PJM, the largest U.S. power grid operator, said it ordered generators to run at maximum output and bring idle power plants online immediately on Thursday evening, as it faced escalating stress from a heat dome.
PJM’s orders, detailed on its emergency procedures website, were aimed at preserving reliability as it sought to maintain power on a grid serving 67 million people across the Mid-Atlantic, South and Washington, D.C., regions and the world’s largest concentration of data centers.
Even before this week’s heat wave that sent temperatures soaring toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), PJM had been straining to overhaul a system pushed to the brink by surging energy consumption by data centers and electric vehicles.
Sure, but we’ve never had a need for it before. And a lot of our stuff was built hundreds of years ago, and retrofitting is a lot harder than building an entirely new city in one go.
District heating is a lot more common and exists as a patchwork across the world in different places including the US I.e. New York has a steam district heating system (why the manholes there steam so strongly.) university campuses also commonly used it for centralized heating and cooling.
Cooling is less common but it does exist in a lot of places. Denmark has a decent amount of district chillers using heat from the city district heating system.
The big issue for north America is after WWI power stations were built at coal mines and power lines transported the power. As a result they were way too far away to act as CHP plants even if they wanted to. Europe retrofitted heat networks into it’s existing cities since it had coal closer, or you were a port city where coal arrived by ship already.
The biggest reason it’s less common is city gas (produced from coal) being used for lamp lights and then heating and cooking basically everywhere in the world at some point. We switched to natural gas in the 1970s to replace it but that same network is still doing the heating/cooking and prevented the need for a shared heat or cooling network.
With a push to renewables it’s easiest to store excess solar or wind as heat in a soapstone battery. They’re extremely cheap to make and store almost as much energy as lithium per ton, with the caveat that it can only store it as heat instead of electricity.
Having a guaranteed customer for over producing solar and wind during sunny/windy days makes renewables a lot cheaper to operate, and that heat gets to do something useful out the other end if you hooked it into a city heating/cooling system.