’s growing fleet of clean energy resources buttressing the region’s power supply.

Amid intense scrutiny and political pressure following the August 2020 brownouts, it would have been easy for California to renege on its clean energy ambitions. Instead, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislators doubled down, prioritizing “firmer” sources of cleaner power, such as battery storage and geothermal. A combination of improving market economics and targeted centralized procurement directives resulted in California adding nearly 9 GW of incremental clean energy — solar and wind in particular — and growing its fleet of battery storage by a whopping 22 times in the past four years.

The California Independent System Operator reported that solar and wind resources were responsible for meeting up to 40% of demand from Sept. 30 to Oct. 3 during the recent heat wave. The output from battery storage resources also peaked at 7 GW at 6 p.m. on Oct. 2, aligning perfectly with the height of electricity demand that Wednesday.

Customer consumption levels and patterns have also contributed to ensuring that the power grid remains an afterthought.

“Time-of-use” utility rate structures implemented by PG&E and others have successfully employed a carrot and stick approach to nudge customer power usage. Indeed, the power load during the worst of this last heat dome peaked at 40 GW, compared to the 47 GW peak in 2020, despite sizable growth in power demand from electric vehicle charging, data centers and heat pumps since August 2020. Smarter grid planning — particularly around coordinating imports, primarily hydropower — has rounded out a seemingly effective strategy.

All this has been achieved while keeping wholesale power prices relatively low. Based on CAISO data, prices averaged $55/MWh in Northern California from Sept. 30 to Oct. 3, well below the $80/MWh price during the Aug. 13 to Aug. 15, 2020, heat dome.

In fact, during some daytime hours over the course of the recent heat dome, prices at certain locations within California continued to be negative, a trend that has grown significantly this year. Northern California is on track to experience negative wholesale power prices in approximately 7% of all hours this year — primarily driven by increasing volumes of low-cost renewables — compared to just 2% across all of 2020.

That said, this latest bout of extreme heat is proving that we can increasingly and reasonably rely on renewable energy and storage to save us from catastrophic power outages even as the planet warms.

California has demonstrated that a key concern of the clean energy transition has to do less with the proliferation of clean energy, and more with the need to harden physical grid infrastructure. The California Public Utilities Commission released an independent report in 2023 showing roughly 60% of underground lines in PG&E’s territory exceeded useful life, with 20% of the structures suffering from unreported damage. Also, PG&E was only installing about 40 miles of new lines on average for the past seven years, well behind the report’s recommendation to install 800 miles of new lines each year.

Fortunately, state regulators recognize this issue and have granted PG&E the approvals necessary to “future-proof” more than 2,000 miles of electric lines and spend more than $1 billion on vegetation management through 2026. Similarly, a public-private coalition that includes the California Energy Commission, CPUC, CAISO, PG&E and Southern California Edison received a $600 million federal grant for modernizing 100 miles of transmission infrastructure.

The hope now is for a broader, nationwide paradigm shift, which moves the focus away from the purported risks of clean energy and toward the need to strengthen the resilience of physical infrastructure.

Read the article on Utility Dive