West faces winter challenges, continues work on building summer peak supply

摘要

Western regulators continue to work toward alleviating summer powersupply concerns following the 2020 rotating outages, but there is alsoconcern of adequate winter supplies if the entire region experiencescolder-than-normal days at the same time.The California Independent System Operator had some close callsin summer 2021 from record high temperatures, weak hydro conditionsfrom an ongoing drought and a wildfire took out a regionaltransmission line. The drought drove more dependency on natural gasgeneration as gas prices rose to record highs.