This is your SolarWakeup for September 8th, 2020

Power Crisis Part 2. California entered the weekend with a heat wave reaching record temperatures across the state causing grid operators to ask consumers to lower consumption as much as possible. There was no reporting about any widespread outages because Californians responded and a massive buildout of distributed generation helped the distribution networks. This isn’t how it should be done, the grid has a reserve margin and if that margin isn’t being met then the operator needs to increase the reserve threshold. Moreover, consumers shouldn’t have to be philanthropic participants to the transaction. If the grid needs their action, that should be a transaction with financial value. The utilities have the responsibility to serve and came close to failing once again, but don’t wait long to see the failure.

Heat Waves, Fires, Outages. The heat waves caused a power crisis, someone will have to do a dumb it down version on why heat waves (on weekends) cause an undersupply but I digress. About 10 minutes before I started writing this, PG&E announced it would cut power to 172,000 accounts in 22 counties due to low moisture and high temperature environment that is conducive to wild fires. How in the world is that utility still operational? It’s early September and fires are burning in large numbers, the last thing that folks should worry about is losing power in addition to all of the other concerns they are facing. The Bay Area is consumed by smoky conditions at unhealthy levels, no electricity means no circulation or worse if your health conditions require medical devices. Ratepayers in California pay some of the highest rates in the Country and deserve better service for their investments. This is a problem with transmission infrastructure, which is causing the utility to shut off power. Remember that for the paragraph below.

Nationalize This. Here is a tweet from the Secretary of Energy, who never missed an opportunity to make his point and desire to return to the 20th century. The key quote “He [Sec. of Energy] also encourages policymakers to evaluate why the grid is not able to handle extreme stress, which could be alleviated with the support of greater caseload power generation and natural gas supply.” This was in response to the state’s request for federal intervention, clearly a moment of need and not a moment to get a backhanded comment.

Fixed Electricity Price. Here is your question of the day. Why is our electricity price a fixed rate, especially for IOUs? Competitive markets would do a better job of creating the types of behavior the grid needs to be resilient, resilience can’t just happen on the generation side of the ledger. We talk about this and more in this week’s podcast which posts later this week.

Join The Buyer’s Group. Residential installers should be taking advantage of the 20%+ savings in the buyer’s group with new products added last week and more coming. You can fill out the price discovery and get a 1-week trial if you do. 

Opinion

Best, Yann