
California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001 - stx
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/15/902781690/california-issues-first-rolling-blackouts-since-2001-as-heat-wave-bakes-western-
======
cipher_system
I wish the massive financial bailout money could be used to build and improve
infrastructure. There doesn't seem to be a lack of money but it never seem to
do anything useful.

~~~
Apocryphon
You'd think with the reduction in traffic there's all sorts of extra space and
time for fixing old infrastructure.

~~~
foota
Unfortunately, I think this is countered by municipalities losing funding from
sales taxes.

~~~
electriclove
California has gotten a windfall in sales taxes from Amazon and Ebay in recent
years when sales tax collection was forced. The money is always poorly spent.

~~~
foota
I don't know in detail what California's budget is like (other than they've
been in the whole lately?) But I personally view a lot of the issues with
local and state government spending as being associated with bidding processes
and the cost of e.g., infrastructure. I think California generally has the
right priorities (roughly, education, healthcare, safety (although this could
perhaps be reshuffled, see zeitgeist), and infrastructure). If anything I
think they probably need to work to reduce costs in higher education
especially and spend more on infrastructure (or reduce costs, but I think
that'll be harder than in ed).

------
strangeloops85
Worth noting: This does not affect many of the major municipal utilities,
including SMUD in Sacramento, LADWP in LA, and Silicon Valley Power in Santa
Clara because many have their own generating capacity and are also in
alternate distribution arrangements. The investor-owned utilities don't have
much direct generating capacity anymore and rely on CAISO, and well, that has
its limits. Also pretty sure that customers of the municipal utilities pay
less than PGE/ SCE customers. For example, this is why Santa Clara has so many
data centers (municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power).

Really unclear what value investor-owned utilities provide us - the municipal
utilities in general seem way better.

~~~
chaostheory
I’m guessing it shields local government from lawsuits. You’re right though,
better alternatives to an investor owned utility would be a co-op or non-
profit.

------
p1mrx
We're going to need lots of power grid upgrades over the next few decades, for
all the new air conditioning (climate change), and the electrification of heat
and transportation (trying to avoid climate change.)

Are these upgrades even in the planning phase? People will be hesitant to
migrate away from fossil fuels if they can't trust the alternative.

~~~
3000000001
In a word, yes. There are plenty of smart people thinking about distribution
management systems to control loads, manage local generation (household PV)
and even use electric vehicles as an energy store to power the during periods
of peak demand.

Supply authorities in my corner of the world (Australia) are planning this
shift, but I can’t speak to the situation in other regions.

[https://arena.gov.au/assets/2020/06/future-grid-for-
distribu...](https://arena.gov.au/assets/2020/06/future-grid-for-distributed-
energy.pdf)

------
tibbydudeza
We been having load shedding for a few years now in South Africa due to tender
corruption , aging and badly maintained coal fired fleet and the late
commissioning of new power stations.

Outages are at least planned and last about 2 and half hours every day for
each area so we learned to cope plan our lives around it.

Solar power hot water/gas cooking appliance/DC battery backup system for the
Fibre OTN box and Wireless router and wireless AP and I can continue to work.

------
edge17
Strange reporting that people were "believed" to have been blacked out. We
lost power yesterday in Sunnyvale from 5-9pm. Very interested in more info on
the "hundreds of thousands" because it seems like the cuts were fairly
limited. There was enough power to keep the fridge running but thats about it.

~~~
chaostheory
Lost power in the north peninsula from 9pm-12am. A warning would have been
nice. We signed up for notifications via text, and we didn’t receive any.

~~~
edge17
Yup, same. No warning. I left the house in my AC car and went out for ice
cream

~~~
jonny_eh
Discounted ice cream due to the power loss?

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bradly
This my be a dumb question, but if I have solar (no power wall or batteries)
will I still have power during a rolling blackout?

~~~
guerby
Some solar inverters can do it without batteries. But if a cloud passes over
your panels you might get near zero watt.

~~~
jeffbee
Considering that yesterday's outage began at ~18:45, rooftop solar would have
been generating 0-20% of its nameplate capacity.

------
jeffbee
The article doesn't give a lot of details. The grid shed ~1000 MW of load and
delivered ~46000 MW, so the outage was in proportion about 2%. Not great but
it puts events in perspective.

If you're concerned about this, don't charge your Tesla before 10pm.

~~~
jonny_eh
I lost power but don’t have a Tesla. Your tip doesn’t help me.

~~~
jeffbee
If you had one, your individual choice would not prevent your particular
electric service from going out, so no big deal.

It would be neat if the utilities had the ability to selectively shed car
chargers, clothes dryers, and suchlike loads. I imagine they have to make the
choice at a much more coarse level, like at a distribution substation.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It would be neat if the utilities had the ability to selectively shed car
> chargers, clothes dryers, and suchlike

They have the capacity, though it's only used for AC reduction AFAIK:
[https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-
money/savi...](https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-
money/savings-solutions-and-rebates/smart-ac/smart-
ac.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_smartac)

~~~
mmm_grayons
Maybe because I'm in Texas rather than California, but AC is the absolute last
thing I'd want turned off. It doesn't make sense to try to convince people to
reduce AC on the hottest days compared to something like charging a car,
running a water heater, etc., even though this is probably the largest demand
in such a case. What percentage of consumers have signed up for this program?

------
edge17
Where is all the load coming from? Aren't most of the office building (in the
Bay Area) empty rightnow due to Covid?

~~~
dredmorbius
As with other impacts of shutdown and quarantine, shifts in demand and
consumption patterns can mean that infrastructure isn't able to supply
electricity to where it's specifically needed. It's been pointed out that
electricity is not storable --- it's less an energy _store_ as with fuel and
far more energy _distribution_ as with a transmission or driveshaft, but with
far more connections. Not only must the Grid make power available _when_ it is
needed, but it must do so _where_.

Peak daytime demands in urban cores, offices, and factories is different from
peak demands in residential exurbs, purely on distribution, even if quantity
is comparable.

~~~
Steltek
Residential solar once posed the opposite problem: generating power during the
day in suburbs where it wasn't being consumed nor could it be transported to
areas of high demand.

If our current problem is higher daytime residential demand, maybe power
companies can stop fighting residential solar initiatives now?

~~~
makomk
As I understand it, the problem was evening demand, not daytime and that's
probably also the real reason why all the empty office buildings aren't
helping - most people would probably be out of the office and back home by
them. If anything, residential solar makes this problem worse both by making
non-solar generation less financially viable and causing a sharp increase in
demand for it during the evening as the sun goes down.

------
pwarner
[https://mobile.twitter.com/california_iso](https://mobile.twitter.com/california_iso)
gives heads up on grid issues, stage 2 = grid at capacity, stage 3 = lights
start going out for someone.

~~~
mmm_grayons
How is the decision made as to who loses power first? Coolest area?

------
dmode
I live in a suburb of the Bay Area where temperatures are usually in 70s and
80s. Suddenly it is going to be 100 for 5 day straight. I have never seen
anything like this

~~~
jlmorton
What? This happens every year - always.

~~~
dmode
100 for this long ? Last year the highest we got was 90s for a couple of days.
I have never experienced 100 degree weather here on 12 years of living here.
And that too for days

~~~
gdubs
Which part of the bay? We lived in Los Altos for 6 years and when we first
arrived old-timers said the heat was unusual. Every summer after had crazy
heatwaves. A couple were so bad I was concerned about my infant, in our old
house with no central air and terrible insulation.

------
fanf2
Don't last year's blackouts count?

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/23/pge-rebuked-over-imposing-
bl...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/23/pge-rebuked-over-imposing-blackouts-in-
california-to-reduce-fire-risk.html)

~~~
apsec112
Those were for fire safety, not because of excess load on the electrical grid.

~~~
thaumasiotes
They were a tactic in a political battle. Saying they were "for fire safety"
is stretching things.

~~~
cj
Wikipedia attributes the outages to fire prevention:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_California_power_shutof...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_California_power_shutoffs)

Can you provide a source for your viewpoint?

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perfunctory
This is only going to get worse. Better get used to it. Also, go fix the
climate crisis.

~~~
Yetanfou
Build some nuclear power stations and you'll fix both. While you're at it
build a breeder reactor and feed it with stored nuclear waste to both produce
new fuel for other stations and reduce the amount of radioactive waste which
needs to be stored as well as the period for which it needs to be stored.

~~~
perfunctory
I am building a breeder reactor in my backyard right now.

~~~
Yetanfou
Aren't you mistaking your compost heap for what I described here?

------
malchow
The grid is slowly being decentralized using grid-agnostic solar and storage.
(I.e., solar power that stays going even when the grid drops off.) A computer
network -- not a large infrastructure project -- is likely to be the solution.

~~~
jeffbee
Almost nobody has solar power that can serve through a grid outage, so
emphasis on "slowly".

~~~
malchow
That's true. But grid-forming tech began shipping this summer:

[https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2020/07/enphase-
begins...](https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2020/07/enphase-begins-
shipping-encharge-storage-systems-to-u-s-customers/)

------
sunstone
The (small) silver lining is that these blackouts are happening in the evening
which suggests that solar is holding up the grid during the day when air
conditioners are at max. In the evening though AC is still on but solar is
absent. Tesla's megapack batteries might have found a niche market.

------
pwarner
Isn't this just a $ decision? Do you build a power point that runs only for 4
hours every 10 years? Batteries may pencil out?

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
Even if you had the plants I'm not sure how you'd run them - it's not exactly
an unskilled task.

------
eigenvector
What happened?

The power grid must not only have sufficient generation capacity to match
load, it needs some extra - called spinning or operating reserve. This ensures
security - the characteristic where the grid is resilient to any single
failure. Because load is not normally controlled (i.e. people can turn loads
on and off without permission from the system operator), the system needs to
be able to respond to that as well as contingencies like a line or generator
trip.

Imagine, for instance, that you're fully maxed out on generation with no
reserve, and one generator trips offline. You will now need to trigger
emergency load shedding very, very rapidly (within seconds) to arrest
frequency decline and a cascading, wide-area outage.

So you carry a margin of operating or spinning reserve, essentially generation
that is available to very quickly ramp its output up or down in response to
system conditions. When that margin starts to get eaten away by lack of
capacity, you can do controlled load shedding, where you remove loads that
have been already marked as low-priority to get some of your margin back. By
doing this, you can avoid uncontrolled load shedding, which would have worse
consequences.

Official notice from CAISO:

\---------------------------------------------------------------- NOTICE:
202002424 POSTED: 2020-08-14 18:38:00
\---------------------------------------------------------------- CAISO Grid
STAGE 3 System Emergency Notice [202002424]

The California ISO hereby issues a CAISO Grid Stage 3 System Emergency Notice
effective 08/14/2020 at 18:36 through 08/14/2020 at 23:59.

Reason: California ISO is Reserve Deficient.

Refer to the ISO System Emergency Fact Sheet
([http://www.caiso.com/Documents/SystemAlertsWarningsandEmerge...](http://www.caiso.com/Documents/SystemAlertsWarningsandEmergenciesFactSheet.pdf))
for additional detail.

The ISO requires load curtailments, use of Interruptible Loads* and requests
Out-of-Market (OOM) and Emergency Energy from all available sources. Maximum
conservation efforts are requested.

Spinning Reserves have depleted or are forecast to deplete to levels below
minimum requirements. Load curtailments are required and will continue until
such time as sufficient Spinning Reserves are available.

Monitor system conditions on Today's Outlook
([http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx](http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx))
and check with local electric utilities for additional information.

[http://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/Notifications/AWENoticeL...](http://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/Notifications/AWENoticeLog.aspx)

------
rasz
Richest state of the richest country (by GDP) on the planet folks!

~~~
iaw
Infrastructure is 50+ year investment and everywhere in the country has been
slacking in development. Given the growth of the bay area and the increase in
hot weather due to global climate change the system gets exacerbated because
it's going out of spec.

The fact that it has been as robust (in delivery, not hazard) as it has for
the last 20 years is a testament to its strength.

------
aaomidi
Lol and I made fun of my country when this happened in Iran. Good job America.

~~~
emilsedgh
When we didn't have power in Iran for 2 hours I used to think it's such an
atrocity. It never happened for more than 5-6 hours though.

I had power outage in LA for ~17 hours last month.

~~~
aaomidi
Yep! Same here. This is hilariously bad for a state like California.

I wonder why I got downvoted.

~~~
electriclove
Tribes.. everything is red/blue, white/black, us/them.. you can't say anything
without really pissing off some group.. so disappointing

------
lisper
The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt
government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I
recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running
water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals. 75
years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from
ourselves? :-(

~~~
refurb
That's just your human brain succumbing to its recency bias. As someone who
has been around for way too many decades, it was like this in the 70's, 80's,
90's, 00's.

And corruption is _way down_ from say the early 1900's (don't even talk about
the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt).

And your "save the world from fascism" happened at the same time most of the
US was segregated.

~~~
heavyset_go
And inequality is up since the 70's, as are housing, health care and cost of
living expenses, while wages have remained stagnant for nearly 50 years.

~~~
refurb
Sure, you can cherry pick certain statistics for any period. That doesn’t tell
you anything.

My point was, the US is not falling apart. Or if it is, it’s always been
falling apart.

The current situation is not unique.

~~~
heavyset_go
> _Sure, you can cherry pick certain statistics for any period. That doesn’t
> tell you anything._

I'm curious what this is supposed to tell you, then:

> _And corruption is way down from say the early 1900 's (don't even talk
> about the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt)._

~~~
refurb
That was a counterpoint to the OPs concern about corruption today in an
attempt to convey that it’s not all that different now, not to argue it’s
better now.

------
0x402DF854
Obligatory book recommendation:
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33369264-blackout](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33369264-blackout)

This terrifying novel describes fragility of our society and its absolute
dependence on power grids. Must read in my books

~~~
segfaultbuserr
The more terrifying fact is that the scenario described in the novel has
already partially happened in the real world.

* New Clues Show How Russia’s Grid Hackers Aimed for Physical Destruction

> _Russian hackers planted a unique specimen of malware in the network of
> Ukraine 's national grid operator, Ukrenergo. Just before midnight, they
> used it to open every circuit breaker in a transmission station north of
> Kyiv. The result was one of the most dramatic attacks in Russia's years-long
> cyberwar against its western neighbor._

[https://www.wired.com/story/russia-ukraine-cyberattack-
power...](https://www.wired.com/story/russia-ukraine-cyberattack-power-grid-
blackout-destruction/)

------
scarface74
Why is this only happening in California?

~~~
nemo44x
It’s a huge state with a lot of people with a massive heatwave covering a lot
of it.

It’s easy to rag on California lately but it’s still American’s living there
and I feel bad for them.

~~~
scarface74
What makes California different than Texas? I don’t have a dog in the fight, I
live on the east coast.

~~~
jeffbee
Texas generates more power than it needs (which is good because I seem to
recall they also aren't tied to grids of neighboring states?). California
doesn't. California banks on the probability that it can import power from
Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Arizona, and that all those states won't have
one big correlated, synchronized demand peak, which of course is just
stochastic. Sometimes you get the worst case.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_Texas generates more power than it needs_

And despite whatever stereotypes you might have about Texas, it produces more
power from renewable sources (beside hydro) than any other state in America,
by a pretty fair margin.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_electri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_electricity_production_from_renewable_sources)

~~~
nemo44x
Texas seems to get hate for some reason but everyone I know that lives there
(and many have moved from California) love it. I’ve been many times and I
haven’t found much to dislike other than I prefer the structure of East Coast
cities and towns, which is a personal preference.

Texas is affordable, welcoming, and plays to its strengths. It seems like the
land of opportunity today and it makes sense it is growing so fast. It seems
like I hear jealousy about it in terms of it being a moderate to slightly
conservative state overall.

~~~
scarface74
If Texas is anything like GA, people fly into Atlanta and say it’s not that
bad but never experienced life outside of the metro area.

