PLEASANTON (KPIX) — A looming, prolonged heat wave descending on the Bay Area is keeping inland temperatures pretty warm at night with overnight lows hovering in the 70s.
The sweet smell of mole mixes with the rhythmic refrains from Charles Sedlak’s guitar. For 25 years he’s played in front of Blue Agave in downtown Pleasanton five nights a week no matter the heat.
“I make sure I stay hydrated,” Sedlak said. On nights like this, sundown brings little relief from the triple-digit temperatures.
“There’s nobody here tonight. I’m out here by myself,” Sedlak observed. Still, the show must go on.
“I thought people wouldn’t want to cook and so they’d come out but everybody’s at home in front of their air conditioner,” he lamented.
The lack of an overnight cooldown has other impacts — mainly on electric grid transformers.
“They get hot in the hot weather,” explained Severin Borenstein, an energy expert at UC Berkeley who sits on the board of governors at Cal ISO, the state’s power grid manager.
Borenstein says many of the transformers atop utility poles are engineered with overnight cooling in mind.
“If the temperature stays high overnight, they don’t cool down as much and the problem is, that can lead to more overheating and blown transformers,” Borenstein said.
He says he doesn’t anticipate rolling blackouts in this heat wave so long as everyone does their part to conserve during the evening hours.
“Do anything you want after 9 p.m. or before 4 p.m. but 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. is when we really need people to try to lighten the load as much as possible,” he said.
Cal ISO has already issued another Flex Alert for Friday afternoon. They’re asking people to conserve electricity in those critical evening hours.
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