The Northern California Power Agency said its dispatcher misinterpreted Cal-ISO’s order to prepare to cut power and immediately undertook the process to cut 46 megawatts - enough to serve about 35,000 customers - in the cities of Alameda, Lodi, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Healdsburg, and Ukiah. “You can see very clearly a drop off … on Saturday when temperatures will be lower across the state, the heat wave will lift and so that’s going to create a needed wave of relief on the grid,” Anders said. But help in the form of cooler weather is on the way for the state and Anders said that should end the Flex Alerts. So far, California has narrowly avoided rolling outages during the extreme heat. The state’s legal marijuana regulatory agency also urged businesses to turn off lights and reduce power or use backup generators. Tuesday with 52,061 megawatts, far above the previous high of 50,270 megawatts set July 24, 2006.Īs residents and businesses cranked air-conditioning to escape withering heat across the West and solar power supplies began to wane, Cal-ISO issued a stage 3 energy emergency alert to prepare utilities to initiate outages if demand didn’t decrease. With record demand on power supplies across the West, California snapped its record energy use around 5 p.m. “The number one cause of really very large outages could be debris: things that people have in their pool, because they've all been enjoying their pools during the hot weather like this, secure all that, get that inside.” “The best way to help avoid outages during this storm event, the high winds, secure anything that’s loose,” he said. Geraghty said it will bring high winds that can do damage to power lines. That storm is the outer edge of Hurricane Kay, which is climbing up the coast of Baja California. But we’re likely to see relief locally on the demand on the local grid tomorrow based on the timing of the storm.” This is a statewide supply issue so we’re still monitoring all of that. “We know the cloud cover has actually reduced our demand here in San Diego county just a little bit, he said. San Diego Gas & Electric COO Kevin Geraghty said the utility is seeing some relief in demand due to the incoming storm system. And so we’ll double down on the communication to make sure that doesn’t happen again.” “There was a lot happening on the grid for everybody last night. “That is certainly concerning to me,” Elliot Mainzer, president and CEO of Cal-ISO, said Wednesday. The confusion occurred Tuesday afternoon between a dispatcher at the Northern California Power Agency, which owns and operates power generating facilities for 16 members including a dozen cities, and the California Independent System Operator as the grid it manages was perilously close to running out of energy amid record-breaking temperatures. Targeted blackouts were avoided a day after miscommunication led utilities to mistakenly cut power to customers in several California cities. “But when the whole of the Western United States is under one of these heat domes, there's not much extra power to be traded around because everybody is just as hot as we are. “We can kind of trade power between states that are to the east of us or to the North of us and that helps to kind of iron out some of the supply issues we’re having,” Anders said. Scott Anders, director of the Energy Policy Initiatives Center at University of San Diego, said the length of these consecutive flex alerts is historic.
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