No rolling blackouts or grid emergencies as California continues on path to a carbon free grid. Several strategies, including upgrades to vulnerable parts of the grid at play here, but key enabler is more clean energy, especially solar, and above all, battery storage, now equivalent to 5 very large nuclear power plants.
In fact, California seems to have reached a level of storage that is creating some kind of a phase-change in the grid, yielding benefits that are surprising even expert observers. More and more days where renewables supply greater-than 100 percent of California’s power – enabling exports even under these challenging conditions.
This writeup omits a significant factor: selling power consumption reduction to PG&E. I participate in a program that pays me to save power when requested (usually for an hour in the early evening). The company running this aggregates the consumption reduction capacity of 1000s of retail power consumers, and sells that to PG&E. The premise being, “hey, we know you’re going to have to buy power at ruinous rates on the spot market tomorrow, so why don’t you buy some megawatts of power reduction from us instead, at better rates than the spot market?” (plus those peaker plants on the spot market are all fossil plants).
During the July 6-12 heat wave, I was asked to save power every day but one (sunday). I expect the grid was creaking at the seams that week.