KQED: EcoBlock senior advisor Dr. Alexandra “Sascha” von Meier was recently featured in a KQED podcast alongside Duncan Callaway of UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group and Ivan Penn of The New York Times. In this interview, the team discusses how California’s power grid works, how it’s adapting, and how it performed during the recent heat wave.
“I think that it really was quite a success,” said Sascha of California’s emergency response to the heat wave. “I think we have to keep in mind … that the conditions are really unprecedented, and there were temperature records broken, demand records broken—we had several gigawatts more [of] electric demand than ever before. And so I think we really have to adjust our expectations. I thought that the way people responded was phenomenal.”