RetroFed
Grid operator PJM orders emergency steps to avoid large-scale US power outages
Tony BarkPJM, the largest U.S. power grid operator, said it ordered generators to run at maximum output and bring idle power plants online immediately on Thursday evening, as it faced escalating stress from a heat dome.
PJM’s orders, detailed on its emergency procedures website, were aimed at preserving reliability as it sought to maintain power on a grid serving 67 million people across the Mid-Atlantic, South and Washington, D.C., regions and the world’s largest concentration of data centers.
Even before this week’s heat wave that sent temperatures soaring toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), PJM had been straining to overhaul a system pushed to the brink by surging energy consumption by data centers and electric vehicles.
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Immense Heat is causing the Grid to FAIL on a Regular Basis? Thank GOD we’re Spending Taxpayer Dollars on
Generating LOCAL electricity via solar or wind!Creating LOW Energy environments via shade and walking paths!Public Transportation!OIL and DATA CENTERS!Don’t forget all the dimwits championing the return of more coal fired plants.
My water heater has a remote control that FPL can switch off to manage stress on the power grid, but the slop machines are allowed to stay on full blast?
Kinda…. Different areas are probably different, and no part of this should be construed as defending the insanity around AI, but in my area, data centers are typically part of load-shedding agreements with the local power utility, and they’re likely to simply switch to backup generators to help mitigate demand peaks. In some cases they may back-feed their excess generator power to the grid on a short term basis. Typically speaking there are financial incentives, fees, or offsets that they receive as compensation.
So yes, they’re probably on at full blast, but they’re probably powering it themselves so it’s not a direct impact on grid health.
nice shade thrown at EVs.
Don’t a lot of EVs have systems where they can charge at times when there is less demand (and get a lower rate)?
yes, practically all of them.
I was actually wondering if this would be a thing. This kind of heat across so much of the U.S. is going to be a huge drain.
I still don’t understand why there are so many people on the right that simultaneously want to 1) pretend they are all frontiersmen operating a homestead out on the range, fending off wild animals and gangs of marauders or something and 2) chomp at the bit to reject any kind of distributed energy production (wind, solar) and substitute more centralized options.
Seriously, I was talking last summer to a winger I happen to know and mentioned I wish I could get in on the subsidies for home solar while they are still in place because I anticipate the cost of electricity to go up, but also we sometimes get power outages that can last several hours or sometimes even days.
The way he acted? It’s like I turned to him and said: “I’m gay”. 🤣 I’m sure most of it is driven by the vibes he has about Biden v. Donvict - if Donvict’s group ended something that was attributed to Biden, that’s just inherently a good thing, LOL, and this equation results in: no real man should have solar.
Yeah it’s not a logical position. If you want to needle him you could ask why he trusts the government for his electricity.
If I find myself in that conversation with a wrong-thinker, I couch renewables as a way of reaching independence from a generally uncertain world, energy costs and grid stability (all while avoiding other hot-button topics). I try to discuss the positive aspects for everyone. They are usually agreeable, and I keep pressing (with mild excitement) with how cool the tech is getting, how I am learning things and then talk electricity and now we’re on to general topics and the comfort zone returns for them. Hopefully their perspective changed a smidge. If not, nbd to me.
That’s pretty much how I was talking about it since I know they are kinda tech-oriented. I could just tell I hit onto something winger-identity-oriented, though, even though I was not talking about any personalities (Biden, Trump) but just about how the subsidies are going away at the end of 2025. I think the mention of subsidies might have been the trigger…
BTW, it was interesting to watch some of these types being entirely uncertain about how to think about Tesla, especially early last year. On the year, they’ve been getting told real men should probably alter their enormous diesel trucks to roll coal on EVs, bicyclists, etc. And that owning an EV is really quite gay.
But then along comes Elon with the Nazi shit and he’s working for Donvict, too. Talking to these people and throwing out that I’m thinking of buying an EV was pretty wild last year. It was like they were not yet given all the right talking points to try to thread that needle…. 🤣
One of the funnier reactions when I told them that new EV sales were approaching 10% of sales (this was earlier last year): “Well, Elon is involved… so, um, I guess I’m okay with those being sold here?”
I was like….my dude, no one is asking for the permission of people like you in order to buy these things. It really is like these people think that just because Donvict is in office, everything needs to be run by his supporters for every aspect of life. It’s truly sick. Anyway, that didn’t really seem to register for him, but even more wild was when I was saying how Tesla is going to really have some strong headwinds in China when it comes to trying to sell there. His reaction: well, Trump will have something to say about that. I asked him what he thought Trump was going to do in China to force people to buy Teslas in their market?
These people are hair-trigger man. It’s like they think Donvict “wins” an election here, and even the Chinese market, en masse, should bend the knee to buying Elon’s cars….just because.
AI buildouts really need to be heavily regulated. We cant just allow industry to build as many as they ant and make the water and power generation for those everyone elses problem.
Hoping we get through the next 24 hours or so. My apartment is a heat trap (hotter than the house I’m moving into without AC). It’s 83 in here with the ac running constantly.
Brb, tokenmaxxing.
At my job exec has dashboards around who is spending the most tokens and those spenders are safe from layoffs. People who use zero get the axe. They dont look at exactly what queries we are making though.
If I keep doing this I’m going to be known as “that district heating and cooling guy” but combined heat and power plants are the proven solution for this… Of course it wouldn’t actually work in the US since you never nationalize natural monopolies like power or rail… Instead you have a patchwork network for operators that make the entire network as a whole drastically less efficient, less maintained, less standardized, and with constant rent seeking.
Anyways…
Absorber chillers are a proven solution for producing district cooling with CHP plants. Heat provides cooling in the summer, and heat provides warmth in the winter… CHP plants are 88-92% efficient since they make electricity with their heat first before using what’s left over for heating or cooling.
If you had a district cooling system already like Dubai, this wouldn’t be an issue…
Sure, but we’ve never had a need for it before. And a lot of our stuff was built hundreds of years ago, and retrofitting is a lot harder than building an entirely new city in one go.
District heating is a lot more common and exists as a patchwork across the world in different places including the US I.e. New York has a steam district heating system (why the manholes there steam so strongly.) university campuses also commonly used it for centralized heating and cooling.
Cooling is less common but it does exist in a lot of places. Denmark has a decent amount of district chillers using heat from the city district heating system.
The big issue for north America is after WWI power stations were built at coal mines and power lines transported the power. As a result they were way too far away to act as CHP plants even if they wanted to. Europe retrofitted heat networks into it’s existing cities since it had coal closer, or you were a port city where coal arrived by ship already.
The biggest reason it’s less common is city gas (produced from coal) being used for lamp lights and then heating and cooking basically everywhere in the world at some point. We switched to natural gas in the 1970s to replace it but that same network is still doing the heating/cooking and prevented the need for a shared heat or cooling network.
With a push to renewables it’s easiest to store excess solar or wind as heat in a soapstone battery. They’re extremely cheap to make and store almost as much energy as lithium per ton, with the caveat that it can only store it as heat instead of electricity.
Having a guaranteed customer for over producing solar and wind during sunny/windy days makes renewables a lot cheaper to operate, and that heat gets to do something useful out the other end if you hooked it into a city heating/cooling system.