On May 26, NYU Tandon Assistant Professor Yury Dvorkin provided testimony before representatives of several New York City Council Committees about the city’s cooling needs for the upcoming summer. Though air conditioner use increases demand on the city’s power grid every summer, Dvorkin warned Council representatives that the number of individual air conditioners working during daytime hours is likely to increase, as Covid concerns could keep people working from home during the summer months. Even if this means less energy consumption in the commercial sector, it does not necessarily mean that this reduction can serve increased demand in another part of the system (e.g., in the residential sector). Dvorkin advised Council members that, “Consolidated Edison must, therefore, must proactively analyze the impact of increased demand and reduced accuracy of demand forecasting tools on their system,” including what capacity might be available “to exchange power between different parts of the system.”

An article in the Daily Beast on May 27, that was also referenced in New York magazine takes such concerns to their logical but scary conclusion: blackouts. “The fact that Lower Manhattan is using less power is not going to help to deliver power to people in Queens, many of whom for health reasons may be intolerant to high temperatures, and whose buildings are connected to a very old transmission line with limited margins to carry extra power,” said Dvorkin. “What’s going to happen this summer, if we have stay-at-home orders, if we have consumption which the grid was not designed to accommodate, it will push the system to its limits.”

Dvorkin recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to “bridge the current gap between infrastructure and epidemic models to understand how the demand of infrastructure services change under different outbreak scenarios.” You can read Dvorkin’s comments to the New York City Council here. Dvorkin was also quoted on the topic in an article in the Wall Street Journal.