Oops!...California did it again

It’s Tuesday morning, time for a fresh dose of Bright Ideas. I’m Julian Spector, L.A. based journalist covering clean energy for Greentech Media. This is my personal newsletter about how clean energy is taking on the world and winning. Although this week, the narrative is a little more complicated. Read on to find out why!

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Friends, I’m afraid I misled you.

When I warned, a few weeks back, about the impending collapse of the electrical grid, I framed the issue around wildfires starting from or disabling California’s electrical wires. I neglected to name a threat so remote that it had slumbered since the early days of the new millennium, a time of Britney Spears and Enron. This lurking threat is that one day, we might not have enough electricity to meet our needs.

That day came Friday in the Great State of California. And it came back on Saturday. And also today, and probably tomorrow, and on into the week. A heat wave moved into town, drawn perhaps by the Mediterranean climate and attractive people, and it’s not going anywhere. Our collective air-conditioning tab is overpowering all our power plants.

I watched it go down in real time Friday, as my job for the day was to check it out for Greentech Media. Sometimes, investigating a concern unveils facts that contextualize it, and put you at ease. This time, the more I dug in, the scarier it got (see the article here). 

Things really took a turn when I called up CAISO, the organization that operates the grid and power markets for most of California. They’d put out a “Flex Alert,” which asks typical folks to do their part and cut back on electricity usage. I wanted to know what that meant.

“We don’t call on consumers to conserve unless it's imminent that there could be an energy shortfall," CAISO spokesperson Anne Gonzales told me. “If everybody conserves a little bit now, we don’t have to turn to more severe measures, such as rotating power outages.”

The most populous state in the union only had to corral its 40 million people to turn down the AC while they sat at home during a deadly pandemic amid a record heat wave that pushed temperatures above 100 degrees in many places, or else the grid might collapse. You can probably guess how well that went. 

In matters of the grid, like matters of the heart, simply hoping someone else does what you want them to do is just not a solid plan. Communication is crucial, as is establishing mutually understood boundaries and responsibilities and incentives. We learned that California is woefully underprepared to rally collective action to keep its vital electricity flowing.

But I also found examples of how we could do this much better, like, now.

How bad is it really?

Friday kicked off a series of “rotating power outages,” also known as rolling blackouts.

What this means is, CAISO tells the utilities they have to cut a certain amount of electricity usage preemptively, to avoid a disorderly collapse of the system as we know it. In practical terms, it means you could be minding your own business, catching the latest episode of Selling Sunset and wondering if Christine was going to make it all about her again, and Boom! Your power goes out, and now you’re on your own in the relentless heat.

Maybe you go catch a flick, because those theaters have air-conditioning? Oh but pandemic. Kick back at the Russian Banya, where you’d expose yourself to greater heat anyway? Also there’s still a pandemic. 

The last time Californians faced rolling blackouts like this was the Enron-induced crisis of 2001, and they disliked the experience so much they booted out a governor. There wasn’t even a pandemic that time.

Our current governor, Gavin Newsom, jumped into the fray Monday, charismatically declaring that he wished someone had told him what was happening (#energytwitter was on top of it, just saying). And CAISO blamed the regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission for not heeding its earlier warnings. And that gets into some thorny stuff about the transition to clean energy.

The grid failed because we weren’t making enough power to meet demand, and we couldn’t borrow enough from neighboring states because they had to grapple with the same heat wave. 

Unpacking that, the issue is California is at the awkward growth phase of our clean energy maturation. We’re moving to a system of solar and wind and hydropower backed by gobs of batteries. It’s just, the batteries haven’t arrived yet. Meanwhile, we have shut down a big nuclear plant and a bunch of gas plants. It’s like we’ve lost some baby teeth, and before most of the new teeth grow in, we’re biting into a steak (or a thickly cut cauliflower, for all my vegan readers).

Obviously the solar won’t work when the sun goes down. California has an intricate bureaucracy in place to ensure we have enough power capacity to meet our needs at all times. But something happened with the math, because it wasn’t adding up.

This album actually came out in 2000, just a year before California’s last rolling blackouts, when Enron was not that innocent. (Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Give people a stake

Unpacking exactly what went wrong will no doubt be laborious and acrimonious in the months to come. What’s very clear to me is that the system does not properly activate people to play a role, even though it easily could.

CAISO did try to enlist the common folk in the defense of the polis. That’s what the Flex Alert said: please, just stop doing the things you’re literally paying for the right to do. If everyone else also stops enjoying the energy they pay to use, we can all get through this, together.

This approach asks everyone to sacrifice in order to deliver to the CAISO something that it pays companies for. Unlike energy companies, most people don’t have a detailed knowledge of what actions drive the most consumption, or how to reduce usage without too much hassle. Also, there’s no data on who even sees the message or what they do in response, so it’s impossible to know if the requests are working.

The other path here is through what’s known in the industry as demand response, or flexible energy consumption. The idea is that, since avoiding an electricity shortfall has real economic value, if you help to avoid it, you should get paid for your help.

A startup called OhmConnect does this for residential customers. It sends detailed messages about when and how to lower your consumption, and can even remotely toggle certain appliances on its customers behalf (for instance, you don’t need to run your refrigerator every single minute to keep your food safely cool). CAISO pays OhmConnect for the amount of consumption it eliminates, and OhmConnect pays its customers for participation, which is verified with digital meter data.

"I fundamentally believe that unless you can flex residential demand at scale, we cannot decarbonize our electric grid in a reasonable period of time," OhmConnect CEO Cisco DeVries told me, as his team geared up for their biggest activation ever. 

I’d bet on data and clear incentives over lack of data and a hope that others choose to sacrifice. But OhmConnect’s fleet encompasses 150,000 California households, a tiny fraction of the total. That still added up to more than CAISO’s grid battery capacity until recently, but it’s so far from its potential.

Things will have to change among the big power plants. But paying homes to use energy more nimbly costs less than building new power plants. You’re using appliances people already have to lower the amount of power we need to create. And it leaves people with some spending money, instead of darkness and sweat.

Got some feelings about the right way out of this mess? Tell the world!

This week in quarantine…

I watched Top Gun for the first time since moving to Southern California, and doesn’t it just make you want to cruise down to San Diego on a motorcycle with a fresh pair of aviators and some synths?

Although I now realize, that film does something funky with its amber filters, turning sunsets into vistas of turmeric and marigold. San Diego skies don’t look like that; they’re a crisp antidote to L.A. smog. 

It’s an escapist film, back to the ideological simplicity of the Cold War, and up into the air in the hands of ace fighter pilots. But it’s also a film that understands energy. After catapulting from an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, Tom Cruise and pals have to complete their mission and get back to the ship before fuel runs out. As Californians then and now understand, energy keeps you aloft; if you run out, you get that sinking feeling.