News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #13
Yet another tour around my brain as I try to understand electricity, the duck curve, Texas, and batteries. C'mon!
Hello! I hope everyone enjoyed their two weeks without me clogging your inbox, but I’m back! As always, please write to me with any questions, ideas about what I should cover, and any other feedback you have about News from a Changing Planet.
This week, I’m going to try taking you on another tour of how I read the news, and the different kinds of connections I make to things I’ve previously read or thought about, but if the train of thought feels unfinished, well…I too am a mere mortal with a human-length attention span.
FIRST: EXTREME HEAT AND ENERGY USE.
I was reading about extreme heat for personal reasons (it’s extremely hot in New York), but this piece from Heatmap News ($) about how late summer/early fall heatwaves create problems for the electricity grid — specifically the ability to use solar power — stood out as something I hadn’t thought about much before.
To back up, a problem in renewable energy is the “duck curve”, which describes the relationship between electricity demand and the amount of available solar energy throughout the day. In sunny places with a lot of solar power, the peak supply of solar power coincides with the day’s period of lowest demand (the middle of the day, when most people aren’t home), and then demand ramps up again in the evening when there is less solar power (because the sun has set) but everyone gets home and maybe turns on their AC or runs the dishwasher and watches TV.
What this piece explains (in great depth!) is that September heatwaves are adding to this problem. Later in the year, the sun sets earlier but human time still runs on the clock, not the amount of sunlight. So people are coming home from work, turning on all of their appliances, and it’s getting darker earlier, and the angle of the sun is such that solar panels don’t generate as much power to begin with. When there are extreme heat events in September, such as there are now in Texas, for example, that means less energy is coming from renewable sources, and more is coming from fossil fuels.
[S]]ummer peaks are later in the year in two the country's largest electricity markets: California and Texas.
The Texas energy market had hit its peak day in July in 2022, but it moved out to August this year. And Texas is already bursting through its September demand records. It reached over 78,000 megawatts in just the first week of this month, well over its previous record of 72,370 megawatts, which it set in 2021.And California hit its power demand record last September amidst a heat wave that covered much of the western United States.
The problem here is one of intense demand — mainly coming from the need for air conditioning, because extreme heat can be deadly! — mismatched with supply and inadequate infrastructure (like not enough transmission lines, a problem we’ve talked about here!), all combined with hot weather, which can make power plants less effective, limit the amount of electricity than can be transmitted, and make failures in transformers more likely.
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