from Hacker News

California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

by stx on 8/15/20, 5:43 PM with 237 comments

  • by cipher_system on 8/15/20, 6:57 PM

    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.

  • by strangeloops85 on 8/16/20, 12:25 AM

    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.

  • by p1mrx on 8/15/20, 7:40 PM

    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.

  • by tibbydudeza on 8/15/20, 8:07 PM

    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.

  • by edge17 on 8/15/20, 7:13 PM

    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.

  • by bradly on 8/15/20, 10:28 PM

    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?

  • by jeffbee on 8/15/20, 10:33 PM

    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.

  • by edge17 on 8/15/20, 7:15 PM

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

  • by pwarner on 8/15/20, 7:17 PM

    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.

  • by dmode on 8/15/20, 11:08 PM

    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

  • by fanf2 on 8/15/20, 8:52 PM

  • by perfunctory on 8/15/20, 10:05 PM

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

  • by malchow on 8/15/20, 9:56 PM

    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.

  • by sunstone on 8/17/20, 10:49 AM

    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.

  • by pwarner on 8/15/20, 7:12 PM

    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?

  • by eigenvector on 8/15/20, 9:51 PM

    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...) 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) and check with local electric utilities for additional information.

    http://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/Notifications/AWENoticeL...

  • by rasz on 8/16/20, 1:29 AM

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

  • by aaomidi on 8/15/20, 9:31 PM

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

  • by lisper on 8/15/20, 6:40 PM

    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? :-(

  • by 0x402DF854 on 8/15/20, 7:04 PM

    Obligatory book recommendation: 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

  • by scarface74 on 8/15/20, 7:52 PM

    Why is this only happening in California?