WILLIAM RAU

Murphy’s Law, “If anything can go wrong, it will,” merits climate crisis amplification: If two things can go wrong simultaneously, they will. And they have via electricity blackouts due to extreme weather. Examples: California in August 2020, and Texas in February 2021. Multiday blackouts during Texas’ polar vortex killed 700. Bitter cold is deadly, brutal heat even more so. Therefore, if we could foretell a huge Illinois heatwave during, say, August 2025, what should we do now to prevent or reduce the lethality of possible Texas-like blackouts?

First, let’s start by assembling a statewide network of cooling centers equipped with solar-plus-storage. Grid-independent electricity ensures the center’s air conditioning during outages, while also helping reduce growing capacity shortages. With storage, centers can sever their grid connections and, with solar electricity, continue cooling heat-vulnerable Illinoisans. Centers with solar only go down with the grid. Importantly, solar-plus-storage will pay for itself. Unlike diesel generators that just sit there, solar produces cash flow every day the sun shines. When unneeded, stored electricity can be sold for top dollar during electricity peaks. To paraphrase Dire Straits, cooling center solar-plus-storage is “air conditioning for nothing, life insurance for free.”

How much storage does Illinois need? New York and California offer clues. New York will be adding at least 6,000 MW of storage by 2030. California, which already has 6,000 MW in place, will be adding at least another 2,000 MW by 2026. To match these states, Illinois would need to procure about 4,000 MW of storage. However, Illinois may need more storage per megawatt of electric capacity than either New York or California due to the dominance and non-dispatchability of our nuclear power plants.

Second, we would vastly expand “demand response” and wed it to storage for “demand flexibility.” Under demand response, utilities pay voluntary participants to reduce electricity use during peak demand. It’s cheaper, better, and much faster to reduce demand than increase supply. Demand flexibility goes further by using storage to shift consumption to any time energy use is low. The two together greatly flatten the duck curve — that is, being able to more efficiently utilize solar energy that would otherwise be curtailed due to the state’s reliance on nuclear energy. Demand flexibility reduces total megawatts of peak demand and the speed of the late afternoon-evening ramp to peak use (the duck’s neck and head). Big ramps require lots of standby electricity capacity whose impending shortage could cause Ameren service area blackouts in the mid-2020s. It’s the duck’s tall head (the fast ramp to elevated peak demand) that will bring down the grid during a heatwave.

So, how are we doing? Worse than wretched. Ameren has developed only 1.7 MW of demand response for estimated peak demand of 1,700 MW for 2022 through 2025: one tenth of 1 percent. Granted this right by the Illinois General Assembly, this Missouri Corporation is licensed to gamble with the happiness and lives of Illinois customers.

Finally, we need more generation capacity. This year 4,700 MW of Illinois coal power will retire with only 1,000 MW of wind and possibly 1,500 MW of solar as replacement: a 2022 deficit of about 2,000 MW. It therefore behooves the General Assembly to quickly enact a Demand Flexibility & Renewables Acceleration Act. California and New York are rapidly installing enough renewables-plus-storage to meet their 21st Century needs. We are not and will pay dearly if Murphy’s Climate Law intervenes.

References

Aldhouse, Peter, et al. 2021 (May 26). The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says. BuzzFeed; https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/texas-winter-storm-power-outage-death-toll

Goldenberg, Cara & Mark Dyson. 2018 (Feb 14). Pushing the Limit: How Demand Flexibility Can Grow the Market for Renewable Energy. Rocky Mountain Institute; https://rmi.org/demand-flexibility-can-grow-market-renewable-energy/

Plautz, Jason. 2022 (Jan 7). New York to double energy storage target to at least 6 GW by 2030. Utility Dive; https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-to-double-energy-storage-target-to-at-least-6-gw-by-2030/616793/

St. John, Jeff. 2021 (Jun 25). California just OK’d a massive new buildout of renewables and clean storage. Canary Media; https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/california-approves-11-5-gw-of-zero-carbon-resources-by-2026-no-natural-gas-required