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Amid Insane Heat Wave, Can The Pacific Northwest Power Grid Handle The Stress?

This article is more than 2 years old.

From 1894 until last month, Seattle had only recorded three days in history over 100°F. That’s three really hot days in 127 years. And none were in June whose previous record high was 96°F.

Then came this June, where in its last week, three days in a row exceeded 100°F. The last Saturday exceeded 102°F and Sunday was 104°F, the hottest day ever recorded…until the following day, when the temperature was 108°F degrees.

The whole Northwest was hot. "Portland had to shut down all its streetcar and light rail lines yesterday, because equipment was melting," pointed out 350 Seattle's Stacy Oaks.

The eastside of Washington, where the Hanford site sits, was even hotter. With almost three weeks of greater than 100°F, with many exceeding 110°F. That same Monday was 116°F, the next day was 117°F, followed by 113°F, then 108°F. Another ten days will follow with temperatures averaging 100°F, unlike anything I have seen here in 35 years, or anyone else here in living memory. 

As Annette Cary at the Tri-City Herald reported, extreme heat in the Northwest may force the Bonneville Power Administration to impose some rolling power outages in Eastern Washington as extreme heat puts stress on its transmission system. BPA is maximizing its transmission now by scheduling no maintenance on the system that could possibly interrupt delivery during the heat wave. Similarly for electricity generators – anyone who can must generate electricity, no maintenance outages.

“We take our responsibility to provide reliable electricity to the consumer-owned utilities in the region very seriously,” said BPA Administrator John Hairston. “We are working hard to provide non-stop, reliable electricity this weekend to help residents and businesses stay cool and safe during the heatwave.”

Fortunately, a small front moved into the region, cooling things down to just the low 100°s and preventing BPA from needing to consider rolling blackouts.

The record breaking heat here in the Northwest is directly attributable to the shift in the jet stream and changes in ocean currents in connection with warming.

Heat waves are rough, but if you have air conditioning, reliable power and plenty of water, you won’t be hurt. But if you don’t have one of these, then things can get bad.

Seattle never had many air conditioners in residences. The increased hot weather over the last decade has changed that a bit, but more than half the people in Seattle still have no air conditioning.

We used to have a resilient and reliable grid but that is also changing. America’s aging electrical infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable to outages and other disruptions, especially weather-related events (see figure).

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), the leading transnational regulatory body, is struggling to produce measurable and enforceable reliability standards for power systems. One reason for this is that the organization does not adequately account for outages occurring in the distribution system and incidents related to severe weather, both of which are on the rise.

This is not surprising since for the last decade the American Society of Civil Engineers has given America between a D+ and a C- on our energy infrastructure report card, as well as most other areas of our infrastructure.

A separate report from the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory and other researchers warned that extreme heat, dry spells and water scarcity could cause grid failures because more than 70% of U.S. power plants require cooling.

Severe weather events over the last few years have demonstrated that we need to harden our grid against severe weather events, and that we can do so. It’s just that we don’t. Texas, California, Florida, all have been warned about extreme weather events, and even had a few demonstrations of how vulnerable they were. Then they still did nothing.

"In some cases, the utilities and operators know what they need to do, but it's an issue of investment and funding to make sure the grid is resilient," said NREL analyst Ariel Miara, adding, "They are not always able or willing to make those investments."

Jeff Dagle is Chief Electrical Engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and co-director of the Washington State University and PNNL’s Advanced Grid Institute, which works to improve real-time grid simulation so operators can better control it, among other activities. As a national laboratory in service to the nation, PNNL's mission includes grid-related emergency response.

Dagle says that "grid resilience means you are anticipating extreme events and preparing for them. On the grid, electrons are flying around at the speed of light. If you have a disturbance on your grid, the disturbance can propagate faster than your ability to control it. So you have to predict what can happen and make sure you're not going to add stress to the system.”

PNNL’s Dynamic Contingency Analysis Tool does just that - helps utilities anticipate and manage power and grid instability during extreme events, like mitigating wildfire threat to the grid, enabling operators to see and reinforce weak spots on the grid to stop cascading power losses or blackouts.

But the Pacific Northwest has a few other tools for addressing. Our extensive amount of hydropower is a great resource for grid dispatchers because it can follow the short-term variations in load, helping with frequency and voltage support. 

Some hydropower can store water for longer periods of time, allowing for daily or even seasonal storage, to use when it is most needed. The only limit is water availability.

“Even with streamflows below average levels, [with the region’s 31 federal dams] we are in a good position to serve our customers over this very hot weekend,” said Senior Vice President of Power Services Suzanne Cooper.

Despite the lower-than-average water year, there is plenty of water behind Grand Coulee Dam and some snowpack left in the Canadian Rockies. Unlike 2015 and 2001, years with a similar volume of available water, the shape of this year’s runoff has been slower with snow gradually melting above Grand Coulee.

In a different way, another tool we have is our nuclear plant, the Columbia Generating Station, which provides a consistent source of baseload power to the grid, operating 95% or more of the time, regardless of weather, stabilizing and supporting the grid. During the heat wave it is at 100%.

Another tool is called Demand Response, in which large customers, like paper mills, agree to stop using power for a short time if the system is facing a sudden emergency, like an imminent cascading failure. In exchange, they get a reduction in the electricity rate for some time period. 

But there is a dark cloud on the horizon. It’s called high renewable penetration, the amount of renewables as a percentage of total generation. Presently, renewables are about 10% of total U.S. generation, and about 6% of Washington State’s. Above 15%, problems with reliability occur, as there isn’t sufficient generation to back-up the grid when the weather causes renewables to stop producing.

During periods of extreme heat, all resources that are available to generate electricity are called upon. Unfortunately, often periods of extreme temperatures are associated with a stationary high pressure weather system, which diminishes the availability of wind generation. Solar decreases in the late afternoon and stops into the evening, before the peak load ends. 

This requires other flexible resources to be able to ramp up and serve the demand during those periods when solar and wind stop generating. Usually, that’s natural gas or hydro, although small modular nuclear reactors are designed for just this purpose. The gas plants are paid to idle and be ready, at significant cost.

Above 15% renewable generation, in the absence of a lot of expensive idling back-up gas, long-term storage needs to be a big part of the picture. Unfortunately, we don’t have much long-term storage yet and it is unsure when it will be available at the level we need.

So - during extreme weather events, we need to have more controllability, including flexible and dispatchable generation resources, more demand side resource dispatchability to limit load in specific areas, and more storage that provides spatial and temporal flexibility. In 2017, the National Academies issued a report on grid resilience that provided more detailed information on these strategies.  

All of this requires making the necessary investment in grid resilience. It appears that the infrastructure bill is becoming more and more important.

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