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California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) admitted Thursday that the state still faces the risk of blackouts in heat waves despite investing in battery capacity to store electricity for use in times of peak demand. The Los Angeles Times reported: Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that California continued to rapidly add the battery storage that is crucial to the transition to cleaner energy, but admitted it was still not enough to avoid blackouts during heat waves. … Asked by reporters if California now had enough battery storage so that residents no longer had to worry about blackouts during times of high...

The emergence of new technologies means demand is soaring for power across the country; in Georgia, "demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently," Evan Halper said for The Washington Post. Northern Virginia "needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all [its] new data centers," Halper said, while Texas faces a similar problem. This demand is resulting in a "scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid." At the same time, companies...

A solar flare slammed into the Pacific Ocean on Monday, causing radio blackouts, while a second is set to hit the Earth on Tuesday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a geomagnetic storm watch on Monday, monitoring two large solar flares ejecting from the sun. Both left the sun on Sunday, the first hitting over the Pacific on Monday, while the second is projected to make contact on Tuesday. Despite the cosmic proportions of the event, NOAA said citizens shouldn’t be concerned. Some minor inconveniences could occur, such as minor power grid interruptions or an impact on radios, aviation...

NERC is a nonprofit organization that oversees the reliability and security of the North American bulk power system. It uses a results-based approach. After conducting their ten-year assessment, NERC sent a grim warning of our energy future. We face a serious electricity shortage beginning in the next few years that will exist for years to come. This isn’t news. It has been clear for some time that the elimination of fossil fuels before there is an adequate power supply to take its place will endanger the safety and security of Americans. It is also obvious that this has been engineered...

People should stock up on battery-powered radios and torches, as well as candles and first aid kits in order to prepare for power cuts or digital communications going down, the deputy prime minister reportedly said. According to the Times, Oliver Dowden described the supplies as “analogue capabilities that it makes sense to retain” in a digital age during a visit to Porton Down, the UK’s military laboratory. Dowden made the visit to coincide with his first annual risk and resilience statement, which he had promised to give last year when launching the government’s UK resilience framework. As part of the...

Renewable stocks are taking an outsized beating among other stocks in the utility sector, which was down more than 10% last quarter. Investors may be betting that going green will take longer and require more capital in a higher-for-longer interest rate environment. “As utilities struggle with converting to more green energy, their operating margins are getting squeezed until they can get their utility rates increased,” Louis Navellier, founder of Navellier, a money management firm, told Yahoo Finance. Higher interest rates are impacting the renewable sector because clean energy projects are capital intensive. [snip] “There is an exodus from ESG products...

AI has shown dramatic potential in many fields, and there is no doubt that it will knock some occupations on the head. This article chronicles how AI may revolutionize fields such as medicine, automotive, agriculture, and entertainment. So anyway, all great stuff, right? Except…what does this mean for energy? AI is a power hog the likes of which it is, frankly, hard to imagine. And it is about to explode in size. Consider these few examples...... (Long read, but do it......)

We’re on the precipice of a radical experiment with a national electricity grid The AEMO (manager of the Australian grid) has finally released the major report on problems coming in the next ten years on our national grid, and it’s worse than they thought even six months ago. They euphemistically refer to the coming “reliability gaps”. They could have said “blackouts” instead, but a gap in reliability sounds so much nicer. Bizarrely, the lead graph of the 175 page AEMO report goes right off the scale, mysteriously peaking in the unknown and invisible real estate off the top of the...

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has embraced "dirty" energy for California as he looks to stave off blackouts threatening the state's strained energy grid. While Newsom has pushed for a transition to renewable energy in California, the realities there have forced him to increasingly rely on nonrenewable energy sources to meet the state's energy demands. Fighting off heavy criticism from environmental activists, the California governor has countered by pointing out the practical necessity of using some nonrenewables while stressing his efforts to transition to renewable energy. ... "Gov. Newsom is committed to keeping the lights on while maintaining affordability for all...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (NSF) - Florida utility regulators and other industry officials are objecting to a federal proposal aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants. Regulators argue the changes could drive up costs for consumers and hurt the reliability of the state’s electric system. The Florida Public Service Commission on Tuesday approved sending a document to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency raising concerns that the proposed rule could result in unjust and unreasonable carbon emissions performance standards that would risk the safety, reliability and affordability of electric service in Florida. The EPA released the wide-ranging proposal in May, saying it...

Sammy Roth is an energy & environment reporter for the LA Times. Last week he asked a serious question on Twitter: Would it really be so bad if we had occasional blackouts as the cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels sooner?Serious question for energy/climate people… How bad would it be if growing levels of solar on the grid — and continued gas-plant closures — resulted in occasional, relatively limited power outages on hot evenings? Assuming that only lasted a few years?— Sammy Roth (@Sammy_Roth) July 14, 2023I’m not an energy writer for a major newspaper but this immediately strikes...

* The growth in EV demand is outpacing the infrastructure needed to charge them, with experts predicting the need for more than a million new public EV charging stations in the U.S. by 2030 to accommodate the demand. * Both cobalt and silicon, which are crucial for renewable energy sources like EV batteries, are in oversupply, causing bearish pressure on their prices; increased output from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and China is a key reason behind this. * The production of grain-oriented electrical steel (GOES), necessary for the power sector and increasingly hard to source, is facing difficulties...

Summer’s coming. That means sunshine, swimming, cookouts — and blackouts. That’s the warning from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. According to NERC, at least two-thirds of the country is at risk for major power outages this summer. This extends to most everyone west of the Mississippi except for Texas. Texas and much of the Midwest will be fine, the report says, so long as we don’t experience hot, windless summer days. Well, that’s a relief. When do we ever get hot, windless summer days in Texas and the Midwest? Part of the problem is the steady removal of fossil-fuel...

How many warnings does it take before the Biden Administration wakes up to the risks from its climate policies to the U.S. electric grid? The latest came this month from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), and please pray the wind keeps blowing. NERC’s summer reliability assessment forecasts that no less than two-thirds of the U.S., including most everyone living west of the Mississippi River, could experience power outages. Texas and most of the Midwest should have enough power to meet demand—assuming they don’t experience any sizzling hot and still summer days. Texas last summer narrowly averted a power...

Western embassies including the United States and Australia have advised their citizens in the country to stock up on “several days worth” of food and water and be on high alert during extended blackouts sweeping the country. South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a national “state of disaster” on February 9 in response to the record electricity shortage, which has seen state-owned power company Eskom institute rolling blackouts

(ATLANTA, Ga.) — Governor Brian Kemp announced today that Qcells, one of the largest and most-recognizable renewable energy operations, will spend over $2.5 billion to expand solar manufacturing in Georgia. It will build a new facility in Cartersville, and add a third facility to its existing campus in Dalton. Over 2,500 jobs will be created for North Georgia, and the completed facilities will bring Qcells’ total solar panel production capacity to 8.4 gigawatts by 2024.

The brutal, unrelenting cold that lasted for several days over the Christmas holiday froze off a sizable portion of Appalachia’s ample gas production, cutting off supply to power plants when they needed it most. Gas transmission pipelines said the gas they were promised simply didn’t show up. On the electric grid that connects Pennsylvania to 12 other states, at one point almost 25% of the capacity on the system either didn’t start up or broke while operating, leaving coal and petroleum-fired units to pick up the slack. PJM, a Valley Forge-based grid operator, is still analyzing what happened during the...

Talk about making friends and influencing people. Duke Energy, one of the main power providers for the Carolinas, really stepped in it over the Christmas weekend. For the first time in the energy company’s history, they were forced to institute rolling blackouts and beg their customers to conserve power…in the middle of a ferocious winter storm on Christmas Eve. For the first time in the company’s history, Duke Energy enacted rolling blackouts on Christmas Eve amid freezing temperatures. The move left half a million customers without power. And on Tuesday, the company issued an apology, attributing several compounding factors as...

Rolling blackouts during the recent cold wave has raised concern about the reliability of our electricity grid, but the growing possibility of deliberate sabotage may be a bigger threat. The first sign America’s electricity grid might have become a target occurred in 2013, when a marksman disabled an electricity substation south of San Jose with more than a hundred long-range shots reportedly from a .50-caliber rifle. This was no casual prank or random act of vandalism. It was clearly planned, and the damage required nearly a month to repair. At the time the FBI downplayed the incident, saying publicly that...

On Christmas Eve, 2022, in North Carolina, something happened that had never happened before in living memory. People across the state were alerted by their power company, Duke Energy, that there would be rolling blackouts in the aftermath of a severe (but “not exceedingly rare”) winter wind storm. At least 12 other states received similar and previously unheard-of warnings. Before, rolling blackouts were a California problem, then they also became a Texas problem. Blackouts are spreading faster than even Imperial College London modelers would find believable. Duke was still warning North Carolina customers of potential blackouts two days later. At...