Dive Brief:
- High temperatures across the U.S. – particularly in the mid-Atlantic region – spurred the U.S. Department of Energy to order the PJM Interconnection to maximize generation output, and PJM is forecasting that Thursday’s load could break its 2006 summer hourly integrated record peak of 165,563 MW.
- “Given the emergency caused by the expected load stress,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright wrote in DOE’s Tuesday order, “additional dispatch of the Specified Resources is necessary to best meet the emergency and serve the public interest.” Those specified resources are all fossil fuel plants, including many dual natural gas and fuel oil plants.
- The order also approved PJM’s request to be able to “direct transmission owners, if required as a last resort prior to voltage reduction or load shed, to curtail data centers and other large loads that have backup generation.”
Dive Insight:
“Dangerous, record-breaking heat will continue across most of the central and eastern U.S through Friday then focusing on the eastern U.S. through the Independence Day weekend,” the National Weather Service said Thursday. Peak heat indices of up to 115 degrees and numerous daily temperature records are possible, it said.
Other RTOs and utilities that serve the eastern U.S. issued warnings and requests for customers to conserve energy. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator issued a conservative operations declaration on Tuesday due to the heat, and Con Edison put out an alert asking customers to “limit use of multiple A/Cs and large appliances between 2 and 10 p.m. during the heat wave.”
The New York Independent System Operator said it expects the highest load from the heat wave to arrive on Thursday, with a projected peak of 32,410 MW.
ISO New England expects 25,850 MW of peak load from the heat wave to arrive around 7 p.m. Thursday, and said it is “expecting exceptionally tight operating conditions on the regional electric grid” at that time.
In PJM’s request to DOE for an emergency order, the RTO asked that “the order make clear that PJM may call upon its Transmission Owners to work with Electric Distribution Companies to take lawful actions to implement this order and support large load customers in bringing these backup resources online (including by disconnecting large loads from utility source powers).”
“Because the additional generation may result in conflict with environmental standards and requirements, I am authorizing only the necessary additional generation on the conditions contained in this Order,” Wright said.
The order noted that there exist “tens of gigawatts of readily available backup generation that have remained largely untapped,” particularly the backup generation resources at data centers – including hyperscaler facilities – and other large load sites.
PJM also noted that on June 25, it issued a recall for all “maintenance outages to be returned to service by today to increase the amount of generation available to meet customer demand.”
AccuWeather said Wednesday that 167,000 outages were reported across the U.S. on Tuesday night, and warned that the “combination of extreme heat, surging air conditioning demand and rounds of thunderstorms could quickly push outage totals higher again.”
“The extreme heat and humidity are expected to bring near-record, or possibly record, energy usage to the mid-Atlantic power providers,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alan Reppert said. “This is especially critical on Thursday, as some companies could see possible power cuts to stabilize the grid if it becomes unstable.”