New England’s power grid operator, ISO New England Inc., declared a level 1 emergency alert on Tuesday as a severe heat wave engulfed the northeastern United States.
The alert was issued following unexpected outages in power generation, leaving the grid unable to meet demand while maintaining required reserves, according to Matt Kakley, spokesman for ISO New England.
The grid operator, which serves 7.5 million homes and businesses across six states, saw electricity prices briefly spike to $1,993 per megawatt-hour, over ten times the day-ahead cost.
Despite the warning and the brief spike in cost, ISO New England did not forecast imminent blackouts or rolling brownouts.
The heat wave, arriving just days before the official start of summer, has strained New England’s power infrastructure.
The situation has been exacerbated by the recent permanent shutdown of a significant natural-gas power plant in Massachusetts, reducing the region’s power supply and the ability to rapidly generate more power in response to sudden increases in demand.
On Tuesday, backup oil generation was activated to help meet the demand, accounting for an estimate 4 percent of the supply during the hotter parts of the day and evening.
The potential for further problems with the power grid supply are expected to persist until temperatures cool.
Peak demand is expected to reach 23,750 megawatts on Thursday, June 20, potentially the highest this year but within the forecasted range for the summer season, according to ISO New England.
<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="28779 https://www.themainewire.com/?p=28779">6 Comments
Fingers crossed the whole grid goes tits up. Maybe then those costal morons will pull their heads out of their arses and fire all the useless farks in Augusta.
In the scheduling of fossil resources, natural gas generators were the final go to source since they so outpriced coal and nuclear.
Nuclear as stable base load. Coal for the lions shart. Gas as final burst energy and demand load fill to meet reserve.
So what did they do? Demolished Nuclear and coal plants and left very prices nat gas as the primary. No base load stability in the system. Living on the edge.
Prior to industry collapsing in Maine it was common for warnings/requests for Maine residents to temporarily delay optional use of electricity when possible when it was very cold or very hot. This was back when more hydroelectric dams were online and Maine Yankee was still adding 900 megawatts into the grid. The difference today isn’t a better grid with more capacity – it’s due to shuttered mills and factories not consuming electrical power.
Opposition to nuclear energy reached critical mass after the China Syndrome hit the theaters. If only 2000 Mules, 2016 – Obama’s America, or 1984 had the same impact……………….
Yesterday was just about the longest sunlight day of the year here in Maine. Around the Bangor area they are filling every empty field with those wonderful solar farms. With all the sun yesterday and all the solar farms there are in this area one would have thought that they would have really strutted their stuff yesterday and shown us just how well that green energy can power the grid. And shown that us conservative fools are talking through our backsides when we say it won’t work.
Up here in Dover Foxcroft, The Foxcroft Academy field house has the largest roof top solar array in Maine. We should have seen Reddy Kilowatt running all over that place yesterday around 5. Instead we had about 10,000 people out of power for an hour or more. The academy made their brags about just how wonderful their solar array really is and how it’s going to help save the planet. What they did NOT tell people is that their solar array is on the roof facing EAST when it should be facing south. Gets very little sun in the afternoons. And they did NOT tell people that it is mounted on a very low pitched roof, about 3 inches pitch in one foot. For solar panels to work best the sun has to strike them at as close to 90 degrees as possible. That roof top array is near worthless other than making the local libs feel good about themselves. In the winter it sits totally buried in snow and ice for weeks. Some saving the planet. I agree with another poster here that we need serious blackouts so that even idiots can see that it won’t ever work. Yesterday was just the first stage. Way many more total failures coming.
How convenient.
All part of the plan….
Best to buy you’re own generator sourced by solar/gas and let the world burn