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The California Assembly Utilities & Energy Committee Vice Chair Jim Patterson (R-Fresno) castigated the state’s three energy agencies at a Monday hearing, saying their joint report on rolling outages in August was essentially finger pointing and excuses.

The heads of those agencies, the California Public Utilities Commission, grid operator and California Energy Commission, continued to stress the extreme heat across the West during those days, noting it was a 1 in 35-year event.

A shortage of power left up to half a million people temporarily blacked out for up to two-and-a-half hours.

Vice chair Patterson insisted that the outages were because of reductions in fossil fuel power and the rise in renewables.

California Independent System Operator former Chief Executive Officer Steve Berberich disagreed, noting that renewables have served up to 80% of the system load. Energy Commission Chair David Hochschild added how renewables have filled supply gaps when traditional resources proved unreliable or worse. That includes the months-long methane leak at the Aliso Canyon gas field that led to withdrawal constraints at this very large storage field, to the radioactive leak that shutdown the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in 2012.

“This is a solvable problem,” Hochschild said during the hearing on the first formal analysis of the Aug. 14 and 15 outages released last week. He pointed to “100 points of turning off the light,” from using ice to cool buildings to pre-charging electric school buses.

A parade of other experts also testified on remedies to prevent further outages, including:

Building and buying significant additional megawatts that are specifically available after sundown. Increasing demand response from large and small buildings. Allowing behind-the-meter batteries to fuel the grid. Advancing longer duration storage. Developing offshore wind. Requiring utilities to share more information with community energy about their customers daily energy use. Having an independent agency conduct a root case analysis.

In response to criticisms that the Energy Commission’s forecasting is outdated, Hochschild said his agency is focused on the next 10 years of climate-driven heat waves, in place of less extreme weather scenarios, and is adding hourly projections.

CPUC President Marybel Batjer said an additional 2,400 MW of additional resources are expected to be online by next summer. She added the commission also was working to increase resources adequacy levels, but not until 2022.

Assemblymember Bill Quirk (D-Hayward) blasted the CPUC for not moving on longer duration storage — even after the Commission identified a need for 4,000 MW of storage by 2030 that can feed the grid for well over four hours.

Batjer insisted such storage will be in the future mix, mentioning pumped storage specifically. New pumped storage projects generally take years to bring online.

If the investor-owned utilities had been more transparent with data they see from their customers, community energy organizations would have called for more power ahead of time, avoiding "underscheduling,” said Samuel Golding with Community Choice Partners, a community energy consulting firm. “Community aggregators forecasts are systematically disadvantaged and degraded in terms of accuracy.”

The root cause analysis found a combined underscheduling by community energy, utilities and direct access providers of nearly 3.5 gigawatts during actual peak demand Aug. 14 and 15. In the late afternoon, it was 1,792 MW and 3,219 MW short for Aug. 14 and 15, respectively.

Consumer advocate Mark Toney insisted an independent investigation of the recent outages be conducted by the state Attorney General. He said that he should scrutinize possible market manipulation by traders.

It is “critical to assess how much those shortages resulted from poor planning by CAISO grid operators, and how much of the shortage and resulting skyrocketing prices was triggered by energy traders and power sellers positioning themselves to reap extraordinary profits off the backs of California residents suffering in the midst of the pandemic,” The Utility Reform Network Executive Director wrote in an Aug. 21 letter to Attorney General Xavier Becerra. The AG office responded to Toney on Oct. 7, welcoming any additional information TURN hay have, adding it can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.

Committee Chair Chris Holden (D-Pasadena) asked if regionalization of California’s grid could have averted rolling outages. Berberich insisted trading across 14 western states would have helped and that it would also lower energy costs.