Written by Will Hekman
With the summer heatwave beginning in California and Texas, power and natural gas prices have spiked to multi-month highs this week as homes and businesses turn the air conditioning on to beat the heat.
The California Independent System Operator, which operates and runs a majority of the state’s power grid, has told consumers to prepare to conserve energy if need be, similar to what they said last year before the blackouts struck. In the state of Texas, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), made a similar urge to consumers to prevent the high demand and outages from generator strain.
Both states have imposed rolling outages to avoid massive power outages across their power grids. California in August 2020 during a massive heatwave and Texas in February 2021 during a massive winter storm that hurt much of the state.
Rolling outages are used to leave a certain number of consumers without power for a short time before switching the outage to another group of consumers. In Texas, ERCOT was subject to criticism during the last set of rolling outages when many people were left without power for days.
Despite Newsom’s promise to fix the energy grid in time for this summer’s heat nothing has changed and Californians can expect to see similar blackouts to what was experienced last summer. Many businesses had to close for days at a time as California tried to get the situation under control, costing the state millions in tax revenue over just a few days.
The California Independent System Operator has forecasted that demand would reach 42,152 megawatts on Wednesday. The all-time high was 50,270 megawatts in July 2006.
