Can American utilities avoid summer blackouts?
T HIS IS THE highest-risk cautionary warning. That is how John Moura, an official at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation ( NERC ) recently described the dangers facing Americas power grid this summer. In May the expert group predicted an unusually scorching one in the west and south-west, with a worsening drought and wildfires. This witchs brew of forces, it warned, threatens a power grid that is already vulnerable. The boffins were quickly proven right. A dramatic heatwave has struck large parts of the American west. The prospect of power cuts is unpleasant for everyone. For electric utilities in the hot zone, it is a nightmare. The meteorological uncertainties wrought by climate change are compounded by the human factor, as people preparing for the scorchers buy air-conditioning units that, if switched on, will hugely increase demand for power. If that were not complicated enough, electricity providers face retroactive penalties if regulators decide they did not do enough to keep the lights on. Pacific Gas & Electric ( PG & E ), whose customers suffered blackouts as wildfires raged in northern California in the past two years, may need to pony up fines and legal-settlement fees of nearly $150m for alleged mishandling of those outages. Utilities in New York are threatened with $140m in penalties for alleged failures in responding to storms and demand spikes. The utilities claim such punishments are unfair, pointing to their investments in the grid. In some respects, they have a point. Across the west, new clean-power capacity generation is helping to offset that lost as dirtier fossil-fuel plants are retired. American solar capacity has more than doubled in the past four years, exceeding 100 gigawatts ( GW ) for the first time. In the first quarter utilities installed 2.5 GW of new wind capacity, chiefly in California, Oklahoma and Texas. American electricity providers have historically put up big new power plants rather than experiment with distributed energy and demand management. As evidence emerges that these can help stabilise the grid and avoid rolling blackouts, their attitudes are changing, notes Rebecca Miller of Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy.