AND IT JUST GETS EASIER FROM HERE:

[I]mpressively, California's grid weathered the heat wave. Scientific American spoke with Michael Wara, policy director of the Sustainability Accelerator at Stanford University, about the strategic improvements and unconventional tactics that helped the grid hold up and how power systems can decarbonize and still stand up to climate extremes. [...]

What happened after CAISO announced that a level-three emergency would go into effect?

We were all kind of bracing for these rotating outages to start. The expectation was they'd start around 6 P.M., which is when the sun starts to get lower on the horizon this time of year, and so the solar power plants start to produce less energy.

Instead what happened is that--in contrast to 2020--we had several thousand megawatts of battery storage that started providing energy and helped stabilize the situation. And then the grid operator called all of its demand response resources [large-scale consumers that the operator pays to reduce electricity usage] and reduced demand even further. It took about 1,000 megawatts or so off the demand at around 5 or 5:30 P.M.

And then something really interesting happened: CAISO sent a text to people in California and they said, look, you need to reduce your demand right now, or we're going to have to start rotating outages. And basically, at the moment that that text was sent, demand fell in California by something like [3,000 megawatts.] It's not totally clear yet if that was a result of that text. But it's interesting to note that, simultaneous with the text, there was this large decrease in demand--and that allowed the system to ride out the evening hours.

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