Earlier snowmelt can leave less water available to generate power during the height of summer
CLIMATEWIRE | When California suffers a heat wave, it leans heavily on hydropower from the Pacific Northwest to keep the lights on.
“In general, hydro is a low-carbon source of electricity that is needed to address climate change,” said Steve Clemmer, director of energy research at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “At the same time, it is an electricity resource being affected by climate change.” “If we have heat waves that increase demand, that is when that loss of hydro becomes really important,” said Adrienne Marshall, a computational hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines.
The Southwest is less reliant on dams to produce electricity than its northern neighbors, but faces decreased hydro output as the region becomes drier. That has important implications for the region’s decarbonization efforts. In 2021, EPA data shows that California greenhouse gas emissions were 37 million tons, their highest level since 2016. That coincided with hydro generation that was the state’s lowest since 2015, at 14.5 terawatt-hours of electricity, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration figures. Natural gas generation picked up much of the slack, churning out 96.5 TWh of electricity, the highest such figure since 2016.
“Periods of high demand over a wide area will result in reduced supplies of energy for transfer, causing operators to rely primarily on alternative resources for system balancing, including natural-gas-fired generators and battery systems,” NERC warned.
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