I was on vacation playing with a grandchild during last week’s heat dome, so I didn’t pay much attention to the details. Now I’m back at work and wondering: How bad was it?
Bad, of course.
The state’s official thermometer at Concord airport broke the daily heat record on both Monday and Tuesday, with the latter hitting a not-so-nice, round 100 degrees, and humidity made it feel worse. The heat dome, aptly described as acting like a lid on a simmering pot, has moved east to Europe and is making Europeans miserable as I write this. And it’s not even July yet.
The one bright spot was New England’s power system. Everybody cranking their air conditioning to the max meant that the six-state electrical grid hit a near-record demand of 26,024 megawatts on Tuesday evening, where one megawatt is equivalent to the power needs of 700 or so homes.
That’s the highest demand we’ve seen since 2013. It would have set an all-time demand record if it wasn’t for years of work increasing energy efficiency; instituting non-traditional systems, like demand response, where companies are paid to turn off power at peak times; and most importantly, installing rooftop solar on homes and businesses. At times this spring, New England rooftop solar (“behind-the-meter” is the industry term) was producing six times as much electricity as Seabrook Station.
Generating some of your own electricity means you don’t have to buy as much from the utility, reducing the amount that has to be produced by big power plants as well as the number of new poles and wires that have to be built using money from everybody’s electric rates. Another monetary advantage of solar power is that it can be built more quickly than any other source; there’s no dilly-dallying before your power bill gets reduced.
Getting back to the weather, what about that humidity? The altered climate means that we’re starting to hear about “heat index” almost as often as we have long heard about “wind chill.” Both are attempts to better measure how much damage the environment can do to us.
Wind chill combines wind speed with air temperature because moving air removes heat from our bodies, chilling us more quickly. Heat index includes the amount of moisture in the air – the relative humidity – because damp air makes it harder for sweat to evaporate and remove heat from our body. More wind and more humidity make conditions more dangerous than the air temperature alone would indicate, hence the desire for another number to tell us the danger.
Neither formula is intuitive. Wind chill takes air temperature and wind speed and combines them like this: 35.74 + 0.6215T – 35.75(V^0.16) + 0.4275T(V^0.16), where T is temperature and V is wind speed. Heat index uses air temperature and relative humidity and applies a recursive formula, plugging the result back into the formula several times. They have been developed over time based on experiments and feedback, and they will probably be further tweaked as more data comes in.
Neither is exact down to the second decimal – we’re not talking Newtonian physics here – but both are good estimates of potential danger. Don’t ignore them.
Because, as any sensible person knows, the danger from heat is just going to increase in future years. You’ve seen the Simpsons meme where Bart complains this is the hottest summer of his life and Homer corrects him to say it’s the coolest summer of the rest of his life? That’s accurate, unfortunately.
Oh, well. There’s always chasing your grandchild through the lawn sprinkler to look forward to.
David Brooks can be reached at dbrooks@cmonitor.comWeb body
By DAVID BROOKS
Monitor staff
I was on vacation playing with a grandchild during last week’s heat dome, so I didn’t pay much attention to the details. Now I’m back at work and wondering: How bad was it?
Bad, of course.
The state’s official thermometer at Concord airport broke the daily heat record on both Monday and Tuesday, with the latter hitting a not-so-nice, round 100 degrees, and humidity made it feel worse. The heat dome, aptly described as acting like a lid on a simmering pot, has moved east to Europe and is making Europeans miserable as I write this. And it’s not even July yet.
The one bright spot was New England’s power system. Everybody cranking their air conditioning to the max meant that the six-state electrical grid hit a near-record demand of 26,024 megawatts on Tuesday evening, where one megawatt is equivalent to the power needs of 700 or so homes.
That’s the highest demand we’ve seen since 2013. It would have set an all-time demand record if it wasn’t for years of work increasing energy efficiency; instituting non-traditional systems, like demand response, where companies are paid to turn off power at peak times; and most importantly, installing rooftop solar on homes and businesses. At times this spring, New England rooftop solar (“behind-the-meter” is the industry term) was producing six times as much electricity as Seabrook Station.
Generating some of your own electricity means you don’t have to buy as much from the utility, reducing the amount that has to be produced by big power plants as well as the number of new poles and wires that have to be built using money from everybody’s electric rates. Another monetary advantage of solar power is that it can be built more quickly than any other source; there’s no dilly-dallying before your power bill gets reduced.
Getting back to the weather, what about that humidity? The altered climate means that we’re starting to hear about “heat index” almost as often as we have long heard about “wind chill.” Both are attempts to better measure how much damage the environment can do to us.
Wind chill combines wind speed with air temperature because moving air removes heat from our bodies, chilling us more quickly. Heat index includes the amount of moisture in the air – the relative humidity – because damp air makes it harder for sweat to evaporate and remove heat from our body. More wind and more humidity make conditions more dangerous than the air temperature alone would indicate, hence the desire for another number to tell us the danger.
Neither formula is intuitive. Wind chill takes air temperature and wind speed and combines them like this: 35.74 + 0.6215T – 35.75(V^0.16) + 0.4275T(V^0.16), where T is temperature and V is wind speed. Heat index uses air temperature and relative humidity and applies a recursive formula, plugging the result back into the formula several times. They have been developed over time based on experiments and feedback, and they will probably be further tweaked as more data comes in.
Neither is exact down to the second decimal – we’re not talking Newtonian physics here – but both are good estimates of potential danger. Don’t ignore them.
Because, as any sensible person knows, the danger from heat is just going to increase in future years. You’ve seen the Simpsons meme where Bart complains this is the hottest summer of his life and Homer corrects him to say it’s the coolest summer of the rest of his life? That’s accurate, unfortunately.
Oh, well. There’s always chasing your grandchild through the lawn sprinkler to look forward to.
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