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by khuey 2137 days ago
Do we really need to pay for an electric grid that can handle a once every 20 year load?
4 comments

Thanks to climate change, this is probably not going to continue to be a 1 in 20 year load. Expect this to be more and more frequent over the coming years. Might be an every year and/or multiple times a year thing within the next decade or two.

I've read some predictions that suggest these heat waves becoming a regular thing could happen within the next five years, but I'm sticking with more conservative predictions.

Do you really need to pay for house wiring that can handle a once every 20 year load? Pretty sure you would change your tune when the wiring melts in one of your walls.
This is why houses have circuit breakers, which are functionally identical to the load shedding we had last night ...
That's the real question. Even 1 in 10 year load, do you build for it or just live with it? It's just a $ decision.
Grid yes , maybe not the power plants themselves. Typically in robust networks you have good interconnects to neighbours you can purchase power from .

Also robust grid which enables selling back to the grid would have helped, such extreme hot weather goes in hand with solar generation

The problem is not lack of grid capacity. California is capable of importing upwards of 11 GW[0] but there was only around 8 GW[1] available yesterday because it's hot in neighboring states like Oregon too.

The load shedding occurred around 8-10pm after the sun has gone down (but while it's still quite hot) so more solar wouldn't help much.

[0] http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx and select 9/13/2019 [1] Same as above but select 8/14/2020.