At issue are residential grids that are not designed for the sustained increase in power demand.
Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images, FILEforced people to stay inside and businesses to close in a largely unprecedented way, summer months strained electrical grids. The oppressive heat forces residential and commercial units alike to crank up the air conditioning, causing a significant increase in power usage and a greater likelihood of a blackout.
And this data was published in late April, before temperatures started to climb, which is a key contributing factor to power outages, study author Vijay Modi, professor of mechanical engineering and a faculty member of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, told ABC News.
"The grid is well-equipped to handle forecasted summer demand," Wes Yeomans, New York ISO vice president of operations, said in a statement."We operate the grid to meet reliability rules that are among the strictest in the nation and are designed to ensure adequate supply." Similar to the Columbia University study, Con Edison said it forecasts overall New York City usage to be down because of a decrease in office use but with an increase in residential areas. Should an outage occur, the utility said it would send generators to those affected.The key area for concern is residential grids, Yury Dvorkin, assistant professor at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering, told ABC News.
Modi said it's not just heat and usage that leads to blackouts, it's also a combination of time and days during a surge of usage. Residential grids, he said, are typically not set up for people to be working from home during weekdays, and this out of norm usage pattern increases the probability of a blackout on a hot day.
The potential pitfalls for electrical grids this summer won't be limited to New York City: areas across the country where temperatures are high and usage is up are at an increased risk, the Earth Institute study said.
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