Another Reason We Need the Smart Grid - Record Heat
It’s baking in New York City, with temperatures hitting over 100 degrees (feels like 105 with the humidity), and excessive heat warnings are telling people to avoid strenuous activity outside. Over 10,000 people have checked in to “Heatpocalypse” on FourSquare. On these blazing summer days you should be thinking about everything your utility is doing to prepare for the Heatpocalypse and also taking note of just how important it is for utilities to invest in smart-grid technology.
Your utility actually spends years getting ready for days like this. When scorching heat sends people indoors to ratchet up their air conditioners, the demand for power spikes and constrains the grid in many regions. The grid needs to operate in a constant balance of supply and demand, so when demand zooms way up, utilities have a few stop gap measures to meet that load.
One way utilities meet these peaks, is by using on-demand generators. For example, PJM, a regional transmission organization serving a population of 51 million, commonly starts generators to control regulation as often as hundreds of times per day. On Thursday the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator (MISO), which is responsible for the bulk power in a dozen states in the Midwest, issued an emergency alert and said the raging temperatures had stretched the load on its generators far more than it had predicted, reported CNN.
[...]
Comments
Post a Comment