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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now our climate story of the week, which we're doing every Tuesday, all this year on the show. Maybe it's not news that it's hot in the summer and hotter in the desert than it is around here, but not like this. For the past few weeks, the American Southwest, in particular, has been experiencing record-setting temperatures, getting and often staying above 110 degrees Fahrenheit in places like Phoenix and Las Vegas. Phoenix has now set a record of 24 straight days with temperatures above 110.

As temperatures outdoors rise as a result of climate change because it's getting hotter each year, indoors, we're increasingly relying on electricity to power our air conditioning and keep us safe from the heat. Using that much electricity brings its own concerns about the reliability of the electrical grid, and about the carbon emissions it produces. Here to talk us through the tension between transitioning to renewable sources of energy and maintaining a reliable power supply, is Matthew Zeitlin, a business and energy correspondent at the climate news platform, Heatmap. Matthew, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Matthew Zeitlin: Thanks for having me on, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Want to start by just describing, in whatever terms make sense, the additional stress on the power grid in a place like Phoenix in this kind of a stretch?

Matthew Zeitlin: Oftentimes, power grids, their peak demand from consumers happens in the summer, and that's because of use of air conditioning indoors. Earlier this month in the Phoenix area, multiple utilities reported record demand. These records are falling all over the place, this also happened in Texas, but these are records that were usually set a year or two ago. Every year, as it gets hotter and hotter, there's more and more use of air conditioning, and thus more stress on the electric grid.

Brian Lehrer: We know how significant the impact of a blackout can be around here in the Northeast. Can you describe the stakes of, heaven forbid, a grid failure during a heat wave like this? How dangerous would this kind of heat wave be for a place like Phoenix if they were to also experience a blackout?

Matthew Zeitlin: Some scientists and researchers looked at this, and they mapped out a pretty extreme situation, which would be a five-day blackout with temperatures well over 100 degrees, actually temperatures a little lower than what they've experienced recently, and they estimated something like half of the population of the Phoenix metro area would probably have to go to the ER, which is obviously implausible, but they would be suffering those consequences, and thousands if not tens of thousands of deaths in the most extreme situation.

What we see in Phoenix now is that while there haven't been many deaths from the high heat because people are inside, and the electric grid has held up, those people who have suffered health effects are often unhoused people, homeless people who have that exposure to the heat. You just have to imagine if a wider swath of the population had that exposure, the health effects would be magnified.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I wonder if anybody is in Arizona right now listening to us, particularly southern Arizona, the Phoenix area, the Tucson area, some of the places where it's really, really hot, and you've been going through it for day after day, and now week after week, anybody want to give our listeners in the New York area and the rest of the country, the rest of the world, a little first person description of what that's been like for you. I was in Phoenix once when it was over 110 degrees, but I was there for one day. It was like, "Wow, this is really extreme," but I was in and out. What's it like to be in that for 24 days straight as it's been in Phoenix now?

Anybody in the Phoenix area happen to be listening, call and give us a first person report, or anyone can call for our guest from Heatmap and ask a question about heat and the power grid. We'll also get to some New York angles on this as we go, but we're starting because of what's been going on in the Southwest, and some of what's actually happening, some of the implications of what could happen if the power grid is stretched beyond its capability. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

Let's stay in Arizona. From what I read, their electrical grid, the whole state is known for being reliable. In a recent article, you compared it to Texas, where especially after the winter storm, I think it was called Uri in 2021, there was a lot to worry about with respect to grid failures. Talk about Arizona's power grid, and go ahead and compare it to Texas if you'd like.

Matthew Zeitlin: What makes Arizona and much of the Southwest distinctive is that it does not have what's called a deregulated power market where the generation of power is split off from the distribution, from the utilities. In Arizona, you have a few big utilities, some privately-owned, some cooperative, some publicly-owned, and they build the generation themselves, and then charge the ratepayers to pay for that generation.

They often have quite healthy margins in their electricity generation. They're able to produce substantially more than is needed, whereas in these more deregulated markets, where stuff turns on when the price is high enough like in Texas, or in California, or here in New York, California and Texas especially, things can be a little tighter. The markets are structured to have less of that margin.

Also in Arizona, unlike Texas, they don't really have to deal so much with cold snaps really shutting down generation, which we saw with winter storm Uri, and then if you remember last winter in the Midwest, there were some issues with natural gas plants not holding up to the cold. Obviously, in Arizona, that's less of a problem. They're able to keep stuff running. They also have a substantial amount of nuclear power. The largest nuclear power plant is about 50 miles outside of Phoenix, and that runs very consistently. It's owned by the utilities.

I think because grid reliability is really a life and death issue in Arizona, they've taken an approach that really emphasizes reliability over other concerns. Those other concerns include decarbonization. The Arizona grid is-- they're transitioning, they're building more solar, especially, but they're a little slower than other sunny states like California and Texas in installing renewables. They're not doing it as quickly as their neighbors, but I think it's because the public there and the utility companies really prize reliability over everything else.

Brian Lehrer: Arizona has what you call a dirty grid. Does that mean it's getting a higher percentage of its power from fossil fuels than some other places?

Matthew Zeitlin: Exactly. It's not the dirtiest grid by any means, and they're really moving quickly, especially in the last few years, but yes, there's a fair amount of natural gas and even some coal on the grid, whereas opposed to Texas, which obviously uses lots of fossil fuels, they're a leader in wind and solar, and California obviously has a huge amount of solar and especially batteries that power the grid. Arizona is-- they use more fossil fuels.

Brian Lehrer: You describe in your article how Arizona has a regulated market for electricity, different from Texas, which has a more deregulated energy sector. What does that refer to?

Matthew Zeitlin: It's what I was talking about earlier. Texas has the most extreme version of this, but you see versions of this in the Midwest, and other parts of the state in the Northeast. Generators, power plants are in real time and in a day ahead bidding to provide power to the grid, and so lots of resources only turn on, start spinning up when it's really expensive, and the price is really high, whereas in Arizona, it's a system that's more run by the utilities, and there's lots of that kind of market trading going on.

A criticism of deregulated markets is that they don't lead to as much investment in reliability as the regulated utility-run markets do or utility-run systems do. That was really borne out with winter storm Uri as well as with the rolling blackouts in California about 20 or so more years ago. There's been a really big debate over the last 20 years about whether deregulation, which is supposed to bring prices down, has really been effective or not.

Brian Lehrer: I see that you recently wrote an article specific to New York, which is also like Texas, a deregulated state. You wrote about a report that says in a few years, New York is at risk for transmission shortfall, specifically on a hot summer day. Of course, that's when we've had blackouts in the past on New York. They've already happened. Tell us a little more about what you found.

Matthew Zeitlin: In 2019, New York State passed a law that set a goal for 70% renewable electricity by 2030, and 100% renewable by 2040. Along with that, there are regulations that would essentially force what are called peaker plants. These are natural gas plants that only start spinning up when there's really high demand, so often in the summer, to either do expensive upgrades to limit their pollution or shut down entirely. That's already been happening in Astoria. This happened recently. There's a plant in Newburgh that's in the process of shutting down as well.

What the New York Independent System operator, which runs the New York electricity market in the grid has said, is that this planned shutdown of fossil fuel plants over the next few years by 2025 will, if it continues, mean that on a really hot summer day, there could be a reliability issue downstate New York. That's because the New York City area does not have a lot of indigenous fuel resources, energy resources. If you think about hydroelectricity, it's upstate. If you think about where a utility-scale solar, wind farm will be, it'll be in a less dense area.

The New York City is very reliant right now on these gas plants. Ravenswood in Queens is a really big one. Right now we're trying to build offshore wind, off the coast of Long Island, which is supposed to power the city and power batteries for use when the wind turbines aren't spinning or were having reliability issues, but those projects are not completed yet. They're not supposed to be completed for a few years.

Then the other big thing we're doing is building a transmission line from Quebec. It starts at the New York-Canada border, goes through Lake Champlain, down the Hudson to here. That is not expected to be complete until the middle of the decade. We're in a tight spot where the worry is that there may be a real trade-off between New York's climate goals, which means transitioning to renewables and the reliability needs of a place like New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're in our climate story of the week on The Brian Lehrer Show, which we're doing every Tuesday, all this year. On the show, our guest today is Matthew Zeitlin, a business and energy correspondent at the climate news platform, Heatmap. We're talking about the implications for the power grid and therefore for people if the power grid goes down in the increasingly hot and lengthy heat waves that we're experiencing now around the world, particularly right now in the southwest US.

I mentioned in the intro, 24 straight days now, which is a record of temperatures over 110 degrees in the Phoenix area. We're getting a call from Phoenix. Dorothy in Phoenix, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in. Hello, from New York.

Dorothy: Hello, New York. Thank you, Brian. Good morning. I just want to comment. Yes, it's hot out here. I was trying to walk my dogs. I usually walk them around 7:00 AM, but now it's just too hot at 7:00 AM, so I moved up to 5:30. Usually, at 7:00 AM I'm out there by myself, but now at 5:30, I got a whole neighborhood of families walking their dogs at 5:30 AM because that's about the best time to get a good walk in, or if you're going to do an evening walk, it's got to be about 8:30 or 9:00. That's really hot too still, but the morning is the best bet to beat it.

Brian Lehrer: That's another side effect of the heat that I didn't even think of. You lose sleep because you have to get up so early to walk the dog.

Dorothy: I'm becoming a morning person. I really wasn't before, but it's nice. It's actually nice. I guess it's a positive consequence. If we did have a power outage, it would definitely-- I would not make it. I would not, because I was over at Safeway and the self-checkout was by the exit doors. I was like, "Man, I can't wait to get done checking out my groceries because I've got to get back into the AC. I was just feeling not well at that point, so I couldn't make it.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Dorothy. Hang in there. Thank you for that report. Very vivid. Here's Deb in Forest Hills in Queens, who's just back from Arizona, I think. Deb, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Deb: Hi. Good morning. I grew up in Tucson and been here for the last 20-plus years, but family's still in Arizona. I spend a lot of time in different parts of the state. One thing that was really surprising this last visit, I just got back a couple of days ago. I was in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is up in the Ponderosa Pines in the northern part of the state, 7,000 feet. It was over 100 degrees for the three days that I was there.

Brian Lehrer: Really, even there. Wow, I've been in Flagstaff and that's really-- You'd consider it a fairly different environment because it's so elevated generally, right?

Deb: Exactly. That's where I went to college. I was really excited to get up out of the hot weather in Tucson and Phoenix. In fact, it was almost worse up there because a lot of places don't necessarily have central air conditioning. We had rented an Airbnb for the weekend and they had no air conditioning, which during the day was really oppressive. At night it was fine because the temperature drops 30 degrees. That's a significant difference between being in the desert as opposed to up at elevation. Even spending a day in Phoenix at 118 degrees, you step outside and it's like you're in a blast furnace. We joke around about its dry heat, which it most definitely is, but it doesn't really matter if you can't breathe.

Brian Lehrer: Not when it's that hot.

Deb: It's tough.

Brian Lehrer: Deb, thank you. Let's go to Dakota in Phoenix. You're on WNYC. Hi, Dakota. Hello from New York.

Dakota: Hi. I moved here about 14 years ago from Staten Island. I would say living in anything above 100 degrees feels the same. What that feels like is walking into an oven. When you open your oven door and you get that blast of heat to your face, that is what outside feels like anywhere above 100. We don't go outside unless we absolutely have to. We go from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned buildings, back to air-conditioned car. I would say if you don't do that, you can literally feel your brain not functioning correctly and you cannot think clear thoughts.

Brian Lehrer: Do you ever hear people out there talking about the possibility of a power outage and whether the grid has the capacity to handle this kind of extended heat wave if it continues to go on, or if it happened summer after summer?

Dakota: That would be something I am worried about being a non-native moving in. Anyone I've met here who is native to Arizona feels very confident on the infrastructure of the electric grid and have zero worries about it at all.

Brian Lehrer: That's good. Which is worse, summer in Phoenix or winter on Staten Island?

Dakota: Summer in Phoenix. Winter on Staten Island, I could still go outside and play.

Brian Lehrer: Dakota, Thank you. Hang in there. Thank you for checking in. Pretty interesting testimonies from people who are or have been in Phoenix recently, right Matthew?

Matthew Zeitlin: Yes. I think what our caller who is in Flagstaff talked about is a really important thing to think about as temperatures rise. In southern Arizona, it's been really hot forever. There's a lot of infrastructure in terms of central air, but in other parts of the state in the country that traditionally do not see these huge heat waves, that infrastructure doesn't really exist. Even if the temperature is not the highest in the country, in the 90s or 100, if you're in Flagstaff and you don't have central Air, that's a huge problem.

In the last few years, we've seen really quite devastating heat waves in Portland, Oregon, in the Bay Area. These are places that are thought of as temperate areas. I'm thinking of where I grew up in the Northern California. My house I grew up in, we don't have air conditioning because it's a very temperate area. Yet there have been points recently where it's been prolonged temperatures above 90 degrees and in some sense that's more dangerous than a 115-degree day in Phoenix where everyone has central air.

Because of global warming, there's going to be health effects of that heat and then also massive amounts of outlay and expense as we have to upgrade infrastructure for temperatures because the infrastructure is not originally built for the kind of climatic situation we're in now.

Brian Lehrer: A few more minutes with Matthew Zeitlin from the climate news site, Heatmap talking about the implications for the power grid of the increasingly hot and lengthy heat waves that we're having in the world now and especially at this moment in the southwestern United States. I want to take a call from here in New York with a New York-related question on heat and power pertaining to something you were mentioning before about New York. Here's Jackie in Valley Cottage. Jackie, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jackie: Hi there. Thank you for taking my call. The guest mentioned the Champlain Hudson Power Express, the power line coming from Quebec down into Zone J New York City. My big question is, actually there's two parts here. One is that Hydropower Québec Blackstone [unintelligible 00:19:58] project does not have to supply wintertime heat to New York City. How is that going to help not having peaker plants coming back online in disadvantaged areas? Also, they're going to be running out of energy, Hydro-Québec, by 2026 and have announced that they're going to have to build four or five more new dams.

Not only does that go against harm to indigenous people, but it contributes to global warming because all of these dams have methane emissions that aren't really being counted because they're considered non-combustible, but these kinds of dams contribute greatly to global warming around the world. That's my question and I'll just listen to the answer. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Matthew, you up to speed on those things?

Matthew Zeitlin: To some extent, yes. Always an issue with importing power is that if there's a shortage that's regional, imports can only do so much for you. This is a problem that California had had when there was a prolonged heat wave across the entire Western United States. They couldn't rely on those imports, but I will say that Hydro-Québec has been importing power to the United States for decades.

New England is quite reliant on it. New England had some grid issues a few weeks ago precisely because of the wildfires in Quebec affected the imports. Then as to the issues that the caller mentioned about constructing new dams, this is something that there's a lot of debate about, but I think it's more largely an issue in different types of environments closer to the equator than the type of environment in Quebec.

It's always any type of building energy infrastructure, that large utility-scale, has environmental impacts, and that's as much true about Fossil, not as much true, but it's true about any time you're doing building. I would say that the Quebec power grid, which is almost entirely powered by hydropower, is one of the cleanest in the world in terms of ongoing carbon emissions. Already New York state gets a lot of hydropower. Robert Moses built a lot of dams upstate and western New York, and those that have them really rely on them because it is a form of non-carbon emitting power.

Brian Lehrer: As we run out of time, let me ask you a national angle question now that we've talked about New York a little bit and the Southwest a lot. How worried are federal regulators about issues with reliability of the power grid across the country? Is the power grid optimally set up for problems that might arise? Are the power grids of the different regions of the country connected to any degree?

I think we talk sometimes about risks of a hyperconnected power grid because some hacker from an enemy nation or from wherever could then get into the whole thing, and maybe it should be decentralized, but maybe because of the things we're talking about today with global warming, it should be more centralized. How do the federal regulators look at that, or how have you reported on that?

Matthew Zeitlin: One big issue is that there's no one person in charge of the electric grid, while the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has some oversight, there's only so much they can do to enforce interconnection between the different grids. What a lot of democrats in Congress and advocates for renewable energy want is more interconnection between grids, more ability to transfer power from one region to another, especially because renewable energy is often cited based on where it's windiest and where it's sunniest, and that's not necessarily where people live and where power demand is highest at any given time.

If there were more transmission, it would make the renewable energy build-out easier and more effective. There's a lot of focus on that in Congress trying to reach a deal between Democrats and Republicans. We've actually had some reporting on this that Senator Schumer, the majority leader and New York Senator, has been pushing with FERC, the federal regulators of the grid, to encourage more of this transmission build out than they are right now, and maybe sidestepping Congress.

A grid interconnectivity is an absolutely massive issue. It's probably the biggest issue right now in climate policy, especially in wake of the Inflation Reduction Act, we have this way of funding renewable energy, and we just need a way of funding and building it, and now we need a way of getting it around the country to where it's needed most. This is a huge issue and is something that we Heatmap have been paying a lot of attention to, and we'll continue to do so in the future.

Brian Lehrer: Matthew Zeitlin is a business and energy correspondent at the Climate News Platform, Heatmap. Thanks so much for being our guest today on our Climate Story of the Week.

Matthew Zeitlin: Thank you, Brian.

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