Opinion: Dr. Climate, Dr. Grid, Mr. M.D., & Me

The mega heat wave gripping California and the West has revealed cracks in California’s clean energy policy edifice that increasingly threaten to pit keeping the lights on against public health and emission reduction efforts.

Dr. Grid over the past week keeps telling me to minimize use of air conditioning.

Mr. M.D. keeps warning me to stay cool at all costs.

So which advice does the half of the adult population with high blood pressure and other cardiovascular diseases heed, as well as pregnant women and the one-in-ten with asthma or chronic respiratory disease? For them, staying cool can be a do or die matter.

True, in an ideal world, the buildings and homes people inhabit would be energy efficient and could be pre-cooled to 72 degrees, with the air cranked up to 78 degrees at 4 p.m. This is good advice for people who live in newer or deeply retrofitted homes that are hyper-energy efficient. However, it doesn’t work in the millions of older homes with AC systems that can’t cool the air to 72 degrees, much less to 78 degrees, in the evening when it’s 90 degrees-plus outside and the walls are thermally loaded from several days of 100 degrees-plus heat.

And this conundrum will only grow worse in the future.

Yes, California is leading the way toward stabilizing the climate by requiring all new cars to be electric in 12 short years. But this week’s advice from Dr. Grid not to charge from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. was less than a confidence booster for EV owners and shoppers.

And let’s not forget all the grid’s evident limits over the last week were revealed with the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant still online.

That’s because Dr. Climate says heat waves are becoming hotter and longer with higher temperatures at night. No wonder one of the latest headlines in Scientific American proclaims, “This Hot Summer Is One of the Coolest of the Rest of Our Lives.”

As one of the millions of people caught in the middle, I can’t say I have many solutions to offer and I do recognize public officials and the power industry are doing their best to strike a balance under increasingly difficult circumstances. However, the problems of the past week show current approaches to supplying power through a centralized system are near a breaking point. Within that centralized grid system, it’s becoming harder and harder to balance promoting energy efficiency, assure resource adequacy, hasten the move to clean energy, electrify transportation and buildings, and maintain human health during worsening heat waves.