Roger Caiazza
The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) recently issued its Power Trends which is billed as their “annual analysis of factors influencing New York State’s power grid and wholesale electricity
Markets”. This post highlights the expectation that electricity supplies will “be adequate to meet expected summer demand under baseline conditions, but under more extreme summer weather scenarios, potential reliability concerns have been identified” relative to the heat wave for the Northeast and Midwest predicted for next week.
NYISO Power Trends
NYISO recently released their power assessment: Power Trends Resources is the landing page for documentation, Power Trends 2024 is the report itself and there is a Power Trends Fact Sheet. If you are interested in a review of key developments and emerging issues in a jurisdiction trying to implement a net-zero transition then I recommend you look at this documentation. For this post I will only highlight the Key Messages listed:
- Public policies continue to drive rapid change in the electric system in the state, impacting how electricity is produced, transmitted, and consumed.
- Electrification programs and economic development initiatives are driving projected demand higher. Generator deactivations are outpacing new supply additions. Together, these forces are narrowing reliability margins across New York.
- The potential for delays in construction of new supply and transmission, higher than forecasted demand, and extreme weather are threatening reliability and resilience to the grid
- Electricity supplies are adequate to meet expected summer demand under normal conditions, but extreme weather and other factors pose reliability risks.
- The New York statewide grid is projected to become a winter-peaking system in the 2030s, primarily driven by electrification of space heating and transportation.
- On the coldest days, the availability of natural gas for power generation may be limited and significant interruptions to natural gas supply can disrupt reliable operations.
- NYISO’s interconnection processes continue to evolve to balance developer flexibility with the need to manage the process to more stringent timeframes. Efforts are underway to make this process more efficient while protecting grid reliability.
- To achieve the mandates of the CLCPA, new emission-free supply capable of providing the necessary reliability services are needed to replace the capabilities of today’s generation. Such new supply is not yet available on a commercial scale.
- The wholesale electricity markets administered by the NYISO exist as an important tool to attract necessary investments to facilitate the transition of the grid in the coming decades.
There is a lot of information in this report that probably could provide fodder for another article. Suffice to say the conclusion would be that I characterize it as using careful wordsmanship to suggest that there are issues that must be addressed but not coming out and saying the current energy direction of New York is bat guano crazy. What will it take to wake New York up?
For this post I only want to address the Summer 2024 Reliability Outlook. I have highlighted the particular concern for next week in the quotation of this section:
NYISO grid operations and planning teams collaborate with utilities, suppliers, and stakeholders to prepare for expected summer weather conditions. The NYISO forecasts conditions based upon normal, or baseline, expected weather conditions as well as extreme weather conditions. New York recorded a record peak of 33,956 megawatts (MW) in July 2013. For summer 2024, the NYISO expects electricity supplies to be adequate to meet expected summer demand under baseline conditions, but under more extreme summer weather scenarios, potential reliability concerns have been identified.
For summer 2024, the NYISO expects 34,913 MW of resources available to meet 31,541 MW of forecasted demand under normal conditions. Under extreme summer weather conditions, however, forecasted reliability margins could potentially be deficient without reliance on emergency operating procedures. For example, if the state experiences a heatwave with an average daily temperature of 95 degrees lasting three or more days, demand is forecasted to rise to 33,301 MW, while predicted supply levels are reduced to 34,502 MW. When accounting for the required 2,620 MW of operating reserves that must be maintained, this scenario results in a forecasted reliability margin of -1,419 MW. That reliability margin declines further to -3,093 MW under an extreme heatwave with an average daily temperature of 98 degrees. Under these more extreme summer weather conditions, the NYISO forecasts an available supply of 34,317 MW to meet the required 2,620 MW of operating reserve requirements, plus a forecasted demand of 34,790 MW.
To maintain reliability, NYISO operators can dispatch up to 3,275 MW of incremental capability through emergency operating procedures. These emergency operating procedures are not reflected in the forecasted reliability margins described above. To mitigate risks to reliability, NYISO operators conduct weekly outreach to suppliers to address risks to resource availability and coordinate with both generation and transmission owners to reduce the impacts of outages during hot weather periods. In addition, NYISO operators coordinate with neighboring regions to support regional grid reliability.
Forecast
New York has a very imbalanced load profile with New York City and downstate having the highest load. NYISO might weigh the temperature by population and load, and I am not sure how they calculate the statewide average temperature. For this projection I used the National Weather Service Extended Forecast (seven days) for Albany, Buffalo, New York City and Syracuse. Table 1 lists the high and low temperature forecasts for those cities. I calculated the average daily statewide temperature as the average of the high and low values for all four cities.
As shown in Table 1 the threshold of concern for an average daily temperature of 95 degrees does not appear likely. Nonetheless, the forecast discussions all mention that there is uncertainty with these forecasts so it will be worth watching to see what happens.
Discussion
The Power Trends figure that lists generation deactivations and additions demonstrates the inherent stupidity of New York’s current energy policy. Since 2019 the politicians have forced the premature shutdown of over 2,000 MW of nuclear generation just north of New York City. To respond to ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standard non-attainment issues, the State was required to shutdown or add controls at old peaking power plants in New York City. Political pressure halted proposals to replace those units with modern much cleaner units that we know could provide sufficient reliability resources. .
The Power Trends report highlights risks coming to New York. The NYISO figure indicates that over 5,000 MW of dispatchable generation that provided the New York State with reliability services for decades has been shut down. In its place are wind and solar projects that check all the environmental goals of the State but may not provide power when needed most. Although the State is not completely dependent upon wind and solar yet, the state policies that have shut down and precluded development of conventional generating resources means that the toolbox of choices used to maintain reliability has lost options. The risks of blackouts are increasing so watch what happens during the first stress test of the year.
I will post an update on what happened next week.
Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.
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I hate to wish bad things happening on anyone but this is an exception.
Imagine the media coverage if this happened in NYC. Imagine also, the spin and the denials.
Same analysis applies to Texas as well. They are even more vulnerable as their ‘isolated’ grid isnt as interconnected to reliable generation much further away
Yes, if the Texas Grid goes down, there are going to be a lot of uncomfortable questions for Texas politicians, of both political parties.
Texas politicians have put Texas in a vulnerable positiion with regard to the electric grid. Texas politicians need to fix the grid problem, and that doesn’t mean adding more wind and solar. Adding wind and solar to the grid, and retiring conventional, reliable electric generation is what is causing these problems. And it’s not just in Texas either, it is affecting every electric grid in the United States now because of Net Zero insanity.
CO2-based Human-caused Climate Change is the biggest science hoax in human history and is on track to be the most damaging propositiion put forth by human beings in peace time.
Damned Idiots can’t figure out that windmills and solar are the problem, not the solution.
A summer heat wave ain’t “extreme weather”.
“A summer heat wave ain’t “extreme weather”.”
More “an expectation”… of normal weather.
And New York’s upcoming “heat wave” would just be considered a couple of warm days in Oklahoma.
And what causes this heat wave? It’s not CO2. A heat wave is an effect of a high pressure weather system. When one sits on top of you, the temperatures get hot.
I think New York has stolen Oklahoma’s high pressure system. Usually, about this time of year, after the rains in April and May, a high pressure system comes along and sits on top of us and heats us up real good. Sometimes the high pressure system only sits over us for a week or two or three, and sometimes one can sit over us all summer long. That’s when things get interesting.
So far, the seasons look to be right on schedule: Rains in April and May, and then the rains decrease in June, July and August, and it can get real dry around here sometimes. Right now, it’s real green.
A heat wave in NYC must put a huge demand on the grid- what with almost every building being air conditioned.
Hmm, maybe not as much as you might expect considering the commercial buildings don’t have full occupancy. Maybe they’ll shut off the HVAC for the empty office space since there’s no one there. That ought to reduce the demand in NYC by at least…uh…let’s see…hmm…carry the 1…and…umm…0.3 percent.
Tom,
It sort of looks like a “spill-over” of your heat dome. Our local NOAA forecast in New Hampshire is speaking of a once-every-thirty-year or even once-every-sixty-year event. If the “heat dome” gets established we could get a situation like the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s. While Oklahoma, Nebraska and Kansas got the worst back then, plenty of “spill over” came to fry the east. There will be a howl about Global Warming, but it will just be a repeat of history. There needs to be a loud push-back about the weaknesses of the grid. Heat sucks, but cold kills.
“In its place are wind and solar projects that check all the environmental goals of the State but may not provide power when needed most.”
I’d think that the amount of time- wind and solar will be functioning should be predictable based on the past history of weather in the region. Assuming there really isn’t much change in the climate, such an estimate should be pretty accurate. Somebody must have done this, right?
And with the heat wave usually comes calm winds. Oh, goody, we get to see the error of their ways this summer instead of next summer. Reap what you sow.
Yes they do detailed probabilistic analyses and in fact do not rely on wind and solar very much. But they do not explain this or say it publicly.
But then they actually can’t rely on it ar all…
Past history isnt detailed enough . Grid demand is in half hour blocks.
They tootle on about how much wind generation ‘per year’ is supplying homes .
Thats useless in terms of the daily ramp up for the peak periods of a few hours and often the critical half hour.
Calculations been done. Reporting on the new semiconductor chip factory (Micron?) NY hopes to attract for near future construction, which requires a large steady electrical supply to function:
when demands from certain quarters were made that the plant supply its own power with solar panels on all the buildings and/or wind turbines (wherever they would fit, one presumes), calculations based on 34(?) years of NY wind and solar generation showed that utilizing the projected 1400 acres for maximum density of solar panels (no factory space left) could supply about 1% of required power. Wind could provide even less.
All one has to do to realize the absurdity of net zero, is to walk around NYC, day or night.
Since New York doesn’t recognize my concealed carry permit and I can’t afford an armed escort detail, I’m not visiting the Big Apple anytime soon. Send me some postcards instead.
It’s not bad during the day in the nice areas. Most of the city I’d never go into. But Central Park seems pretty safe and around it are the great museums. It was much worse before Mayor Juliani cleaned up much of it.
Unfortunately, Bloomberg went out of his way to invite the crooks back in, and subsequent mayors have gone out of their way to hamstring, if not completely dismantle the police.
Democrat-run cities, are crime-ridden cities.
Radical Democrats refuse to lock criminals up, and
want as many criminals wandering the streets of their cities as possible. As a result, their cities are havens for criminals who have no fear of punishment.
If you don’t like crime in your cities, don’t vote for radical Democrats.
These days, pretty much all Democrats are radical.
The few who aren’t, are completely cowed by the radicals.
New York learned nothing from Texas in February 2021. Weather dependent sources are just that.
Actually what we learned in Texas and in PJM the next year is that gas is also unreliable in extreme cold, which they mention above. On paper PJM had a 30% reliability margin and the gas supply system failure swiped that out.
see my https://www.cfact.org/2024/06/10/windless-nights-make-net-zero-impossible/
Coal is the answer.
There were also egregious features like demanding the use of electric compressors on gas pipelines, which made the situation worse. Gas was not adequately winterized, but wind was a total failure.
Well what wiped out gas was ELECTRIC compressors on gas pipelines being used in favor of the usual gas compressors. And the electric supply failed due to…wind face-planting when the wind died in the wake of the storm.
Story tip –
Climate Change Information is Sanitized for Your Protection › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)
Translation: this cannot work with the current technologies.
Does any possible DEFR even exist at a theoretical level?
No!
They have created a fictional technology to avoid saying the plan is impossible.
A small pacific island , perfect for solar has found it impossible . The ‘answer’ is always send more money as the previous technology isnt capable of having mixed generation
https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/508767/niue-facing-more-power-rationing
Interesting article. Thanks for posting the link. On paper, remote islands in the tropics are one of the few use cases where solar power looks to be a viable solution for providing power. Why? Because it’s simple and with battery backup reasonably reliable. Once installed, it doesn’t require fossil fuels which need to be imported, or (probably scarce) foreign exchange to buy said fuels it with, or people with the skills to keep generators running and to fix them when they break.
One would think that a properly designed solar system could be repaired/maintained locally by anyone with some basic hand tools and enough smarts to keep a small boat afloat. Apparently not. One wonders if the problem at Niue is poor system design — perhaps over-reliance on shiny new technology — or something more basic.
The best that can be hoped for, even with wind/solar/battery, is that you decrease the amount of time that the diesel generator has to run.
Answer is in few lines in article. They used Tesla battery….
Too little show for your bucks.
Nuclear fission with the non-emergency output being used to resupply geothermal sources, only switched to the grid when wind and solar fail
There is a standard deception here: “Generator deactivations are outpacing new supply additions. Together, these forces are narrowing reliability margins across New York.”
The “supply additions” are intermittent so even if they exceeded deactivations reliability would still suffer. It sounds like we just have to speed up the additions but that is wildly false.
“The “supply additions” are intermittent so even if they exceeded deactivations reliability would still suffer.”
This is what is happening in every electric grid in the United States.
Net Zero insanity has all our electric grids on the brink of failure.
I hate to wish bad things on people, but without a spectacular, undeniable failure of
renewablesunreliables how will we ever learn?Some might argue that already happened with the Texas blackouts in February 2021. Since we didn’t learn anything, I argue it hasn’t happened yet.
It doesn’t sound like Texas politicians learned anything, either. They are still on the verge of having blackouts.
Nice work Roger. I find it harder and harder to show any sympathy for New York. They have plenty of power generation available to them, that they choose not to use, it is not my problem. The only actions we should take is to protect the grid for the rest of us. We need to be able to isolate those people who don’t want affordable, reliable and dispatchable power so that those of us who do treasure that power can have it. These people are really being stupid.
New York, and most of the other states in the North Eastern U.S., have been shooting themselves in the foot for decades. I was working in Houston, TX back in the ’70s when the N.E. was running out of natural gas and the government was asking people to conserve it. Houston Power and Light was running an ad on television at the time telling its customers to use all the natural they wanted… they had enough gas in storage to last 10 years or so and the North East would not allow pipelines or import terminals to be built, so (effectively) screw ’em.
“…demand under normal conditions, but extreme weather and other factors pose reliability risks.”
Under so-called “normal” conditions” NYC can expect 2 tto 4 heatwaves of 3 to 4 days long in a season and the one they are worried about isn’t even in July yet!
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-waves#ref11
Roger has recognized the garden variety ‘poker tell’ that should be recognized even by the dark side trolls we get here : the The NYS knows the ersatz power grid is in very deep trouble, not just for the forecast heatwave, but certainly others in the queue!
All tells reporting on adverse news have this structure.
Things are okay with (“The Science” or the policy, or the plan, or the consensus or …) but, something challenging may come to pass for which we have a contingency plan (is a disaster waiting in the wings!).
Due to supply chain issues, a shortage of moonbeams, pixie dust, and unicorn farts means New Yorkers will have insufficient electricity to cool their homes, cook their food, power their screens, and generally continue with the business of life. I’m making a short trip to stock up on beer and popcorn.
Past heatwaves at many cities have caused deaths through electricity shortage causing lack of cooling as by air conditioning.
It is known that for now and the rest of summer that New York faces such deaths. These death forecasts can be reduced by mobilization of existing shut down facilities such as gas peakers and nuclear plant.
Political decisions and regulations caused these shut downs and therefore, logically, will contribute to the cause of deaths.
In essence, one or more persons, being from the political/regulatory sector is liable for the knowing murder of such people as might be killed in this forecast heatwave.
In the dominant application of the law in the US, a murder requires an investigation, identification of an alleged perpetrator, a charge of a form of murder or manslaughter, a trial, a judgement, a punishment.
There is no reason why this process should not be followed in New York.
It might assist if New York authorities were advised of this scenario before a heatwave might arrive, to remove the excuse that they did not know.
Geoff S
But New Yorker’s are much safer now, due to the fact that the president of a non publicly held corporation has been convicted of falsifying business records.
Who will sink into darkness and undeveloped nation status first?
UK, California, New York, Germany, Texas.?
Interesting that all of these have a high reliance on UNRELIABLES. !
That’s a good list. It’s going to be one of those, if they don’t change their ways.
Meh. Summer outages are mostly an annoyance. Very few people die from heat.
With the state pushing electric heating and refusing to build gas pipelines to run the power plants or heat homes, winter is much much scarier.
Large number of deaths have occurred in recent decades in a few places from heatwaves. Heatwaves in those places are historically very infrequent so not much provided for (northern France during vacation month).
Years ago, before the climate crazies, I read historical accounts of large number of heat caused deaths in Rome and Delhi (“poor people dying in the streets like flies”) while people of means left the cities for the beaches or the mountains. Of course there were no weather or temperature measurements 2000 years ago, not accurate mortality statistics. These were only gross/casual observations, not measurements.
In places like NYC, the buildings and the roads hold in the heat and can even make it worse. In many buildings, designed for air conditioning, windows don’t even open, so no cooling breeze, even if there was cooling breezes.
NYC with no electricity in the middle of a heat wave, would be a very scary place.
We can be sure that the blackouts will result from extreme weather caused by human induced climate change and definitely not as a result of deliberate policy designed to encourage hoi polloi to welcome the New World Order.
The sad part is that if a heat wave hits and causes any type of blackout, the media will spin it as another illustration of climate change and demand that more FF plants be shutdown and replaced with wind and solar. It will likely take a total grid collapse to occur before people start to wake up, and even then, the media will put some idiotic spin to it and there will continue to be true believers who will take the media spin as gospel. Pray that Trump gets elected and puts a permanent end to the nut zero nonsense. While NY, CA, MA, NJ, etc. may still push the lunacy, it will still help spare other states that are not quite that stupid.
Well here’s the New England ISO charts. Does not include New York State but does show the energy export/import.
It is going to get very warm around here for the next few days.
Will be interesting to see how the grid holds up..
So they’ll have to depend upon all that offshore wind to meet demand? What if the wind doesn’t blow? Oh, wait…there isn’t any offshore wind to depend upon!
Never mind…