“Americans used more electricity last week [week ending Aug. 5) than any week for which records have been kept,” the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) said last Wednesday. It was the second new weekly power demand record in the last three weeks, sparked by a searing heat wave that stretched across two-thirds of the country.

EEI’s Weekly Electric Output, a survey of electricity demand, said that for the week ending Aug. 5, Americans consumed 98,583 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity, erasing the previous single-week record of 96,314 GWh set during the week ending July 22, for a 2.4% increase. Many power utilities saw their peak demand records fall on both occasions and at least one natural gas distributor set its first ever summertime peak demand record last week (see separate story).

Both the July and August heat waves resulted in unusual summertime net natural gas storage withdrawals. Instead of adding to storage the industry showed a net storage withdrawal of 7 Bcf the third week in July and 12 Bcf the first week in August. It appears that all the natural gas-fired peakers built in the last few years were all put to use at once. Typically, the natural gas units, representing the most expensive power, are the last to be called on.

Despite calls for conservation and cutting back industrial load, all seven of the regional independent electric grid operators across the country set new record demands in the July week, ranging from 0.9 to 4.5 % higher than the peak levels reached in 2005. ISOs and RTOs serving two-thirds of the U.S. population reported a new aggregated peak record of electricity usage of 483,233 MW, compared to a 475,717 MW peak last year.

During the August heat wave grid operators in the eastern half of the country, including the Midwestern system, MISO, the mid-Atlantic system, PJM Interconnection, and New York (NYISO) and New England (ISO-NE) all re-broke their records for the week.

“Once again the nation’s electric system withstood a severe test,” said EEI President Tom Kuhn. “Apart from some localized outages, the system worked, the power remained on and the transmission grid was resilient.”

Kuhn reiterated the importance of the utility industry’s mission to continue investing more to expand and upgrade the nation’s high-voltage transmission grid and its local distribution networks, and he also noted the critical role played by energy efficiency and conservation. He voiced support for the National Action Plan on Energy Efficiency.

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