Turning on renewables for the electric grid is great but what really needs to happen, to reduce future climate change, is for fossil fuel plants to turn off.
That happened Easter Sunday when New England saw a record low “load,” the term for amount of electricity produced by power plants. And it was quite a record: At 2 p.m. the total load was 5,237 MW, a whopping 1,577 MW less than the previous record set on Easter Sunday 2023.
Of course this is an outlier. Easter Sunday sees relatively little electricity-consuming activity and the day was cool and sunny, perfect for solar. But it’s still astonishing to thank that for a couple hours in the six-state region, more electricity was being produced by a zillion small units of rooftop solar than by all the gas, nuclear and hydro plants combined.
Some more details can be seen here from ISO Newswire.
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