It’s cold in the U.S. Here’s why some buildings turned down the heat.
As temperatures plunged and a snowstorm moved across the United States on Sunday, households cranked up the heat. But some buildings across Virginia, Maryland and the Washington area did the opposite: They tamped down the amount of electricity they were pulling from the grid. And they’ll get paid for it. It’s part of a strategy called demand response that’s being used by power grid operators in times of peak energy use, like cold snaps and heat waves. The idea is to reduce power demand when supply is tight by incentivizing big electricity customers to use less. That could mean a bitcoin mine shuts down for a few hours. Or a hospital might switch on a backup power generator, reducing the amount of electricity it pulls from the grid. Big box stores might adjust the thermostat, refrigeration or lighting to save energy. In theory, if enough large power customers signed up to participate in demand response, an alert from the grid operator would swiftly trigger a significant, voluntary drop in regional electricity use, freeing up power to heat homes and avoid blackouts. Think of it as subtracting a power plant’s worth of demand instead of adding a power plant’s worth of supply. The companies coordinating all that subtraction are known as virtual power plants. Ken Schisler, chief legal and regulatory officer at the virtual power plant CPower Energy, said that coordinated energy reductions have the potential to reduce short-term demand by about 5 percent. The grid operator PJM, which activated Sunday’s demand response in the three mid-Atlantic regions, did not immediately have an estimate of how much the strategy had reduced power demand this weekend. During Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022, demand response actions by CPower clients freed up power equivalent to the daily electricity use of about 1.7 million homes, according to the company. How it worksCPower sprung into action on Sunday when PJM sent instructions to activate demand response. The company can control the operations of some customers remotely, shutting down specific pieces of equipment or dispatching battery power. In other cases, businesses carry out their own reductions. Most of the energy savings in PJM’s operating region come from the manufacturing sector. “They aren’t just running around turning lights off here and there,” Schisler said. “We’ve identified in advance what can be reduced, and we have a curtailment plan with customers.” Some participants sign up to get a 30-minute warning before they must reduce their consumption; others opt for 60 or 120 minutes. All three groups were called upon on Sunday, Jeff Shields, a PJM spokesman, said. CPower and its customers are paid just for being available when called upon. They’re paid again, at a rate equivalent to current electricity prices, when they and reduce their consumption on command. What’s nextSome have argued that certain industries benefit disproportionately from this model. A 2023 New York Times investigation found that a bitcoin mine in Texas had been paid $18 million for powering off for four days during a winter storm in 2021. Those costs were ultimately borne by ratepayers, and many of them would rather see heavy electricity users like data centers and cryptocurrency mines pay more for electricity in the first place. Demand response is also impractical for many businesses. Big-box stores are able to participate in part because they can aggregate energy savings across many locations. An independent grocer, by contrast, may be too small to sign up. For other types of industries, it’s neither practical nor economical to abruptly shut off large equipment, even with two hours of notice. An e-commerce warehouse, for example, would most likely make far more money by continuing operations than it would earn from an energy payment. In the long run, individual houses could make a significant contribution to demand response, too. In California, where many homeowners have installed batteries, a test over the summer delivered enough electricity to the grid to power hundreds of thousands of homes, according to the utility PG&E. Still, demand response will probably become increasingly important globally as electricity demand increases and more and more power sources that generate energy for only part of the day, like solar and wind, are added to the grid, according to the International Energy Agency. In a 2023 report, the I.E.A. found that demand response capacity would need to increase tenfold between 2020 and 2030 to align with a global target of reducing net global greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.
A $17 billion disaster aid bottleneckAbout $17 billion in federal disaster funds for states is getting an extra layer of review by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, causing unusual delays in payments, according to internal Federal Emergency Management Agency documents reviewed by The New York Times. The delays stem from a directive issued by Noem in June that said any expenditure of $100,000 or more must be approved by her office, which oversees the disaster agency, to root out “waste, fraud and abuse.” The bottleneck includes money that had already been approved by regional FEMA offices for things like debris removal and repairs to roads, bridges and water and sewer systems. Noem’s directive has extended the final processing of large projects, a stage that normally takes a few weeks, by months, according to three FEMA employees who spoke to the Times.— Scott Dance
Scanning Antarctica for clues to a faraway worldScientists on the icebreaker Araon have traveled a long way to study Antarctica’s fast-shrinking Thwaites Glacier. But one team on the ship is doing research with an eye toward a place even farther away — about 1.8 billion miles farther. For more than six hours on Friday, one of the Araon’s helicopters flew over the Thwaites with three long radar antennas jutting from its belly. As the chopper battled strong winds, the radar peered into cracks inside the ice, which developed because the glacier is sliding so quickly out to sea. The radar data will shed light on how the glacier is breaking apart and contributing to rising seas here on Earth. It should also help researchers understand another place: Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter that may support life. — Raymond Zhong Watch as the scientists set foot on the Thwaites glacier. You can follow all the updates at nytimes.com/antarctica More climate news from around the web:
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