Soaring electricity demand must be ‘good citizen of the grid’ says California energy chief

But Siva Gunda warns extreme climate conditions pose unprecedented challenges

“Climate change is making it difficult to fight climate change,” according to Siva Gunda, vice-chair of the California Energy Commission.

Gunda explained that increasingly worsening extreme weather events are making present day methods of energy planning obsolete and he called for a “third paradigm of strategic planning”.

He was speaking at the International Renewable Agency’s (IRENA) Innovation Week in Bonn, Germany, where the spotlight was on innovations to accelerate the energy transition.

Gunda explained that in 2020, California suffered its first blackouts in 20 years, “because the temperatures had departed so much outside what we had planned for”.

And he added a year later, droughts dried up reservoirs of hydropower plants.

These events, he said, illustrated the need for a “strategic reserve for those hours of the year when these events will strike”.

More from IRENA Innovation Week:
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California energy agenda

“California’s climate agenda is based on rapid electrification. With renewables we need to start forecasting supply and match demand to it.”

Last week, the state celebrated a clean energy milestone: the installation of 10,000 direct current fast chargers for electric vehicles.

That goal was set in 2018 by then governor Jerry Brown as part of an executive order, and since that time, the number of fast chargers installed in the state has nearly quadrupled from 2,657 to more than 10,000 today.

And Gunda said that by 2030 there will be seven million electric vehicles on the road in California.

The challenge, he stressed, was “how do you seamlessly take that demand and make it a ‘good citizen’ of the grid to keep the lights on?”.

Originally published on Power Engineering International.