Is your air conditioning working? Thank a solar panel.

When the forecast calls for record-breaking temperatures, the kind that turn the weather app warnings deep red and push the limits of what a window unit air conditioner can do, those in the know brace themselves.

Extreme heat means extreme electricity demand, and that can lead to rolling blackouts or outages that leave thousands without electricity.

But even amid record high temperatures, that has not been the story this week.

But with thousands of small solar arrays distributed across the region,

“if one of these solar arrays goes down, it’ll be immaterial,” said Joe LaRusso, manager of the Clean Grid Initiative at the Acadia Center.

Beyond the solar that helped power the grid through the heat wave, traditional resources, such as natural gas and nuclear power, held up reliably.

A small amount of oil-fired electricity was also powering the grid — an increasingly rare occurrence as the region weans itself off the dirtiest sources. But because oil power plants can take longer to fire up, keeping some operating at a low level during a heat wave is a precautionary measure, LaRusso said, so they can quickly ramp up if something goes wrong at another power plant or demand suddenly spikes.

To read the full article from the Boston Globe, click here.