As we begin to experience the symptoms of the Climate Crisis – more frequent and severe weather events, the stability of our electrical grid is coming into question more and more often as Utilities are finding a balance between providing reliable electrical service and preventing catastrophic equipment failures and/or wildfires.
For decades, people on the east coast of the US have experienced periodic rolling brownouts in the summertime. This has become a new phenomenon on the west coast in the past decade as wildfires sparked by downed electrical lives have caused death and massive property destruction in California, Oregon and even Washington.
People in Eastern Washington experienced power outages during our recent record-setting heat blast because their Utility, Avista, cutoff power to protect their electrical equipment from catastrophic failure. Ironically, about one month ago, Avista was one of the two Washington’s Utilities (there are 60) that announced it was NOT going to develop a plan for preventing wildfires by shutting down it’s electrical grid.
In this instance, the Seattle Times reported “Rosentrater said the outages were a distribution problem, and did not stem from a lack of electricity in the system.”
So, the good news is that there was enough electrical generation to meet the need, but the bad news is that their distribution model was incapable of handling the increased electrical demand. This highlights the vulnerability of the centralized (one-way flow) electrical system that we’re used to. Decentralized models (back and forth flow) as shown below and discussed in more detail here, help stabilize the grid by balancing and distributing electricity for a variety of sources instead of just one source. This is the direction our electrical grid is heading.
To date, people in the Greater Seattle have mostly been spared from brownout/blackouts but as the symptoms of the Climate Crisis worsens, our centralized electrical grid will inevitably face the same threat which is why we’re seeing an increase in requests from businesses and homeowners interested in solar+storage solutions, so they can keep the lights, heat and/or emergency medical equipment going, no matter what happens elsewhere.
If you’re interested in protecting your electricity by going with solar+storage (batteries), please give us a call at 206-706-1931 or fill out the contact form below and tell us a little about the goals of your project.
