By admin 
TUCSON, Ariz. (13 News) – TEP is managing high energy demand and the potential for weather-related outages as the city entered its fifth consecutive extreme heat day on Monday, Aug. 3.
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TEP’s Irvington Campus houses the utility’s map room and energy units, where staff monitor and respond to outages and manage Tucson’s energy supply.
Lonnie Chapman, TEP’s manager of distribution control, said back-to-back extreme heat days produce a measurable spike in consumption.
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“One day is a one-off, you know, hot, hot day, but multiple in a row we notice a real increase in usage,” Chapman said.
Chapman said that sustained increase in AC use pushes the grid toward peak load thresholds and puts strain on equipment.
“That will shoot our load, and that’s when we start setting peaks. That’s when we notice that some of our equipment gets burned out — it’s all got a shelf life,” Chapman said.
He said TEP has a responsibility to respond to those fluctuations in real time.
“We’ve got obligations to the interconnection and to our customers to — as the power drops, we gotta back down generation, as power peaks, we gotta pick it up a generation,” Chapman said.
TEP operates 10 RICE units — large natural gas engines housed on the Irvington Campus — that can be brought online quickly when energy demand rises.
“It’s almost like a giant car engine or a giant boat engine that runs off natural gas. It can be throttled up and down; they’re a lot smaller than our peaking units, which means we can bring them on and off several times a day,” Chapman said.
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The units are designed to fill generation gaps on cloudy or stormy days when solar output may be reduced.
In addition to managing demand, Chapman’s team reroutes power when storm damage takes down poles or lines, limiting how long customers go without power.
“A yellow circuit, a light blue, dark blue, more light blue, purple. Those all indicate different circuits and available backup sources in the event that we were to lose one of these lines due to poles down or wires down or cars into poles — those types of things,” Chapman said.
TEP set its record peak load last August when temperatures reached 111 degrees. Despite similar temperatures over the past weekend, that record has not been surpassed this year.
TEP recommends customers conserve energy during extreme heat days. HERE are TEP’s energy-saving tips.
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