Suns out, AC is on, How You Can Help Minimize Summer Energy Demand

Lately, every summer seems like the new “hottest summer ever.” The NOAA even has the statistics to back that up! Not only does that make getting into your car like stepping inside a mobile oven, but that heat wreaks havoc on the nation’s power grids.

In the summer, we already use way more energy than any other season. Your AC unit works hard against the sun to keep your home cool and livable, and it’ll continue to work harder as the heat turns up.?

Multiply that by millions of homes and businesses, and you’ve got a recipe for an oversized short-circuit.

That’s a blackout, just like the ones we’ve been hearing more and more about in recent years. The risk of them has been rising while the heat pushes more people to crank their air conditioners for longer, sucking up more power than aging power plants are prepared to supply.

Power plants already work like circus jugglers to balance meeting the growing energy demand without overloading the grid, and the means of creating the energy needed, or load, in the first place. But they do have very skillful hands.

Plants plan their production by following seasonal energy-use curves. Load-following plants change their output by the minute. If they overproduce a small amount, it gets released as heat. If they fail, backup plants can take over.?

In recent years, plants have been forced to push their output closer to maximum capacity for longer, which means more potential for wear and tear. Aging plants need the most maintenance, which usually happens in Spring and Fall, but heat waves and cold snaps keep plants online, robbing valuable maintenance time.?

Plants are also losing efficiency as the water used to cool their systems, create steam, or turn turbines is getting preheated and evaporating. They also suffer from the geopolitical conflicts that influence the amount of fuel they can access, along with more frequent and destructive wildfires burning through parts of the grid.

This leaves suppliers two options: either raise prices or beg consumers to use less energy. But there are some budding, brighter possibilities.

The obvious answer is renewable energy, but it isn’t exactly so simple.

Renewables offer a small relief, but aren’t yet powerful enough to meet demand. They aren’t always easy to integrate into the central power grid. And in some places, more aging fossil fuel plants are retired quicker than renewables can replace them.

So, how can we use what we have more efficiently?

Demand Response Programs are offered by local grids to large businesses, to make energy efficiency more profitable. During peak demand times, they take into account the business’ needs, its energy consumption, and the grid’s reliability, to figure out what changes to make. And if those changes are made, dollars are paid.

Wouldn’t it be cool if that happened on a residential scale too? It's already happening in states across the country. In both New York City and California, the GridRewards app allows customers to do exactly that- earn money for lowering their carbon footprint.

Smart Grids are a system where power is fed through the grid to consumers, and information is sent back to the utility to meet energy demand with less waste. Smart Grids include upgrades that improve the efficiency of energy in “transmission” from the power plant to consumers. That feedback is used to reduce peak demand, costs, time between the start and end of a blackout, and more.

These are amazing developments, but it’s not enough to use what we have better. Some things have to change.

Enter grid-scale battery storage.

A BESS is a very large battery. One that, with some friends, can power 130,000 homes. A BESS can also respond to energy fluctuations instantaneously, which will help with blackouts, and mean no more randomly dimming lights at home. In the first 3 months of this year, 4 times as many BESSs went online as the same time last year. As they develop to hold even more energy, we’ll only see more implementation.

Microgrids are another option. Think of them as a little island of clean energy. They serve a small area, like a neighborhood or college campus, linked to, yet fully independent from the central power grid. They also have smart grid technologies that allow a higher level of management and efficiency.

And what if our buildings were more efficient too? “Integrative design” is a way of rethinking building design, with the idea that individual parts can offer more to the whole. It’s like going from box-recipe brownies to knowing exactly how much of which ingredients create the flavor you want. The process overhauls design from start to finish, creating more room for communication between departments, and including specialist input on sustainability.?

Check in next month for our next topic!