Section:GDN 1J PaGe:9 Edition Date:190829 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 28/8/2019 17:40 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Thursday 29 Aug ust 2019 The Guardian •
9
O
n a sweltering Thursday evening
in Manhattan last month, people
across New York City were preparing
for what meteorologists predicted
would be the hottest weekend of
the year. Over the past two decades,
every record for peak electricity
use in the city has occurred during
a heatwave, as millions of people turn on their air
conditioning units at the same time. And so, at the
midtown headquarters of Con Edison, the company that
supplies more than 10 million people in the New York
area with electricity, employees were busy turning a
conference room into an emergency command cent re.
There, close to 80 engineers and company executives,
joined by representatives of the city’s emergency
management department, monitored the status of the
city power grid, directed ground crews and watched a
set of dials displaying each borough’s electricity use tick
upward. “It’s like the bridge in Star Trek ,” Anthony Suozzo,
a former senior system operator with the company, told
me. “You’ve got all hands on deck, they’re telling Scotty
to fi x things, the system is running at max capacity.”
Power grids are measured by the amount of electricitythat can pass through them at any one time. Con Edison’s
grid, with 62 power substations and more than 130,000
miles of power lines and cables across New York City and
Westchester County, can deliver 13,400MW every second.
This is roughly equivalent to 18m horsepower.
On a regular day, New York City demands around
10,000MW every second; during a heatwave, that fi gure
can exceed 13,000MW. “Do the math, whatever that gap
is, is the AC,” Michael Clendenin, a company spokesman,
told me. The combination of high demand and extreme
temperature can cause parts of the system to overheat
and fail, leading to blackouts. In 2006, equipment failure
left 175,000 people in Queens without power for a week ,
during a heatwave that killed 40 people.
This year, by the evening of Sunday 21 July, with
temperatures above 36 C and demand at more than
12,000MW every second, Con Edison cut power to
50,000 customers in Brooklyn and Queens for 24 hours,
afraid that parts of the nearby grid were close to collapse,
which could have left hundreds of thousands of people
without power for days. The state had to send in police to
help residents, and Con Edison crews dispensed dry ice
for people to cool their homes.
As the world gets hotter, scenes like these will becomeincreasingly common. Buying an air conditioner is
perhaps the most popular individual response to climate
change, and air conditioners are almost uniquely power-
hungry appliances: a small unit cooling a single room, on
average, consumes more power than running four fridges,
while a central unit cooling an average house uses more
power than 15. “Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave,
50% of the power capacity was going to air conditioning,”
says John Dulac, an analyst at the International Energy
Agency (IEA). “These are ‘oh shit’ moments.”
There are just over 1bn single-room air conditioning
units in the world right now – about one for every seven
people on earth. Numerous reports have projected that
by 2050 there are likely to be more than 4.5bn , making
them as ubiquitous as the mobile phone is today. The
US already uses as much electricity for air conditioning
each year as the UK uses in total. The IEA projects
that as the rest of the world reaches similar levels,
air conditioning will use about 13% of all electricity
worldwide, and produce 2bn tonnes of CO2 a year- about the same amount as India, the world’s third-
largest emitter, produces today.
All of these reports note the awful irony
of this feedback loop: warmer temperatures
The long read
The warmer it gets,
the more we use air
conditioning. The more
we use air conditioning,
the warmer it gets. Can
we escape this trap?
Blow ing
cold
and hot
By Stephen Buranyi
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