With Palo Alto encouraging a widespread push toward "electrification" to meet the city's goals on climate change, utility officials are warning that the city's aged electric grid may not be able to accommodate the effort.
Given the challenge, two members of the Utilities Advisory Commission on Monday asked the City Council to immediately create a road map for modernizing the city's grid, much of which was built in the 1950s and 1960s and does not have the capacity to accommodate citywide electrification. In a memo, the two commissioners, A.C Johnston and Phil Metz, noted that for the city to achieve its goal of reducing emissions by 80% by 2030 (with 1990 as the baseline), it would need to ensure that about 85% of the city's new vehicle purchases are electric and that almost all gas appliances in single-family homes and all commercial rooftop heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) units are electrified.
"The existing infrastructure has insufficient capacity for a sufficient level of electrification of EV transportation and electrical heating to meet the SCAP (Sustainability/Climate Action Plan) goals, and the grid has other technical shortcomings that need to be addressed," the commissioners wrote in the memo, which they presented to the council on Monday.
Problems with the city's electric grid emerged as a hot topic last month, when Tomm Marshall, assistant director in the Utilities Department, gave the Utilities Advisory Commission a presentation that highlighted the challenges that the Utilities Department is facing when it comes to meeting the city's electrification goals. The grid, he said, does not have the capacity to accommodate recently developed technologies such as electrification of gas appliances, distributed generation and electric vehicles.
"Currently the grid, as it is today, cannot handle everyone putting in the heat pump out there, maybe not even half the people putting in the heat pump," Marshall said. "There's places today where we can't even take one heat pump without having to rebuild a portion of the system. Or we can't even have one more EV charger go on … we're already maxed out on capacity."
While the council did not take any formal actions on Monday, utilities commissioners and council members acknowledged on Monday during their joint study session that the city will need to make a significant investment in modernizing the grid, a process that would take several years and require additional staffing.
"We want to make sure we can underline the urgency of planning for the grid modernization because it will take time. It's complicated," Johnston said. "There's going to be quite a bit of expense involved."
Metz noted, however, that the city's pending switch to "advanced metering infrastructure," also known as smart meters, can help take some pressure off the grid by creating ways to reduce peak demand and lessening the need for additional grid infrastructure.
"There's a lot of levers that could be pulled and we think it's especially important to look at those," Metz said.
Council members agreed Monday that updating the grid should be a major focus of the city's push toward meeting the 80x30 goal and that the Utilities Advisory Commission should play a leading role in the effort. Vice Mayor Lydia Kou suggested that modernizing the grid would encourage more people to switch from gas to electricity for their vehicles and home appliances.
"Once this grid is addressed, then there is more confidence about switching over and more willingness to do so," Kou said.
The council had established its goal of cutting emissions in 2016 but has failed to launch any significant initiative since then, frustrating local environmentalists. According to city officials, the city is currently on pace to cut its emissions by only 47%, an achievement made possible by the city's switch to a carbon-free electric portfolio in 2013.
Given the sluggish pace of progress, council members have tried to make emission reduction a more pressing priority over the past two years. The council had established a new Sustainability/Climate Action Plan Committee consisting of Mayor Pat Burt and council member Alison Cormack, which held public meetings throughout the year on topics like electric vehicles and electrification of residential and commercial buildings.
The committee has also established a working group of experts and activists who will break out into teams in the coming months to focus on four topics: financing, community engagement, technology and scaling up the activities of the sustainability plan.
Burt said Monday that these discussions will influence the city's decisions on what types of grid upgrades to make. The goal, he said, is to present a plan for meeting the sustainability plan's objectives by this fall.
"We're all going to have our work cut out for us together," Burt said. "This is not something we can borrow from our predecessors, because there aren't any predecessors."
Comments
Registered user
Another Palo Alto neighborhood
on Mar 8, 2022 at 2:13 pm
Registered user
on Mar 8, 2022 at 2:13 pm
It is over 10 years since Palo Alto came to a halt due to a powerline coming down due to an accident in East Palo Alto. From memory, Stanford hospital had to stop all non-essential procedures, surgeries, etc. Most retail establishements were unable to do business without power. Most Palo Alto schools had problems, some classes moving outside as lighting in classrooms meant it was too dark to see the material. Power was out for about 12 hours which meant food could not be kept cool and frozen food started defrosting, food had to be thrown out.
We are now even more dependent on power. People work from home. Online streaming, work, exams, are even more prevalent now than they were on that fateful day.
Palo Alto power is unreliable with helium filled balloons, squirrels, seaguls, geese and tree limbs all responsible for outages. It seems to me that every month or so a power outages is reported for some reason and if we have a bad storm even more outages will occur.
And now the City seems to think our powergrid is aged and unlikely to do the job of providing more power to more customers! We know all that and have done for many years. The citywide power outage could happen again since there have been no upgrades in case of a similar event.
Please use some common sense. Silicon Valley cannot function like this.
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Duveneck/St. Francis
on Mar 8, 2022 at 10:07 pm
Registered user
on Mar 8, 2022 at 10:07 pm
This is a real task for our utilities department. Spending money on the power grid is a lot more sensible than spending $98 million (at least) on a fiber to the premises project that replicates facilities that two of the largest communications companies are already providing and aggressively upgrading.
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Adobe-Meadow
on Mar 8, 2022 at 10:32 pm
Registered user
on Mar 8, 2022 at 10:32 pm
And ten years after the power outage we still do not have a redundant power feed for our city. Plus! We want to remove natural gas from our homes, the one backup,power source that we have in the event electricity fails again.
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Embarcadero Oaks/Leland
on Mar 9, 2022 at 11:12 am
Registered user
on Mar 9, 2022 at 11:12 am
Enough with the virtue-signalling Climate Sustainability plan that ignores reality and that will do very little if anything outside our borders.
The fiber program is a ridiculous expensive joke that will be run by a utility that can't handle the basics beyond stealing $20,000,000 from us each and every year. Why does ANYONE think PAU can run an efficient, competitive service when it can't even manage parking permit programs, simple filing for rebate programs.
It wasn't too long ago the city refused to consider expanding underground wiring to save us from the Mylar balloons!
Stop this ludicrous preaching and just make the basics work cost-effectively and efficiently.
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Downtown North
on Mar 9, 2022 at 11:40 am
Registered user
on Mar 9, 2022 at 11:40 am
Thanks, PA Online and Gennady,
This is ideal time to stop, look up and listen. Ten days ago I sent photo to city staff about a wire draping down from nearby utility pole onto sidewalk. Staff followed up in timely manner for the abandoned cable comm line (apparently not dangerous just unslightly). Staff welcomed my offer to send more photographs of questionable cables, etc.
DTN neighborhood utility poles are heavily loaded with bewildering maze of tangled wires and cables just as ATT is adding more heavy fiber optic cables. We recently repaired a brick walkway between the sidewalk and street and discovered two abandoned? TV? cables less than 6 inches below ground.
I am pleased to see staff and Utility Commissioners "looking up" to infrastructure in plain sight. And I am hoping for better outcome than the recent movie "Don't Look Up"
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Mountain View
on Mar 9, 2022 at 2:02 pm
Registered user
on Mar 9, 2022 at 2:02 pm
I remember from an excellent previous recent article written by a power expert (I forget her name) that in order to achieve its present, highly arbitrary and aggressive goals, the current capacity of almost all of the present power lines, transformers, substations, etc would have to be increased by a whopping 300% to 400%. Oops! Basically, this would necessitate a complete replacement upgrade of the present Palo Alto power grid throughout the entire city.
This immediately brings two things to mind. This will be hugely expensive and time-consuming because the upgrades will have to be made without disturbing power from the present system. They'd have to be done in parallel and in sections. Just how is Palo Alto going to pay the enormous costs of this replacement of its power system?
My second thought is whether Palo Alto can get sufficient power from its sources outside of the city and presumably Santa Clara County. It's one thing to get something permitted within Palo Alto, but another thing to get another city and county to go along with Palo Alto's plans.
In the long run, it might be more practical just to create neighborhood "minigrids" of solar panels on people's roofs. But, how will we run all of those heat pumps, electric stoves, and electric water heaters at night when there's no sun and there are no affordable ways to store power generated when the sun shines?
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Leland Manor/Garland Drive
on Mar 9, 2022 at 2:43 pm
Registered user
on Mar 9, 2022 at 2:43 pm
I think it's worth considering spending some of this earmarked "utility upgrade" money instead towards rebates to encourage Palo Alto homeowners to have home electricity storage.
Why?
Because our houses' worst-case *peak* electricity demand, which presumably will necessitate new, beefier wires and infrastructure, totally overshadows our *average* electricity demand. See the following:
Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation -- what would the *average* power consumption of a fully-electrified house in California be?
In other words, if this house had some energy storage (home battery and/or EVs), but no solar system on the roof, what would its continuous, average power draw from the grid be?
Here are some rough 2009 California numbers I pulled off the EIA website:
* Average CA household annual electricity consumption: 7000 kWh
* Average CA household annual space/water heating use (60 million BTU -- let's assume produced by a heat pump with a Coefficient of Performance of 3.5): 5000 kWh
* Average CA household annual EV electricity use (2 cars x 12,000 miles x 0.25 kWh/mile, 100% charged at home): 6000 kWh
* Total annual electricity consumption of fully-electrified house: 18,000 kWh
Now, if that 18,000 kWh of electrical energy were to be provided to the house at a *constant* basis 24/7/365, that works out to be about 2 kW of continuous power. Or, assuming a 220V utility service, that's only about 9 amps, continuous.
So instead of upgrading our utility grid, how about encouraging lots of household batteries (like a Tesla PowerWall or equivalent)? That could go a long way to smoothing out *peak* demands to something our existing grid could already handle.
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College Terrace
on Mar 9, 2022 at 4:49 pm
Registered user
on Mar 9, 2022 at 4:49 pm
Some time ago I understood Palo Alto's Utilities Department has a hidden financial conflict of interest with encouraging residents to install solar. On the one hand encouraging the installation of private solar panels increases Palo Alto's sustainability chops, on the other hand each private solar installation decreases the demand for city supplied electricity with a corresponding loss of revenue for the Utilities Department budget.
This reminds me, at least as I recall it, of the time when on one hand the city council decided to pay for an expensive long-term contract with a recycling plant to drastically reduce the volume of waste diverted to landfill. Meantime, on the other hand, the Utilities Department went ahead with obtaining and paying millions of tax dollars upfront for a long-term contract for excess and unused space in an East Bay landfill.
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Midtown
on Mar 9, 2022 at 9:04 pm
Registered user
on Mar 9, 2022 at 9:04 pm
If we want full electrification, we need to replace all the older (overhead) distribution system with properly-sized underground wires. We certainly don't want to put fatter wires and more and larger transformers on those old poles. My neighborhood got underground utilities a few years ago and likely has adequate capacity but when I look at those skinny wires with insulators good only for 4kV I cringe. (Modern distribution systems use 12kV mostly.)
We can do this but it's going to be expensive. We can't set a deadline for electrification without a well-engineered plan for upgrading our distribution system so it can support it reliably. Banning gas is not the answer, especially when we don't have the infrastructure to support the electric alternative. And most of that electricity will be generated by burning natural gas, or, worse, coal. (AFAIK California has no coal-fired generators, but we import power from places that do.)
Everyone needs to read the City's report on issues with solar power system permits -- it appears that our permit/inspection folks are a major roadblock for solar power in Palo Alto.
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Embarcadero Oaks/Leland
on Mar 9, 2022 at 10:12 pm
Registered user
on Mar 9, 2022 at 10:12 pm
The previous city council and administration refused to consider more undergrounding. I'll never forget when former Mayor Fine seemed to be unaware that several neighborhoods had been undergrounded for decades and the former city manager said it was unaffordable.
Utter nonsense.
Registered user
Duveneck/St. Francis
on Mar 10, 2022 at 12:49 am
Registered user
on Mar 10, 2022 at 12:49 am
Yet another reason the city should push rooftop solar. It should subsidize energy storage systems (Tesla Powerwalls) to reduce peak demand and lower grid capacity needed. This leverages private capital and reduces public investment needed.
Also, the justification for adding fiber was not all neighborhoods were currently served by fiber by either AT&T or Comcast. However, they do plan to cover the whole city probably before Palo Alto Utilities can role out tgeirs. In the meantime Palo Alto Utilities is saying ghey do not have enough budget or expertise for the grid upgrades. Thus I think fiber should be cancelled and they should focus on the grid.
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Adobe-Meadow
on Mar 10, 2022 at 8:54 am
Registered user
on Mar 10, 2022 at 8:54 am
We have a huge number of advocacy groups which pitch aspirational ideas with no actual recognition of the cost and attendant repercussions of their ideas. That is because they are pitching emotional, single focus ideas with no actual understanding of the impacts of these ideas and all of the surrounding impacts in the real time world. So the PACC comes up with an aspirational idea that does not recognize the cost of that idea - nor how to achieve the idea. Many of those people are working on agendas for further political recognition in this complicated political scene and are working the name recognition gig for future political advancement.
Joe Garfoli in his "It's all political" SFC column noted that the recent CA Democratic confab was fraught with many opposing ideas - many topics which did not address the real concerns of the CA residents. The political ideologues are trying to influence each other.
All of the realities of this topic decision have been made clear. Further noted that the electrical grid has a major crossroads in my location so I can see first hand the impact of tree limbs which go through the lines, wires hanging which none of the utility people ever fix - "that is someone else's line". A lot of talk but no real finances, manpower, or buy-in by the various companies that use the lines to push their products - AT&T, Comcast, etc. Add the squirrels which live in our "canopy" driven city. The poles are their main highway to the fences.
Registered user
Mountain View
on Mar 10, 2022 at 5:41 pm
Registered user
on Mar 10, 2022 at 5:41 pm
AHEM! As I said before, "batteries are and will remain too expensive and impractical to power an entire house, especially during the Winter with a power hungry heat pump, water heater and refrigerator/freezers." That's a very simple proven Physics and Power Engineering fact. But just how many of use have studied those essential subjects? We need natural gas into the indefinite future for home heat and cooling unless you want power interruptions. Batteries are an extremely inefficient and unaffordable way to STORE large amounts of electrical power unless you are filthy rich. And STORE is the critical word here. Example: If you drain your electric car's battery during the night to heat you house, just how will you drive to work in the morning? Doah! Ever think of that? That's common sense --- or is it for most people? Or maybe Tesla, that is desperate to convince us to buy their unreliable, inferior so-called cars and SUV's?
The Feds and the major utilities (states like CA are politically oblivious to facts and truth), are working on mega-scale projects based upon thermal energy storage, but those are decades from now. So, are we willing to freeze to death in the cold dark, are are we willing to admit that our goals have been far too ambitious and need to be linked to FACT and not IGNORANT IDEALISM?
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Adobe-Meadow
on Mar 11, 2022 at 10:59 am
Registered user
on Mar 11, 2022 at 10:59 am
Why is the city establishing a goal that is counter-productive? We already have the facts on the table state-wide keeping the electrical grid operable is a problem. We already know that we are having a water shortage which would reduce the access to hydro-electric power. Our state in total is in trouble. If the state is in trouble relative to the power grid then trying to establish goals which would exacerbate the issue is not a goal. It is a political move to respond to advocacy groups which are short on funding and knowledge as to how to upgrade the systems.
Bottom line is you need gas for the house functions that operate on gas very effectively. In my house that is the water heater and the regular heater. Many are now putting in gas stoves.
Registered user
Downtown North
on Mar 11, 2022 at 1:47 pm
Registered user
on Mar 11, 2022 at 1:47 pm
It is beyond the pale that we should be even contemplating getting rid of natural gas to the homes. This is outrageous and very short sighted.
Registered user
Downtown North
on Mar 12, 2022 at 11:23 pm
Registered user
on Mar 12, 2022 at 11:23 pm
"that works out to be about 2 kW of continuous power. Or, assuming a 220V utility service, that's only about 9 amps, continuous."
So far so good. Now, how fat do the distribution wires need to be to supply 9 amps continuous to however many 1000 homes each serves, and how does that compare to their present bulk? Don't neglect to allow for surge demand.
Registered user
College Terrace
on Mar 13, 2022 at 6:25 am
Registered user
on Mar 13, 2022 at 6:25 am
I think it likely that the "excellent previous recent article written by a power expert" is the one written by Sherry Listgarten. This is still up under her blog in this publication. She regularly provides superb information.
With fire now being a year-round concern (and an outright peril during some months) it seems obvious that undergrounding should be a priority.
It also seems obvious that increasing growth in this area isn't sustainable in the most basic of ways. Specifically: water and power. I think we can address the power issue and I've read some reports about genius efforts/ideas regarding water, but we "aren't there yet" and increasing demand before we are is akin to asking for trouble. A less generous word for it is stupid.
Registered user
Mountain View
on Mar 13, 2022 at 5:46 pm
Registered user
on Mar 13, 2022 at 5:46 pm
Annette, thank you for naming Sherry as the author, whose brief but superb & crushing analysis of the gross shortcomings of PA's power plan was published very recently in Palo Alto Online.
Her analysis was so brilliantly compact, well stated and proven that even a reasonably smart PA resident can understand it --- but only if they aren't blindly bigoted against her proven arguments. As a research PhD, it's really refreshing to see someone highly competent like her take the effort to research and then publish the shortcomings of "the best laid [pathetic] plans mice and men". It's even more refreshing that she wrote a short but very comprehensible and damning analysis of just what's wrong with plans generated by PA bureaucrats who CAN'T POSSIBLY understand the hugely expensive and complex problems facing widespread implementation of "Green Power". Even withing a small city like Palo Alto, let alone the USA.