It’s officially summer, and the grid is stressed

We rely on electricity to keep ourselves comfortable, and more, safe. These are the moments when we design the network: when the need is at its highest levels. The key to keeping everything smoothly during these times may be just a little flexibility.

Although heat waves occur all over the world, let’s take my local network as an example. I am one of about 65 million people covered with PJM, which is the largest network operator in the United States. PJM is covered in Virginia, Worst Virginia, Ouhayu, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as parts of two neighboring states.

Earlier this year, PJM expected that the demand for electricity would reach 154 GW this summer. On Monday, a few days after the official start of this season, the network was blown up after that, with an average of more than 160 gigawatts between 5 pm and 6 pm

The fact that we have already passed all of the peak last year, and I expected this year that the disaster this year is not necessarily a catastrophe (PJM says that the total system capacity exceeds 179 GB this year). But this is a good reason to be a little tense. Usually, PJM sees its climax in July or August. As a reminder, it is June. So we should not be surprised if we see the crawling demand for electricity to higher levels later in the summer.

It is not only PJM, too. Notifying Misso, the network that covers most of the Middle West and part of the southern United States, to notify it that it expects to be close to the peak of demand this week. The US Department of Energy issued an emergency order for parts of the southeast, allowing local facilities to increase the limits of air pollution and skirt with a high demand.

This style of the maximum network will only last. This is because climate change pushes temperatures up, and demanding electricity is swollen simultaneously (partially due to data centers such as those that operate artificial intelligence). PJM expectations show that the peak of summer in 2035 may reach approximately 210 GW, exceeding 179 GB that it can be provided today.

Of course, we need more power plants to create and connect them to the network in the coming years (at least if we do not want to maintain the ineffective and costly old coal factories, as we covered last week). But there is a quiet strategy that can limit the required new construction: flexibility.

The power network must be built moments of the highest absolute demand that we can predict, such as this heat wave. But most of the time, there is a good part of the existing capacity to bring us through these summits sitting in lethargy – it should only come online when the demand increases. Another way to look at this, however, is that by shaving the demand during peak, we can reduce the total infrastructure required to operate the network.