After a prolonged heatwave blazed across the state, its power grids held up better than in years past, officials said.
Despite a few brief power outages, power authorities saw no need to issue large scale brownouts or blackouts. Rather, the state as a whole was able to export excess electricity to other states in need thanks to a four year investment in renewable energy.
“We’ve brought on thousands of megawatts of new generating resources onto our system,” said Elliot Mainzer, president and CEO of California Independent System Operator. “Thousands of megawatts in solar projects and probably more importantly we’re now close to 10,000 megawatts of batteries on our grid which are able to absorb excess solar energy during the day and reinject it back into the system at night. That’s made a major difference.”
Mainzer said it also helped that San Francisco and Los Angeles did not get as hot as other areas in the state.
PG&E also has a helicopter in the air monitoring transmission lines and prepositioned crews in placed it predicted would be hit the hardest.
“Also, in the South Bay we identified all of the transformers that would have been at risk due to the heat and replaced them with transformers that had a lot more capacity which means that they were able to resist the stress even more and perform better throughout the heat wave,” said Stephanie Magallon, a spokesperson for PG&E.
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