Residents asked to reduce power during the California heat wave
Recommendations on how to cut back on power usage during Flex Alert
The blistering heat wave is expected to tax the state’s power grid. A Flex Alert has been issued for Friday that asks Californians to reduce power usage from 3 to 10 p.m. KTVU’s Jana Katsuyama with tips on how to cut back
MARTINEZ, Calif. – A blistering heat wave over the next several days is prompting the California Independent System Operator to issue a Flex Alert for Friday, which means residents are being asked to reduce power usage from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m.
California is expected to have record-breaking heat, up to 10-20 degrees above normal in some areas.
At La Tapatia restaurant in Martinez, they like heat in the food but not so much in the kitchen.
“It’s difficult. I tell you the guys in the kitchen they should be awarded special hazard pay, cause it gets very warm in the kitchen,” said Ernesto Guerrero, the restaurant owner.
Guerrero, the restaurant owner, had a small air-conditioning unit installed Thursday. He says without indoor dining, they are able to save on cooling, but it’s hard for restaurants to conserve much more during dinner hour.
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“We ventilate the place prior to opening up. We turn on the air conditioners last, because not only do we want to conserve energy but it’s also costly. Stoves and refrigeration we can’t do much about,” said Guerrero.
The main concern is people running air conditioners longer will put a strain on the power grid. Power supplies also could be even tighter, as cloud cover is expected to cause a drop in solar power.
[This next line is priceless, emphasis mine. HT/@MikeBastasch for calling out on Twitter]
“The cloud cover obviously reduces the solar output and so that further tightens our electricity supplies,”
said Anne Gonzales, a California ISO spokeswoman.
CAL-ISO says by federal law, they must maintain power reserves, so if demand outstrips supply, there might be outages.
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“Mommy,what did people light their houses with before candles”?
Answer;”Electricity”.
Now all California needs is a windstorm.
The glorious age of incompetence ,has no better expression than being surrounded by electric appliances rendered useless by institutionalized stupidity.
We are approaching the crossroads where the useless and clueless are going to get banished from this luxurious technological society,for they actively seek to destroy what we have created.
Why should we tolerate such ignorant destroyers?
We cannot build while being sabotaged by these cretins.
They want to live as if the “impossible things” are real,let them.
But.
Not on my dime.
Currently the public is being treated to all kinds of demonstrations,of the effect of putting fools and bandits into positions of power.
Completely unforeseeable. It’s as unpredictable as the phases of the moon or dates of presidential elections.
Nancy Pelosi needs volunteers to help eat her $13 dollar a pint ice cream as her $24,000 fridge begins to defrost. You can be considered for this if you send her $2,500 and promise to stop when the power comes back.
Californians should just ignore the “Flex Alert” and use electricity as normal. If the system crashes, that just demonstrates the bankrupt policies of the greenies. Maybe a bit of suffering in the short term would wake up a few people. In any case, electric power in California has been a train wreck for decades.
In the late ‘90s, I worked at Duke Energy’s California operations, with former PG&E and SoCal generating assets in Monterey, Morro Bay (mid-coast) and San Diego. At Morro Bay, using reliable gas supplies, they planned to demolish their back-up fuel oil tank farm (which they did) and replace the three old 1950s conventional gas-fired steam driven generators (650 MW total capacity) with a highly efficient set of gas-fired combined cycle units. They would have demolished the three 450 foot smoke stacks (visual eyesores), replaced by the much shorter stacks at the combined cycle units. Cooling water use would have also diminished. Environmentally, visually and efficiency-wise, this would have been a win, win, win. But NOOOOOOO. Not in California. Duke finally gave up and sold to Dynegy who carried on with plans to build the combined-cycle units. In 2014, Dynegy shuttered the old plant and put it all up for sale, defeated by the loonies. Now some rent-seeking company is dreaming of building a floating off-shore wind turbine facility and using the old Morro Bay plant site to tie into the grid.
Meanwhile …
California sacked megawatts of power when it decided to close SONGS rather than simply replace a couple of steam tube assemblies.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Final-used-fuel-transfer-marks-SONGS-decommissioni
BATTERIES!!! WE NEED MORE BATTERIES!!! Now just how are we going to charge those suckers? Hmmmm…….
I am sure Griff would say all you need is a solar light so you can read at night. Anything beyond that is a luxury.
If you have no light or spend much of you income on kerosene for a lantern not as good as a solar light, then a solar light is transformational in your life.
because not everybody lives in California
Yes, and because you now have a solar powered light, that proves that you don’t need coal powered lights.
Griff: We get solar light every day here. If there is no light where “you” are, you should try pulling your head out. Californians should try it, too.
And not everybody lives where there’s sufficient, consistent sunshine. A lot of good a solar light does you during the six months of winter in northern Alaska, or during the weeks of overcast/rain in places prone to such miserable weather on a frequent basis. Wind and solar are called unreliables for a reason.
Al Jolson has a new song:
Venezuela here I Come.
New Broadway musical:
Bimbo
Serves you right for being in California. You’re the frog in the pot of water and they’re going to crank up the heat until you’re dead. Jump. But one caveat. Stop voting liberal. Don’t screw up your new state. Face it. California is a mess because people like you vote for Democrats.
I gotta be honest.
Those “preppers” everyone likes to laugh at seem more and more reasonable every day.
They should go with galactical panels (lunar panels are a scam : they don’t work) :
– problem solved.
I first learned about this on Fox News. They didn’t have any place to leave a comment – I wonder why? It is pathetic that they don’t maintain enough backup for routine heat waves. I grew up in southern California and we had a heat wave or three every summer. September can be hotter. The other thing I didn’t believe is that the power company said that they did not know which section of the grid would be shut off next. These subsections are not tripping by themselves. Someone tells someone which section to shut down. They have to have a plan of which one is next unless they are just using dice. Either way, welcome to the green future.
‘It is pathetic that they don’t maintain enough backup for routine heat waves.’
but this isn’t a routine heat wave, is it? I see headlines ‘record breaking heat’.
And that’s the best excuse you can come up with for power outages that will no doubt increase crime and death? I mean it’s not like heat waves never happened before.
California ISO said this in advance of the blackouts
“With excessively high temperatures forecast for California, the power grid operator is
predicting an increase in electricity demand, primarily from residential air conditioning
use. Conservation efforts could be critical to maintaining reliability on the power system.
California and the Southwest US will be experiencing near-record or record-breaking
heat, up to 10-20 degrees above normal in some areas. Above-normal temperatures for
the West, including California, are expected to last through the weekend and into late
next week.
Prolonged heat over several consecutive days is expected to drive electricity demand
higher, as nighttime temperatures are also forecast to be above average”
so record heat, record high demand and a power plant failure…
“June 14, 2000 California suffers its largest planned blackout since World War II.
On a day when temperatures in San Francisco reach 103 degrees, a series of localized, rolling blackouts affect 97,000 Pacific, Gas & Electric consumers in the Bay Area. “
Nineteen years ago, Griff. Do you know how hot it got in San Fran this time? 95 degrees on August 14th. Wherever that ‘record-breaking heat’ is, it isn’t in the Bay Area where the blackouts are. Not even close. CA is in worse shape today than nineteen years ago. This was a routine heatwave for them. Pretty soon, blackouts will be normal every summer, even if there is no more global warming.
Your government at work.
It’s only going to get worse.
yup. I also see 10-20 degrees above average.
I have worked for 20 years as a Nuclear Power operator for the Navy and over 30 years in the public power sector. I have only seen one new power transmission line constructed for commercial power and that was 25 years ago. They have “Upgraded” some transmission lines, but that has limitations as the higher the power, the higher and bigger the towers have to be.
The problem with all of this “renewable” power is that it needs new lines from the “boondocks” to a substation, where it can be delivered. That costs money. As a result the lines that were designed to deliver power out the spiderwebs for existing plants with massive substations are NOT at the center where they are erecting the wind turbines. Also, the lines that run from the substation in an approximate direction of the wind turbine location are not capable of handling the MAX power they generate. So now you have a system designed like a star or a spider web designed to take the power from the center and send it out to the peripheries of the service area turned upside down and backwards.
Power now comes from where the wind blows, goes to the center and then out on another leg of the star to where it is being used. During average loads all works “acceptably” (not great, not good, but works.) When a front moves across a service area then the source point and usage point can reverse over a period of minutes, hours or days. Cover the area inside that star with homes that have solar panels on their roof and you complicat the protection even more. Then you have the problem of power lines getting overloaded, lightning in the path from the source, etc. The grid is not designed to handle it. to design it requires NEW distributions systems designed for this problem and a computer to control it, as it is now as difficult as flying a Jet Fighter. You can bet your life that none of these colleges making computer programs then telling you that the present system will work has gone out in the field and determined all of the power limitations on each and every line these renewables are coming from and going to and then hit their model with a weather front moving across the service grid.
get rid of most of the people. problem solved.
I would have thought a migration plan was most sensible under the circumstances. The other states offer refuge to California’s reliables fans and bus their unreliables fans there. Win win.
So more of a trade, then. Hey Cali, we’ll give you 5 unreliables fans for every reliables fan you give us. win-win all around!!
Imagine if CA were fully open for business.
What part of the term ” reliable baseload generation ” do the Commiecrats in Kaliforniya not understand?
Try NONE of it!
Rolling Blackouts in California? Who could have guessed? Enron!
I wonder what blackouts do to cloud computing?
sounds like a good time to shut down diablo canyon!
So glad I had the foresight to leave Kalifornia back in 1989. The writing was on the wall then as the flight of industry had begun to avoid environmental regulations. I moved to the backwards south….we have plenty of power and the only time there is a blackout is when a hurricane hits.
“Rolling Blackouts in California? Who could have guessed?”
Anybody who knows anything about renewable energy.
Sadly, what you are seeing in California totalitarian state today due to a seasonal hot spell, you will see in the UK this winter due to a seasonal cold spell.
A lot of old people will suffer, at least they, i.e. the Greens/ socialists, have a handy excuse lined up they can blame seasonal mortality on Covid. It can be so useful in such energy short periods as winter.
Although I am of an age that won’t be around to see it, I predict by the next 15 years California and other states will see rolling food shut downs lasting weeks. Remember that all trucks will be electric.
The state-species Kalifornicatia parasitica has sucked its own self-limited electrical resources down, now its gonna suck its neighboring states dry too.
This in today’s (Aug 17) NY Times: the power levels did not get near the 3%-from-capacity level.
In other words, there was no reason for the power outages.
Politics?
Possibly not; (unneeded?) power was purchased from Nevada grid for 10x the normal cost/megawatt.
hmm
Pay attention to this because it will have an effect beyond saving California power. I work from home, and rarely am I aware of cold snaps, heat waves, or light rain. This is a way to underscore every heat wave California experiences. Looking back on the summer, they’ll swear it was record breaking heat, just because A/C wasn’t available. Be careful, there is more to this than a simple solution to a dreadful power grid. They are creating true believers.