Many things, seemingly unconnected, sometimes are, and the summer heat's connections to dams is one such connection we need reminding of.
Hydroelectric power, which comes from dams, supplies a good percentage of our power running our air conditioners, and is one of the options needed to be included in the mix as our population grows and our infrastructure grows to cope.
Hopefully we won’t have another disaster like the blackout meltdown five years ago to spur our public leaders to prepare for the future.
An excerpt.
Dan Walters: California beats the heat this time around, but for how long?
By Dan Walters -- Bee Columnist Published 12:01 am PDT Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Electric power consumption mushroomed to record levels Monday as interior California baked in the year's most powerful heat wave, raising the specter of blackouts in the minds of those who recall the state's energy crisis five years ago.
The good news is that California's power grid, with more generation on line and some transmission bottlenecks fixed in the last few years, handled Mother Nature's test with aplomb.
While statewide power consumption approached 60,000 megawatts as air conditioners battled the late afternoon heat, California maintained a relatively comfortable cushion against the failure of one or more power plants.
The bad news is that the state Energy Commission, in a new projection published this month, says that the state's power reserves will shrink as its population continues to grow by more than a half-million people a year, with especially heavy growth in hot interior valleys.
California's increasingly evident east-west political division is also a meteorological split, as Monday's weather indicated. Temperatures along the coast were expected to top out in the 70s, or even lower, while those in inland areas soared well past the century mark, approaching 110 in Sacramento and even hotter in Palm Springs and other desert towns.
The Energy Commission pegs the state's peak power supply at over 70,000 megawatts, including about 13,000 imported from out of state. But new power plants due to come on line will be offset by retirements of older plants, leaving the supply virtually stagnant while each year the peak demand increases by about 2 percent, or approximately 1,000 to 1,200 megawatts. Thus, the commission says, the reserve cushion may shrink by a third or more by the end of the decade.
