a better bay area moving forward finding solutions. this is abc 7 news. hi there. i'm kristen z. you're watching getting answers live on abc 7 every day. we talk with experts about issues important to the bay area and get answers for you in real time. now. we've been hearing a lot about the threat of rotating blackouts during this heat wave today. we'll hear from professor james bushnell and energy and environmental policy researcher about california's power grid and the strain on it due to the heat. during national suicide prevention week. we will talk with dr. dan ridenberg of save. that's one of the nation's first organizations dedicated to the prevention of suicide to learn the signs that can indicate. someone is at risk also, when was the last time you went to the library as of standard data

journalists liz lindquist has a look at the ongoing transformation of san francisco libraries. but first day five of our heatwave and triple digit temperatures joining us now meteorologist mike nico with the very latest mike a little bit cooler at least around the bay, but it's not over. yeah, the cooler temperatures that i'm going to show you on the any other day kristen and good afternoon everybody. we'd be talking about how warm to hot they are but after setting all time record highs yesterday and possibly the day before these temperatures are going to seem comfortable for some of us. you can see we're up to 14 degrees cooler in places like san mateo and san jose, but we're still 94 in san jose, san mateo is 83. that's pretty nice. san francisco 81 that's much better in yesterday's 98, but you could still see some triple digits, especially up around cloverdale ukiah and out in our inland east bay neighborhoods and around morgan hill. we still have this heat building

again tomorrow. it's gonna spike again tomorrow. so today we pull back just a little bit tomorrow at spikes and that's why we have that heat advisory for the santa cruz coast also the san francisco bay shoreline and the marin coastal range and that's until 8 o'clock tomorrow evening elsewhere inland. we have triple digits today. we'll have even more again tomorrow and possibly through friday in places like fairfield and this is until 8 o'clock tomorrow. now, it's also goes to 11 o'clock tomorrow with places like lincoln mendocino case now, let me tell you about some of the good news. when is this going to break and what is going to cause it? well, one of those is a cold fronts can be coming down from the south. another is with a remnants of hurricane k coming up from the north now, it's gonna come as far north as southern california and put look at thisf th the forecast, but it's also along with that cold front going to help induce an onshore breeze for us and the extra cloud cover is what's going to help drop. our temperatures dramatically as we head into the weekend. thank you can see it here in our

three day forecast places like lake tahoe down at 80. we're finally out of the 100s. in fact, we're 20 degrees. learned sacramento from friday to saturday from 106 to 86 same thing in fresno from 108 to 89 and look at the rain possible in la and for two days in san diego, so that is when the flex alerts will finally end in my estimation will be saturday kristin, but of course, we're going to hear from the experts coming up we sure are in fact right now. thanks so much mike. so what is the role of rotating blackouts? are they unavoidable as california continues to get hotter more populated and more energy hungry. how can we get ourselves in a better place in the next decade joining us live now to discuss these issues is professor james bushnell co-director at the davis energy economics program and a member of cal iso's market surveillance committee. thanks for joining us professor bushnell. sure happy to be here. so cal iso is the agency that manages california's electrical

grid, but exactly does that entail? the kaiso is sort of the traffic cop for electricity flows in the state. it was created when we deregulated the system and now there's dozens of companies buying and selling electricity across the state the kaiso tries to make sure that these transactions don't overload the wires don't cause other types of reliability problems because when things do get out of control it can black the entire system out. not just a random one or two percent of the system and at that point you lose control when it blocks out. yes, exactly. so what these types of rolling blackouts that people are talking about this week that may or may not happen. hopefully we might avoid them are meant to make sure that the supply and the demand are are met in real time unlike other products if you have too much or not enough supply in an electric system the entire delivery

mechanism can break down and instead of just having one or two percent not be able to buy what they need it can cause everyone in the entire state to lose power for extended periods of time. so the kaiso is trying to keep this to be a smaller problem other than one that spirals out of control. got it. okay, you say hi. so i think we are used to think how i still on the news. should we switch to kaiso by the way? oh, i don't know what the referred acronyms. are. they probably have a better sense of what they want to be called exactly ex. actly, okay, whatever they are called like they're the ones who look at the numbers and go oops. it's time to order that rotating outage which again we haven't had the last couple of days due to conservation efforts. but if and when they get to that point, they don't decide who goes right they tell the utilities and leave it to the utilities to decide how to drop the load so to speak. yeah, so the delivery system the kaiso's kind of directing traffic, but the big utilities still own the wires and manage

the wires physically and so what would happen is the the kaiso would would identify that there is a potential shortfall happening and it would notify the utilities like pg&e or southern california edison that they may need to drop some demand and at that point it's handed off to the the distribution companies like pg&e who would then decide which neighborhoods lose power for a short period of time in a rotating sense god and you mentioned southern california edison and i'm wondering is the supply and demand equation done on a whole state-wide basis, or is it more localized or regional because i mean all equate this to water right where during droughts we in northern california are usually pretty good about tightening our belts and then we looked our southern california neighbors and go. are you conserving are you still watering right on on so our fates tied together and as well our fates are tied together, but it can differ so there's a there is a big bottleneck between

northern and southern california and and at times you can see the south short and the north in excess and we just can't ship enough power from north to south. for example this week. it's not really the case. it is more of a statewide or even multi-state potential problem. and so it's not really that different of the circumstance in the south and it is in the north right now. just also want to touch on this again. pg&e says half of its customers are basically off the table for rotating blackouts because essential services are on that same grid. is that fair? well, i'm one of those customers so, you know, i guess i'm biased on this question. there's probably better ways to try to manage that but there's there's really better ways to try to manage a one or two percent shortfall overall rather than having to cut. some percentage of customers a hundred percent, you know, it would be better if there was a way to get everybody to reduce their consumption by the one or

two percent that's really necessary to try to balance it. can that be done? i mean with smart devices and homes these days. is that possible? yeah, and people have debated different ways right now. what we do is we we say pretty please and we put out these urgent calls for conservation, but they're not really backed by any incentives the big problem we have in electricity markets is that we have really sophisticated wholesale markets where prices can can go up by a hundred times on the course of a day, but the cut the prices you and i pay are really stable. they don't really respond to the situation in the market. so the price i'm paying right now is really no different than what i was paying two weeks ago or what i'll be paying next week and i don't have an incentive. i will try to conserve and you know, we're doing a pretty cooling and all that, but we don't really get rewarded for that in a monetary sense. okay, so then how could we get rewarded or punished in a real-time situation? yeah, there's a bunch of

different pilots that have been tried over the years a simple one would be that there are five or six days of the year where your prices go up by maybe two or three times between four o'clock and nine o'clock and instead of the modest increase that most people now face every day between four and nine. it's it's really just a few percent increase we would instead double or triple prices, but just in those few hours where we really need people to shift their demand away from and we'd only do it four or five times a year right when we had these extreme heat waves when power use gonna be extreme. it's like congestion pricing but to the max degree is what you're exactly okay? yeah, and we don't we don't really look at when it's congested. does anyone doing this in, california? on a pilot basis smud had a pilot several years ago, and it was very successful. they randomized people into this program and almost all of them decided to stay on it. they had the option to to opt out, but most people were

perfectly happy to stay on and when these events were called the called critical peak events. there was savings of 15 20% wow. okay. look once we get through this immediate heat wave we got to start talking about long-term? right what we can do to ensure a steady supply reliable supply. especially as we anticipate more heat waves in the future in california. so what do you think the solutions are and i say plural because it can't just be one. sure, and demand is was one part of this. we've been talking a lot about trying to add storage to the system. i think one of the challenges we're going to face is everybody wants batteries for all sorts of things. we're trying to add more electric vehicles. we're trying to add more grid storage and there is really a bottleneck in terms of the supply of these technologies. so what we're also seeing is a rethinking of certain types of supply we've seen diablo canyons lifetime expanded for five years

apparently at this point, and we're we may need to rethink the role of natural gas generation at least in the near term to provide backup during periods when the renewable energy is is not providing what we had expected or hoped it too. we thinking means perhaps we need to keep it around a little longer during the transition period but figure out how to do a more cleanly yes, and maybe think about alternative ways of firing these generators either biofuels or some people are talking about green hydrogen other ways of getting cleaner energy, but more on demand rather than the intermittent supply that we usually get from wind and solar just because we like to think big here on ab. c's answers citing to harness or generate energy that most of us in the public have never even thought of or heard of that are on the horizon that you can share with us. well, i think most of the

interesting innovation is happening around this area of storage where which has always been the big problem with electricity that it's been impossible or at least really really expensive to store it and as we are looking at different materials for battery technology other types of compressed air or gravity-based storage technologies, there's lots of thinking going on there and hydrogen itself is sort of a form of trying to store electricity if you can produce the hydrogen from excess renewable power during say the day and then you have a fuel that can be stored to use on demand at some later time. all right so much more to talk about we've got to get you back on another time professor james bushnell with uc davis. really appreciate it. thanks. happy to be here. thanks. all right shifting gears coming up on this national suicide prevention week. we are. talking with the head of a suicide prevention group to learn how we can all play a role to

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that may be difficult to discuss but conversations can save lives. we're talking about suicide. september is suicide prevention awareness month. so joining us live now is dr. dan ridenberg ceo of save.org. that's a leading national nonprofit suicide prevention organization dan. thanks for making the time for us. thanks for having me. yeah, so the past two plus years have been very difficult for a lot of people the pandemic but while we know it's been tough on our mental health the suicide rate is actually down the last two and a half years. so during 2020 and 2021. we actually saw a slight decline in suicides people were really more intentional about staying connected to people so if

somebody had depression people reached out to them more often, somebody was struggling with anxiety or substance abuse issue. they made more time for them. they were really intentional and that's really important the more we can stay connected people that are struggling the better off we are and that actually grew up down the suicide numbers in those two years. wow. okay, that is really an important message to him our home and really ironic that came out of the pandemic because i know the rate was on an upswing for like the two decades before the pandemic right talk about some of the stressors and the causes. that's true for many years. we've seen a slope of it steady increase in the number of deaths by suicide and there's their multiple factors. not only economic impacts social impacts homelessness medical impacts in terms of chronic diseases the aging population are veterans third a whole host of things going into the rises that have gone gone after the last two years the two decades the last two years. we've actually seen people reaching out for help more

reaching out state connected to people and that's made a significant difference now, unfortunately some of the early reports from 2022 we're starting to see that rise again as people get back to the normal life. we're seeing less connections people not reaching out to their health care providers as much not taking their medication as as prescribed not going to therapy appointments as they and rises going up. know normal life is not always easy, especially for teens. i hear anecdotal examples of kids having a hard time acclimating after they've been kind of online and not in social groups for a couple years and i know especially for team boys the rate is some three times higher than for girls. can you talk about the different ways to help a teenager? yeah, i mean tragically we have seen rates go up for teens out of all the age groups teams actually have the lowest number of deaths by suicide thought of 45,000 deaths but 6,000 are teens that means the majority are adults, but he's a really struggling because of this this

hybrid work that the hybrid schooling that they've been doing lack of social integration and understanding how to socialize when they haven't been able to see their friends missing out on activities like homecoming and proms all of those major life milestones. they've been missing out on so we need to do is make sure that they get as much as they can that's as normal as possible, especially as they reintegrate this year and we see kids going back to school. you need to get them involved in the activities. they normally would be involved with we need to make sure that they understand that they're still support systems that are available to them as they struggle the reaction learn how to do classes academically in school versus doing it online. they really struggle with online learning how we're getting them back in. and we haven't given them the adjustment and told them how to do that in a safe way. so we really need to find ways to support the young people as they're both make social things as well as academic things. and i know you've developed suicide prevention programs for schools to try to help kids and

foster those conversations, but when it comes to conversations i have to ask because i think a lot of people wonder about this which is if you see someone who may be under duress and you're worried about their mental health and potentially harming themselves does bringing up suicide. lead to suicide. i think that's a worry a lot of people have. it is where it's a great question and it's really important question. we need everybody to understand that just asking about suicide of bringing it up actually doesn't increase their risk. it decreases their risk of dying by suicide. so we want people to feel safe and comfortable asking the question as hard as it is to ask because we know it reduces the level of anxiety and distress that the person is having so it doesn't lead somebody down that path. it doesn't make them more risk. it actually helps them if we ask the question we need to ask you really clearly and directly we can't damped around it though. we can't just say you don't seem like yourself today if you're really worried about somebody ask them how they're doing say,

you know, have you been thinking about taking your life? you've been thinking about this kind of checking out especially for young people. you don't want to be here any longer you now want to be around your friends anymore. those kinds of questions are really important to ask we're worried about somebody who's at risk. dr. radenberg, thank you for giving parents and other loved ones the language to begin these conversations and of course, i know you wanted to talk about 988 we don't have time but i'll just say that's a new national hotline people can go to as a resource to get help. thank you so much for coming on the show today. appreciate it. thank you. coming up next san francisco libraries are taking challenges. posed by the pandemic and really turning them into opportunities. we'll find out how from san franci i'm jonathan lawson here to tell you about life insurance through the colonial penn program. if you're age 50 to 85, and looking to buy life insurance on a fixed budget, remember the three ps. the three what? the three ps? what are the three ps?

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so your rate can never go up for any reason. options start at $9.95 a month, plus you get a 30-day money back guarantee. so call now for free information and you'll also get this free beneficiary planner. use this valuable guide to record your important information and give helpful direction to your loved ones with your final wishes. and it's yours free just for calling. so call now for free information. how we read there's a lot about us in san francisco after a long pandemic closure. the public library system is

back big time our media partners at the san francisco stand are dove into what types of materials and which titles are most popular and joining us live to talk about it is the standards reporter liz lynn wister liz. for joining us. thanks for having me. oh, yeah, this is fascinating like the san francisco public library's were closed for a long time. i remember the city using librarians to be contact tracers because they had nothing else to do. so how is business these days as they say at the library? yeah, well the librarians i talked to michael lambert the city librarian. they're all saying that business is coming back to normal as close to normal as they can be circulation numbers, which did take a big dip during the pandemic are starting to rise back to the original numbers and even start to surpass the last record of high circulation and you know, the library's finding other ways to serve san francisco outside of just, you know, renting out books and movies and other things like what i guess that's the part. i'm super how did it evolve it's mission or or purpose during this period yeah, so i think

that the one thing is that this the public libraries have always been offering services outside of just book circulation. so they've always provided career services help with access to computers and other electronics free wi-fi and even you know, just in the wake of the heat wave this past weekend. they provided cooling centers for san francisco's. i think now it's just a lot of people in the city are starting to realize that the library has a whole range of services that go beyond just the books that are on its shelves and there are also adapting to more online environment with more emedia and more online virtual kinds of events. yeah. oh, i've always thought of it as a community space right gathering place. what loaners are becoming more popular and which ones are losing popularity? do you mean by type of book or the kinds of people that are coming into renting cds movies ebooks or you know regular books, you know that you have to flip the pages on what's what's becoming more popular. what's trending? yeah, so i think it might be no surprise that even before the

pandemic hit physical books started to go down pretty significantly in popularity. but since the pandemic happened ebooks are really getting popular audiobooks and then there's also been something called like this revenge of the analog. so vinyl cds are really popular and a lot of the branches in the libraries. they're among the top 10 most circulated items. so in addition to seeing the kind of natural progression towards electronic that you would normally expect during a pandemic. there's also kind of a nostalgia with vinyl and cds getting a little bit more popular a little throwback, and i promise it's not just me renting them all out or loaning them out. hey, what are the most popular book titles? i know we just have that graphica, but but i'm gonna put it up again because i think what we choose to be says a lot about us and if you happen to know if those are popular national choices, or are we kind of going in our own direction? yeah, so when you look at the top fiction books a lot of those are pretty common authors you see sally rooney and some others that are like pulitzer prize wing, but when you look at the nonfiction, especially a lot of

those books are also very popular like michelle's honors crying in h mart, but i think from looking at them they kind of seem to represent the diversity of san francisco as a city. so you know that one of the most popular books was this book called bad indians, which is about the mission indigenous people who were taken from southern, california to san francisco. and so you'll see a lot of san francisco history books that are really popular in the nonfiction and even in the fiction department. yeah. well we have about 30 seconds left, but i've got to ask you are you noticing big differences from branch to branch? yeah, so i think one of the cool things about sfpl is that they have like 27 branches in addition to their main library and each one really does tend to kind of reflect the culture or demographic of the neighborhood that it situated within so when you look at circulation trends at like the chinatown library or the western edition library branch they tend to show books that are representative of their patron. so like the chinatown library

mostly circulates chinese fiction books western edition japanese nonfiction, and you'll see that kind of across the board and it is truly a system that has something for everyone liz. thank you so much. i think your articles fascinating i encourage folks to check it out on your website. thank you. all right and indeed you can check that one out. also more of the san francisco standards other original reporting on their website, which is esso standard.com and abc 7 will continue to bring you more segments featuring the standards city focus journalism. look for that twice a week right here on getting answers at 3pm. here on getting answers at 3pm. we'll take a short break and have you seen my new phone yet? it like, folds in half. i would never switch to samsung, i love my phone. what???

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three on air and on live stream answering your questions world news tonight with david muir is coming up next. have a good day. tonight, several developing stories as we come on the air. the emergencies playing out in the west at this hour. record-shattering heat and the exploding wildfires. multiple large fires now burning in california. thousands forced from their homes. and we have learned tonight at least two people killed trying to escape. strong winds and the drought driving the flames. the state warning of potential power outages. the power grid at the breaking point. heat and wildfire alerts from several states tonight. will carr in the fire zone. ginger zee tracking hurricane that will affect the u.s. also tonight, a sheriff's deputy on the run, wanted for murdering a husband and wife. tonight, under arrest. the deputy on the job for only a year. tonight, the newspaper reporter targeted and killed