Signs of a problem within California’s power system emerged a full day before the blackouts hit. Trader Dov Quint sat in his basement outside Boulder, Colorado, scouring the state’s day-ahead power market for opportunities to profit from California’s heat wave. He saw something strange: Prices for electricity to be delivered the next day – the day of the blackouts – were nearing $1,000 a megawatt-hour, more than 26 times higher than last year’s average.
They had a full day to act. And yet, when Friday evening rolled around, nearly 2 million Californians were plunged into darkness in the first rolling blackouts to hit the state since the energy crisis 20 years ago. Without warning, utilities cut power to blocks of communities in a bid to save the state’s electric grid from cascading power failures amid the worst heat wave in generations.
The sun rises over power lines Imperial on Aug. 18.
On that Friday morning, grid operators weren’t panicking — yet. While the heat was certainly driving up demand, they had seen far worse days, such as in July 2006 when demand hit an all-time high of 50.3 gigawatts during a deadly heatwave.
The California Independent System Operator, which runs most of the state’s grid, asked neighboring utilities if they had any extra power to spare, John Phipps, director of real-time operations at the ISO, said at a public meeting the following Monday. But there was none. If utilities had any extra supplies, they were keeping them to themselves in case they needed the power as the heat intensified. So the ISO sent out an alert asking residents to conserve.
108 Degrees
But as temperatures rose, peaking at 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius) in Sacramento, demand climbed and supply looked more and more inadequate.