Queen Creek offers high-voltage-line route

Iceland Bitcoin Mining Energy Shortage highlights surging cryptocurrency and blockchain data center electricity demand, as hydroelectric and geothermal power strain to cool servers, stabilize grid, and meet rapid mining farm growth amid Arctic-friendly conditions.

Key Points

Crypto mining data centers in Iceland are outpacing renewable power, straining the grid and exceeding residential electricity demand.

✅ Hydroelectric and geothermal capacity nearing allocation limits

✅ Cooling-friendly climate draws energy-hungry mining farms

✅ Grid planning and regulation lag rapid data center growth

The value of bitcoin may have stumbled in recent months, but in Iceland it has known only one direction so far: upward. The stunning success of cryptocurrencies around the globe has had a more unexpected repercussion on the island of 340,000 people: It could soon result in an energy shortage in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

As Iceland has become one of the world's prime locations for energy-hungry cryptocurrency servers — something analysts describe as a 21st-century gold-rush equivalent — the industry’s electricity demands have skyrocketed, too. For the first time, they now exceed Icelanders’ own private energy consumption, and energy producers fear that they won’t be able to keep up with rising demand if Iceland continues to attract new companies bidding on the success of cryptocurrencies, a concern echoed by policy moves like Russia's proposed mining ban amid electricity deficits.

Companies have flooded Iceland with requests to open new data centers to “mine” cryptocurrencies in recent months, even as concerns mount that the country may have to slow down investments amid an increasingly stretched electricity generation capacity, a dynamic seen in BC Hydro's suspension of new crypto connections in Canada.

“There was a lot of talk about data centers in Iceland about five years ago, but it was a slow start,” Johann Snorri Sigurbergsson, a spokesman for Icelandic energy producer HS Orka, told The Washington Post. “But six months ago, interest suddenly began to spike. And over the last three months, we have received about one call per day from foreign companies interested in setting up projects here.”

“If all these projects are realized, we won’t have enough energy for it,” Sigurbergsson said.

Every cryptocurrency in the world relies on a “blockchain” platform, which is needed to trade with digital currencies. Tracking and verifying a transaction on such a platform is like solving a puzzle because networks are often decentralized, and there is no single authority in charge of monitoring payments. As a result, a transaction involves an immense number of mathematical calculations, which in turn occupy vast computer server capacity. And that requires a lot of electricity, as analyses of bitcoin's energy use indicate worldwide.

The bitcoin rush may have come as a surprise to locals in sleepy Icelandic towns that are suddenly bustling with cryptocurrency technicians, but there’s a simple explanation. “The economics of bitcoin mining mean that most miners need access to reliable and very cheap power on the order of 2 or 3 cents per kilowatt hour. As a result, a lot are located near sources of hydro power, where it’s cheap,” Sam Hartnett, an associate at the nonprofit energy research and consulting group Rocky Mountain Institute, told the Washington Post.

Top financial regulators briefed a Senate panel on Feb. 6 about their work with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and the risks to potential investors. (Reuters)

Located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and famous for its hot springs and mighty rivers, Iceland produces about 80 percent of its energy in hydroelectric power stations, compared with about 6 percent in the United States, and innovations such as underwater kites illustrate novel ways to harness marine energy. That and the cold climate make it a perfect location for new data-mining centers filled with servers in danger of overheating.

Those conditions have attracted scores of foreign companies to the remote location, including Germany's Genesis Mining, which moved to Iceland about three years ago. More have followed suit since then or are in the process of moving. 

While some analysts are already sensing a possible new revenue source for the country that is so far mostly known abroad as a tourist haven and low-budget airline hub, others are more concerned by a phenomenon that has so far mostly alarmed analysts because of its possible financial unsustainability, alongside issues such as clean energy's dirty secret that complicate the picture. Some predictions have concluded that cryptocurrency computer operations may account for “all of the world’s energy by 2020” or may already account for the equivalent of Denmark's energy needs. Those predictions are probably too alarmist, though. 

Most analysts agree that the real energy-consumption figure is likely smaller, and several experts recently told the Washington Post that bitcoin — currently the world's biggest cryptocurrency — used no more than 0.14 percent of the world’s generated electricity, as of last December. Even though global consumption may not be as significant as some have claimed, it still presents a worrisome drain for a tiny country such as Iceland, where consumption suddenly began to spike with almost no warning — and continues to grow fast.

Some networks are considering or have already pushed through changes to their protocols, designed to reduce energy use. But implementing such changes for the leading currency, bitcoin, won't be as easy because it is inherently decentralized. The companies that provide the vast amounts of computing power needed for these transactions earn a small share, comparable to a processing fee or a reward.

They are the source of the Icelandic bitcoin miners’ income — a revenue source that many Icelanders are still not quite sure what to make of, especially if the lights start flickering.

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AI Load Forecasting for Utilities leverages machine learning, smart meters, and predictive analytics to balance energy demand during COVID-19 disruptions, optimize grid reliability, support demand response, and stabilize rates for residential and commercial customers.

Key Points

AI predicts utility demand with ML and smart meters to improve reliability and reduce costs.

✅ Adapts to rapid demand shifts with accurate short term forecasts

✅ Optimizes demand response and distributed energy resources

✅ Reduces outages risk while lowering procurement and operating costs

The spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has prompted state and local governments around the U.S. to institute shelter-in-place orders and business closures. As millions suddenly find themselves confined to their homes, the shift has strained not only internet service providers, streaming platforms, and online retailers, but the utilities supplying power to the nation’s electrical grid, which face longer, more frequent outages as well.

U.S. electricity use on March 27, 2020 was 3% lower than it was on March 27, 2019, a loss of about three years of sales growth. Peter Fox-Penner, director of the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy, asserted in a recent op-ed that utility revenues will suffer because providers are halting shutoffs and deferring rate increases. Moreover, according to research firm Wood Mackenzie, the rise in household electricity demand won’t offset reduced business electricity demand, mainly because residential demand makes up just 40% of the total demand across North America.

Some utilities are employing AI and machine learning for the energy transition to address the windfalls and fluctuations in energy usage resulting from COVID-19. Precise load forecasting could ensure that operations aren’t interrupted in the coming months, thereby preventing blackouts and brownouts. And they might also bolster the efficiency of utilities’ internal processes, leading to reduced prices and improved service long after the pandemic ends.

Innowatts
Innowatts, a startup developing an automated toolkit for energy monitoring and management, counts several major U.S. utility companies among its customers, including Portland General Electric, Gexa Energy, Avangrid, Arizona Public Service Electric, WGL, and Mega Energy. Its eUtility platform ingests data from over 34 million smart energy meters across 21 million customers in more than 13 regional energy markets, while its machine learning algorithms analyze the data to forecast short- and long-term loads, variances, weather sensitivity, and more.

Beyond these table-stakes predictions, Innowatts helps evaluate the effects of different rate configurations by mapping utilities’ rate structures against disaggregated cost models. It also produces cost curves for each customer that reveal the margin impacts on the wider business, and it validates the yield of products and cost of customer acquisition with models that learn the relationships between marketing efforts and customer behaviors (like real-time load).

Innowwatts told VentureBeat that it observed “dramatic” shifts in energy usage between the first and fourth weeks of March. In the Northeast, “non-essential” retailers like salons, clothing shops, and dry cleaners were using only 35% as much energy toward the end of the month (after shelter-in-place orders were enacted) versus the beginning of the month, while restaurants (excepting pizza chains) were using only 28%. In Texas, conversely, storage facilities were using 142% as much energy in the fourth week compared with the first.

Innowatts says that throughout these usage surges and declines, its clients took advantage of AI-based load forecasting to learn from short-term shocks and make timely adjustments. Within three days of shelter-in-place orders, the company said, its forecasting models were able to learn new consumption patterns and produce accurate forecasts, accounting for real-time changes.

Innowatts CEO Sid Sachdeva believes that if utility companies had not leveraged machine learning models, demand forecasts in mid-March would have seen variances of 10-20%, significantly impacting operations.

“During these turbulent times, AI-based load forecasting gives energy providers the ability to … develop informed, data-driven strategies for future success,” Sachdeva told VentureBeat. “With utilities and energy retailers seeing a once-in-a-lifetime 30%-plus drop in commercial energy consumption, accurate forecasting has never been more important. Without AI tools, utilities would see their forecasts swing wildly, leading to inaccuracies of 20% or more, placing an enormous strain on their operations and ultimately driving up costs for businesses and consumers.”

Autogrid
Autogrid works with over 50 customers in 10 countries — including Energy Australia, Florida Power & Light, and Southern California Edison — to deliver AI-informed power usage insights. Its platform makes 10 million predictions every 10 minutes and optimizes over 50 megawatts of power, which is enough to supply the average suburb.

Flex, the company’s flagship product, predicts and controls tens of thousands of energy resources from millions of customers by ingesting, storing, and managing petabytes of data from trillions of endpoints. Using a combination of data science, machine learning, and network optimization algorithms, Flex models both physics and customer behavior, automatically anticipating and adjusting for supply and demand patterns through virtual power plants that coordinate distributed assets.

Autogrid also offers a fully managed solution for integrating and utilizing end-customer installations of grid batteries and microgrids. Like Flex, it automatically aggregates, forecasts, and optimizes capacity from assets at sub-stations and transformers, reacting to distribution management needs while providing capacity to avoid capital investments in system upgrades.

Autogrid CEO Dr. Amit Narayan told VentureBeat that the COVID-19 crisis has heavily shifted daily power distribution in California, where it’s having a “significant” downward impact on hourly prices in the energy market. He says that Autogrid has also heard from customers about transformer failures in some regions due to overloaded circuits, which he expects will become a problem in heavily residential and saturated load areas during the summer months (as utilities prepare for blackouts across the U.S. when air conditioning usage goes up).

“In California, [as you’ll recall], more than a million residents faced wildfire prevention-related outages in PG&E territory in 2019,” Narayan said, referring to the controversial planned outages orchestrated by Pacific Gas & Electric last summer. “The demand continues to be high in 2020 in spite of the COVID-19 crisis, as residents prepare to keep the lights on and brace for a similar situation this summer. If a 2019 repeat happens again, it will be even more devastating, given the health crisis and difficulty in buying groceries.”

AI making a difference
AI and machine learning isn’t a silver bullet for the power grid — even with predictive tools at their disposal, utilities are beholden to a tumultuous demand curve and to mounting climate risks across the grid. But providers say they see evidence the tools are already helping to prevent the worst of the pandemic’s effects — chiefly by enabling them to better adjust to shifted daily and weekly power load profiles.

“The societal impact [of the pandemic] will continue to be felt — people may continue working remotely instead of going into the office, they may alter their commute times to avoid rush hour crowds, or may look to alternative modes of transportation,” Schneider Electric chief innovation officer Emmanuel Lagarrigue told VentureBeat. “All of this will impact the daily load curve, and that is where AI and automation can help us with maintenance, performance, and diagnostics within our homes, buildings, and in the grid.”

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Sub-Saharan Africa Energy Access faces critical deficits; SDG7, clean energy finance, off-grid solar, and microgrids drive electrification for health, education, and economy amid World Bank and IEA efforts to expand reliable, affordable power.

Key Points

Reliable, affordable power in sub-Saharan Africa via renewables, off-grid solar, and SDG7-led electrification.

✅ SDG7 targets universal, modern energy access by 2030

✅ Off-grid solar and microgrids boost rural electrification

✅ Health, education, and business depend on reliable power

Sub-Saharan Africa has an electricity problem. While the world as a whole has made great strides when it comes to providing access to electricity and moving toward universal electricity access worldwide (the world average is now 90 per cent with access, up from 83 per cent in 2010), southern and western African states still lag far behind.

According to Tracking SDG7: The Energy Progress Report, produced by a consortium of organisations including the World Bank, the International Energy Agency and the World Health Organization, 759 million people were without electricity in 2019 and threequarters of them were based in sub-Saharan Africa. At just seven per cent, South Sudan had the lowest access figures; Chad, Burundi and Malawi were only marginally higher. What’s more, due to a combination of factors, the situation is getting worse. In total, the region’s access deficit increased from 556 million people in 2010 to 570 million people in 2019.

These days, being without electricity has an impact on every sphere of life. The Covid-19 pandemic only served to put this into sharper relief. Intermittent electricity meant vaccination doses that rely on cold storage were impossible to deliver and, as more than 70 per cent of the health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa have no access to reliable electricity, the problem was vast. But even without a global pandemic, having no power stymies opportunity in every field, from education to economics.

French photojournalist Pascal Maitre, who has spent much of his career writing about sub-Saharan Africa, wanted to document the problems faced by people in areas with no electricity. He thought particularly carefully about the location for his project. ‘First, I was thinking I could take images in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,’ he says. ‘But then I thought that if you chose a place that has war, it’s logical that electricity won’t really work. So, instead, I wanted to find a place that is quite stable. I decided to go to Benin, where they have a democracy. It is a good example of a country that’s not in really bad shape but where they still have this problem. Also, I didn’t want to go to a place that is very remote, where it is normal not to have good service. So I decided to go to a place around 50 kilometres from the capital that you can get to by road.’

Maitre visited several villages in the region, as well as making trips to Chad and Senegal, and encountered the full range of limitations engendered by the power shortage. From teachers struggling to conduct lessons in the dark to midwives forced to work with only the weak light from a phone, the situation was clearly unacceptable. ‘People were very, very, very upset,’ he says. ‘I conducted a lot of interviews in different villages and lack of electricity touches education, economy, business, security and also emigration, because people have to move to big cities or maybe to Europe to get jobs.’

Where once the situation might have been accepted as the norm, people today are fully aware of the ways in which they are held back by the lack of power. As Maitre remembers: ‘A guy said to me one day, “Do you think it is normal that last time my wife delivered a baby, the midwife had to hold her phone between her teeth in order to see what she was doing?” You feel very frustrated.’ He adds that the fact that most people now have mobile phones only highlights the hardship. ‘Before, maybe it was not so frustrating. But now, most of these people have cellphones. The cellphone company puts antennae everywhere so the phones work, but people cannot recharge their phones. They have to go to the market, where someone will come with a generator to recharge.’

Governments and global organisations are very aware of the problem across the world as a whole. Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) – one of the 17 goals set out in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly – was designed to ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy by 2030, underscoring the push for clean, affordable and sustainable electricity for all by 2030. As part of this goal, international financial flows to developing countries in support of clean energy reached US$17 billion in 2018. As a result, some areas have seen huge improvement. According to the Energy Progress Report, in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, the advance of electrification has been enough to approach universal access. By 2019, in Western Asia and North Africa, and Central and South Asia, 94 and 95 per cent of the population respectively had access to electricity.

But these statistics only serve to emphasise just how bad the situation is in sub-Saharan Africa, where electricity systems are unlikely to go green this decade according to several analyses. As the report states: ‘While renewable energy has demonstrated remarkable resilience during the pandemic, the unfortunate fact is that gains in energy access throughout Africa are being reversed: the number of people lacking access to electricity is set to increase in 2020, making basic electricity services unaffordable for up to 30 million people who had previously enjoyed access.’

The small silver lining is that if the situation is dealt with properly, the region could build a renewable-energy system from the ground up, rather than having to undergo the costly and complex transitions underway in developed countries. In rural areas, small-scale or off-grid renewable systems (mostly solar) are expected to play an important role, as highlighted by a recent IRENA report on decarbonisation, in increasing access. In fact, solar panels are already used in many areas. In 2019, 105 million people had access to off-grid solar solutions, up from 85 million in 2016, and almost half lived in sub-Saharan Africa, with 17 million in Kenya and eight million in Ethiopia.

Rachel Kyte is currently serving as the 14th dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University in the USA, but her CV is long. She was previously CEO of the UN-affiliated Sustainable Energy for All (SeforALL), as well as the World Bank Group vice president and special envoy for climate change, leading the run-up to the Paris Agreement. According to her, a focus on renewables is absolutely essential, both for wider efforts to tackle climate change, with some advocating a fossil fuel lockdown to drive a climate revolution, but also for the people of sub-Saharan Africa. ‘The fossil fuel industry has said it will just extend the centralised fossil-fuel power systems that we have today to reach these people,’ she says.

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BC Ferries Island Class hybrid ferries deliver quiet, battery-electric travel with shore power readiness, lower emissions, and larger capacity on northern routes, protecting marine wildlife while replacing older vessels on Powell River and Texada services.

Key Points

Hybrid-electric ferries using batteries and diesel for quiet, low-emission service, ready for shore power upgrades.

✅ Operate 20% electric at launch; future full-electric via shore power

✅ 300 passengers, 47 vehicles; replacing older, smaller vessels

✅ Quieter transits help protect West Coast whales and marine habitat

In a champagne celebration, BC Ferries welcomed two new, hybrid-electric ships into its fleet Wednesday. The ships arrived in Victoria last month, and are expected to be in service on northern routes by the summer.

The Island Aurora and Island Discovery have the ability to run on either diesel or electricity.

"The pressure on whales on the West Coast is very intense right now," said BC Ferries CEO Mark Collins. "Quiet operation is very important. These ships will be gliding out of the harbor quietly and electrically with no engines running, that will be really great for marine space."

BC Ferries says the ships will be running on electricity 20 per cent of the time when they enter service, but the company hopes they can run on electricity full-time in the future. That would require the installation of shoreline power, which the company hopes to have in place in the next five to 10 years. Each ship costs around $40-million, a price tag that the federal government partially subsidized through CIB support as part of the electrification push.

When the two ships begin running on the Powell River to Texada, and Port McNeill, Alert Bay, and Sointula routes, two older vessels will be retired.

On Kootenay Lake, an electric-ready ferry is slated to begin operations in 2023, reflecting the province's wider shift.

"They are replacing a 47-car ferry, but on some routes they will be replacing a 25-car ferry, so those routes will see a considerable increase in service," said Collins.

Although the ships will not be servicing Colwood, the municipality's mayor is hoping that one day, they will.

"We can look at an electric ferry when we look at a West Shore ferry that would move Colwood residents to Victoria," said Mayor Rob Martin, noting that across the province electric school buses are hitting the road as well. "Here is a great example of what BC Ferries can do for us."

BC Ferries says it will be adding four more hybrid ships to its fleet by 2022, and is working on adding hybrid ships that could run from Victoria to Tsawwassen, similar to Washington State Ferries' hybrid upgrade underway in the region. 

B.C’s first hybrid-electric ferries arrived in Victoria on Saturday morning ushering in a new era of travel for BC Ferries passengers, as electric seaplane flights are also on the horizon for the region.

“It’s a really exciting day for us,” said Tessa Humphries, spokesperson for BC Ferries.

It took the ferries 60 days to arrive at the Breakwater District at Ogden Point. They came all the way from Constanta, Romania.

“These are battery-equipped ships that are designed for fully electric operation; they are outfitted with hybrid technology that bridges the gap until the EV charging infrastructure and funding is available in British Columbia,” said Humphries.

The two new "Island Class" vessels arrived at about 9 a.m. to a handful of people eagerly wanting to witness history.

Sometime in the next few days, the transport ship that brought the new ferries to B.C. will go out into the harbor and partially submerge to allow them to be offloaded, Humphries said.

The transfer process could happen in four to five days from now. After the final preparations are finished at the Breakwater District, the ships will be re-commissioned in Point Hope Maritime and then BC Ferries will officially take ownership.

“We know a lot of people are interested in this so we will put out advisory once we have more information as to a viewing area to see the whole process,” said Humphries.

Both Island Class ferries can carry 300 passengers and 47 vehicles. They won’t be sailing until later this year, but Humphries tells CTV News they will be named by the end of February. 

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US Grid Pandemic Response coordinates control rooms, grid operators, and critical infrastructure, leveraging hydroelectric plants, backup control centers, mutual assistance networks, and deep cleaning protocols to maintain reliability amid reduced demand and COVID-19 risks.

Key Points

US Grid Pandemic Response encompasses measures by utilities and operators to safeguard power reliability during COVID-19

✅ Control rooms staffed on-site; operators split across backup centers

✅ Health screenings, deep cleaning, and isolation protocols mitigate contagion

✅ Reduced demand and mutual assistance improve grid resilience

Control rooms are the brains of NYPA’s power plants, which are mostly hydroelectric and supply about a quarter of all the electricity in New York state. They’re also a bit like human petri dishes. The control rooms are small, covered with frequently touched switches and surfaces, and occupied for hours on end by a half-dozen employees. Since social distancing and telecommuting isn’t an option in this context, NYPA has instituted regular health screenings and deep cleanings to keep the coronavirus out.

The problem is that each power plant relies on only a handful of control room operators. Since they have a specialized skill set, they can’t be easily replaced if they get sick. “They are very, very critical,” says Gil Quiniones, NYPA president and CEO. If the pandemic worsens, Quiniones says that NYPA may require control room operators to live on-site at power plants to reduce the chance of the virus making it in from the outside world. It sounds drastic, but Quiniones says NYPA has done it before during emergencies—once during the massive 2003 blackout, and again during Hurricane Sandy.

Meanwhile, PJM is one of North America’s nine regional grid operators and manages the transmission lines that move electricity from power plants to millions of customers in 13 states on the Eastern seaboard, including Washington, DC. PJM has had a pandemic response plan on the books for 15 years, but Mike Bryson, senior vice president of operations, says that this is the first time it’s gone into full effect. As of last week, about 80 percent of PJM’s 750 full-time employees have been working from home. But PJM also requires a skeleton crew of essential workers to be on-site at all times in its control centers. As part of its emergency planning, PJM built a backup control center years ago, and now it is splitting control center operators between the two to limit contact.

Past experience with large-scale disasters has helped the energy sector keep the lights on and ventilators running during the pandemic. Energy is one of 16 sectors that the US government has designated as “critical infrastructure,” which also includes the communications industry, transportation sector, and food and water systems. Each is seen as vital to the country and therefore has a duty to maintain operations during national emergencies.

“We need to be treated as first responders,” says Scott Aaronson, the vice president of security and preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group representing private utilities. “Everybody's goal right now is to keep the public healthy, and to keep society functioning as best we can. A lack of electricity will certainly create a challenge for those goals.”

America’s electricity grid is a patchwork of regional grid operators connecting private and state-owned utilities. This means simply figuring out who’s in charge and coordinating among the various organizations is one of the biggest challenges to keeping the electricity flowing during a national emergency, according to Aaronson.

Generally, a lot of this responsibility falls on formal energy organizations like the nonprofit North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But during the coronavirus outbreak, an obscure organization run by the CEOs of electric utilities called the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council has also served as a primary liaison between the federal government and the thousands of utility companies around the US. Aaronson says the organization has been meeting twice a week for the past three weeks to ensure that utilities are implementing best practices in their response to the coronavirus, as well as to inform the government of material needs to keep the energy sector running smoothly.

This tight-knit coordination will be especially important if the pandemic gets worse, as many forecasts suggest it will. Most utilities belong to at least one mutual assistance group, an informal network of electricity suppliers that help each other out during a catastrophe. These mutual assistance networks are usually called upon following major storms that threaten prolonged outages. But they could, in principle, be used to help during the coronavirus pandemic too. For example, if a utility finds itself without enough operators to manage a power plant, it could conceivably borrow trained operators from another company to make sure the power plant stays online.

So far, utilities and grid operators have managed to make it work on their own. There have been a handful of coronavirus cases reported at power plants, but they haven’t yet affected these plants’ ability to deliver energy. The challenges of running a power plant with a skeleton crew is partially offset by the reduced power demand as businesses shut down and more people work from home, says Robert Hebner, the director of the Center for Electromechanics at the University of Texas. “The reduced demand for power gives utilities a little breathing room,” says Hebner.

A recent study by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute found that electricity demand in Italy has plunged by 18 percent following the severe increase in coronavirus cases in the country. Energy demand in China also plummeted as a result of the pandemic. Bryson, at PJM, says the grid operator has seen about a 6 percent decrease in electricity demand in recent weeks, but expects an even greater drop if the pandemic gets worse.

Generally speaking, problems delivering electricity in the US occur when the grid is overloaded or physically damaged, such as during California wildfires or a hurricane.

An open question among coronavirus researchers is whether there will be a second wave of the pandemic later this year. During the Spanish flu pandemic in the early 20th century, the second wave turned out to be deadlier than the first. If the coronavirus remerges later this year, it could be a serious threat to reliable electricity in the US, says John MacWilliams, a former associate deputy secretary of the Department of Energy and a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

“If this crisis extends into the fall, we're going to hit hurricane season along the coasts,” MacWilliams says. “Utilities are doing a very good job right now, but if we get unlucky and have an active hurricane season, they're going to get very stressed because the number of workers that are available to repair damage and restore power will become more limited.”

This was a sentiment echoed by Bryson at PJM. “Any one disaster is manageable, but when you start layering them on top of each other, it gets much more challenging,” he adds. The US electricity grid struggles to handle major storms as it is, and these challenges will be heightened if too many workers are home sick. In this sense, the energy sector’s ability to deliver the electricity needed to keep manufacturing medical supplies or keep ventilators running depends to a large extent on our ability to flatten the curve today. The coronavirus is bad enough without having to worry about the lights going out.

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Enel Green Power España Aragon wind farms advance Spain's renewable energy transition, with 90MW under construction in Teruel, Endesa investment of €88 million, 25-50MW turbines, and 2017 auction-backed capacity enhancing grid integration and clean power.

Key Points

They are three Teruel wind projects totaling 90MW, part of Endesa's 2017-awarded plan expanding Spain's clean energy.

✅ 90MW across Sierra Costera I, Allueva, and Sierra Pelarda

✅ €88m invested; 14+7+4 turbines; Endesa-led build in Teruel

✅ Part of 2017 tender: 540MW wind, 339MW solar, nationwide

Enel Green Power Espana, part of Enel's wind projects worldwide, has started constructing three wind farms in Aragon, north-east Spain, which are due online by the end of the year.

The projects, all situated in the Teruel province, are worth a total investment of €88 million.

The biggest of the facilities, Sierra Costera I, will have a 50MW and will feature 14 turbines.

The wind farm is spread across the municipalities of Mezquita de Jarque, Fuentes Calientes, Canada Vellida and Rillo.

The Allueva wind facility will feature seven turbines and will exceed 25MW.

Sierra Pelarda, in Fonfria, will have four turbines and a capacity of 15MW, as advances in offshore wind turbine technology continue to push scale elsewhere.

The projects bring the total number of wind farms that Enel Green Power Espana has started building in the Teruel province to six, equal to an overall capacity of 218MW.

Endesa chief executive Jose Bogas said: “These plants mark the acceleration on a new wave of growth in the renewable energy space that Endesa is committed to pursue in the next years, driving the energy transition in Spain.”

The six wind farms under construction in Teruel are part of the 540MW that Enel Green Power Espana was awarded in the Spanish government's renewable energy tender held in May 2017.

In Aragon, the company will invest around €434 million euros, reflecting broader European wind power investment trends in recent years, to build 13 wind farms with a total installed capacity of more than 380MW.

The remaining 160MW of wind capacity will be located in Andalusia, Castile-Leon, Castile La Mancha and Galicia, even as some Spanish turbine factories closed during pandemic restrictions.

Enel Green Power Espana was also awarded 339MW of solar capacity in the Spanish government's auction held in July 2017, while other Spanish developers advance CSP projects abroad in markets like Chile.

Once all wind and solar under the 2017 tender are complete they will boost the company’s capacity by around 52%.

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