In the past, California could deal with surging power demand by importing electricity from nearby states. Although California got the brunt of the heat wave, record-setting warmth stretched across the West, knocking down nearly 1,000 records and enveloping Nevada, Utah, and Montana. More important, climate change is also expanding the spatial extent of heat waves, meaning that pockets of hot air in the atmosphere are now physically larger-and therefore cover a much larger land area-than they once did. That’s one view of the future: To state the obvious, these unusually intense heat waves are going to become more common under climate change, which is making heat waves generally more frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting. Last Tuesday, California’s electricity use spiked to more than 52,000 megawatts, surpassing previous all-time records for peak power demand by more than 3 percent. That record-smashing heat led to grid-straining demand for air-conditioning. San Jose, Sacramento, and Redwood City recorded their hottest all-time temperatures, with the state capital hitting 116 degrees Fahrenheit. Last week, California broiled under one of its worst heat waves in written history. Because especially if you’re used to living in a world of physical commodities-and physical fuels-electricity is really, really weird. And that means we should start to cultivate the kind of commonsense understanding of the electricity system that many of us already have about, say, gasoline, or oil prices, or car engines. Electricity will propel our cars, cook our food, and heat our homes. In basically any world in which America addresses climate change and zeroes out carbon pollution from its economy, we will have to use more electricity. Electricity is, I hasten to add, extremely interesting. It came from the state’s electricity grid. It came from California, as usual, but it was not courtesy of Apple’s annual keynote, or indeed of any technology company. Last week, Americans had a rare view into what the future might look like.
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