5 ms·

No, this is the money quote: other states have moved to close coal-fired power plants in recent years, reducing the amount of electricity California can import

by rsj_hn 5y ago

No, this is the money quote: other states have moved to close coal-fired power plants in recent years, reducing the amount of electricity California can import when high temperatures boost electricity demand. In other words, the problem with wind/solar is that they are not controllable, and so California was planning on using the rest of the grid as a buffer -- all of Western US is on one grid. Thus California can still import from coal fired plants in Utah when it needs power, say on a hot day when AC use is high or a day when the wind isn't blowing too strongly. Except now it's realizing that as other states adopt the same strategy, that the grid can't be relied on so much and the state has to do that itself or face blackouts in hot days or windless days. So with this new awareness that the rest of the grid will not be able to bail them out, they have updated their estimate of needed battery capacity in time for the planned shutdowns. Alternately, they are scrambling for some sources of energy that could be tapped on demand in place of battery capacity.

cedilla 5y ago
It may be the money quote but you removed the context in an almost misleading way: > The drought has constrained the output of some of the region’s most significant generating facilities, including the Hoover Dam. … “What changed dramatically…is we have had significantly bigger and more West-wide heat waves than ever before,” Maybe a failure of planning, but the plan was not to get "bailed out" by the grid as you guess.
- AwaAwa 5y ago
  Unless the plan was to have rolling brownouts/blackouts I have no doubt that being bailed out by the grid was absolutely part of the contingency plan. Maybe they didn't expect to need the contingency so soon, but that is on their risk analysis of the weather.
  - cedilla 5y ago
    A deliberate underproduction to get "bailed out" is a strong accusation, I think it warrants a better proof than analysis of one line of an article. Especially when the article points out other reasons why production doesn't meet demand. Unless you talk about actual contingency plans for emergencies in which case I don't quite understand what's so scandalous about falling back on the grid in emergencies. France also falls back on Germany's power generation when they have to shut down some of their nuclear reactors during heat waves.
    - rrss 5y ago
      I think that WECC would probably have gone ballistic if this was actually California’s plan. Also, yes, being able to import from other places as a contingency is not a bad thing, it’s one of the major benefits of having the Western Interconnect at all.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      > A deliberate underproduction to get "bailed out" is a strong accusation In 2019, 25% of its electricity was imported[1]. This is before California takes even more power offline and replaces it with variable power. [1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Given that California is in drought all the time, I don't see how this changes long term planning. FYI, there is a fun wikipedia page that lists California droughts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California The first sentence is: "Throughout history, California has experienced many droughts, such as 1841, 1864, 1924, 1928–1935, 1947–1950, 1959–1960, 1976–1977, 1986–1992, 1999-2004, 2006–2010, 2011–2017, 2018 and 2020-[1][2] 2021. " So the idea that OMG, we didn't realize there might be a drought - doesn't sound very plausible to me.
  - cedilla 5y ago
    Uhm, okay, you have convinced me that droughts aren't a new phenomenon. The claim however was that they become more frequent and severe. Not every drought is the same. From your link: > the 2012–15 period was the driest in at least 1200 years Also, according to your link, about there was a drought in 12 of the last 20 years, with only one or two years in between droughts, where they previously usually were spaced by around a decade or more. The data listed there really doesn't seem to contradict the article's claim about more frequent droughts in the future.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      So is your claim that the 2012-2015 drought was unknown to California when it passed the 2018 law -- maybe the legislature is filled with slow readers? Again, I don't see how the possibility of severe droughts was some unforseen thing when the law was passed. In fact the law was passed in an environment of terrible fear about climate change, so you can't really argue that no one predicted this when writing the law, can you? Don't you think, if you believe the climate is changing, that your energy plan should include production of energy not dependent on the climate? > The data listed there really doesn't seem to contradict the article's claim about more frequent droughts in the future. FYI, California droughts have in the past lasted more than 200 years. The idea that you can count years in the last century and extrapolate drought risk doesn't work. The state goes through long secular wet and dry periods, and this is something we have known for some time. Therefore any energy plan that breaks down if there is a prolonged drought is not an energy plan suitable for the state of California in any period of time. In fact any policy at all that breaks down during a prolonged -- say 100 year -- drought is not one suitable for the state of California. We have the tree ring data, and we know that this used to be called "the Great American Desert". That is why we fought water wars and built enormous public works, it's why San Francisco considered breaking off icebergs and floating them down to the bay in order to get water. California as a state has a highly variable water supply susceptible to century-long droughts. Check out this article: https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-pa...
AwaAwa 5y ago
Just so that I'm sure I've understood this right. California decided to save the environment by shutting down "unclean" power within the state, with the idea that other states will provide them with their "dirty" generated power?
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Yes
  - achenet 5y ago
    Not actually solving the problem, just shifting it elsewhere. Nice.
    - maccolgan 5y ago
      Yes, we're talking about California.
- jfoutz 5y ago
  Excess power from any source. California has imported power from hover dam forever, for example.
- TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  Yes! Scream it from the roof tops. Most think California is green. What they did was outsource energy production to other states. This allowed them to move "dirty energy" from their balance sheet. But moving your coal plant to another state does not reduce GHG production. It only moves it across state lines. EDIT: [1] Here some context with a link about the different types of GHG measurement methods. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28714396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28714396 EDIT: the gist being that if we moved to "B. (Absolute) GHG footprint accounting" we wouldn't be creating policy based on false accounting and those "loopholes" would be obviously misguided.
- toast0 5y ago
  A large amount of California environmentalism is air quality, as measured in California; moving to cleaner sources within the state and dirtier sources outside the state helps tremendously with air quality as measured in the state. Of course, it doesn't help air quality near those other sources, and global measures aren't helped by simply moving coal plants elsewhere. It's also not great for grid reliability to increase the watt miles used (is there a real term for that?).
zz865 5y ago
Its the same for people with home solar panels. They dont pay for most of their electricity so they aren't contributing much for the grid or generators, but then they expect to be able to use power on a cold dark night and the infrastructure to just be there for them.
- hasdf 5y ago
  at least in my case I still pay 20 bucks worth of random fees every month even though I am generating more electricity than I use - so its more like the home solar panel people are still paying upkeep, just not paying for actual electricity
rrss 5y ago
> so California was planning on using the rest of the grid as a buffer Was this actually a plan, or just what ended up happening? My understanding is that CAISO has continued their resource adequacy program to ensure that there is guaranteed supply to meet the expected demand (plus margin), but the problem is that this program was developed before renewables and therefore the central metric is peak demand (which happens around 5pm), which is insufficient for planning when there is a lot of solar & wind generation, because then the most critical period is after peak demand (around 7pm). In other words, I thought that CAISO failed to plan properly, not that they planned to lean heavily on imports.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > Was this actually a plan, or just what ended up happening? It's a good question, and depends on your perspective. I said "planned to" because that is what the state has historically been doing -- relying on the rest of the west coast grid for 25-30% of its electricity, especially for swing capacity. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156 "The California Independent System Operator is soliciting power producers across the West to sell more megawatts to the state in July and August in anticipation of regionwide heat waves that will substantially boost electricity demand." -- back in 2021. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-scrambles-to-find-electricity-this-summer-as-blackout-risks-grow-11625666400?mod=article_inline https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-scrambles-to-find-el...) So the grid has always been what's bailed California out from it's poor energy policies and what has saved California during the summer. Now one can call this lack of planning, but if something's been going on for a few decades, then at some point it has to become part of the plan, although maybe not an official plan written down anywhere. But when someone discovers that the unofficial plan is not going to not work anymore, then you need to scramble. FYI, the whole Enron electricity scandal was all about selling energy to California, because California is constantly in need of energy. Why they didn't wake up after that scandal and start building out more energy sources remains a mystery. Instead, they went in the other direction to reduce domestic capacity. But that's not all, because a lot of the private utilities are being given mandates to get more green energy sources and storage that they are going to have a hard time meeting. You can't simply order someone to get battery power that lasts through the night when batteries last 4 hours. This is discussed in the article: "“We are literally on the cutting edge” of rapidly adding renewables, Mr. Wan [PG&E] said. “And along with that, there are some things we are learning by trial and error, and we are taking some risks in the process.”" In other words, you have the legislature giving mandates that the CPUC can't meet, and then the CPUC gives mandates to the producers that they can't meet, but everyone is shaking each other's hand at what a green future they are building. Meanwhile, the lights in California are kept on by coal and gas fired plants in the rest of the country. That system obviously doesn't work if the rest of the country tries to adopt California's model.

by rsj_hn 5y ago

cedilla 5y ago

It may be the money quote but you removed the context in an almost misleading way: > The drought has constrained the output of some of the region’s most significant generating facilities, including the Hoover Dam. … “What changed dramatically…is we have had significantly bigger and more West-wide heat waves than ever before,” Maybe a failure of planning, but the plan was not to get "bailed out" by the grid as you guess.

AwaAwa 5y ago
Unless the plan was to have rolling brownouts/blackouts I have no doubt that being bailed out by the grid was absolutely part of the contingency plan. Maybe they didn't expect to need the contingency so soon, but that is on their risk analysis of the weather.
- cedilla 5y ago
  A deliberate underproduction to get "bailed out" is a strong accusation, I think it warrants a better proof than analysis of one line of an article. Especially when the article points out other reasons why production doesn't meet demand. Unless you talk about actual contingency plans for emergencies in which case I don't quite understand what's so scandalous about falling back on the grid in emergencies. France also falls back on Germany's power generation when they have to shut down some of their nuclear reactors during heat waves.
  - rrss 5y ago
    I think that WECC would probably have gone ballistic if this was actually California’s plan. Also, yes, being able to import from other places as a contingency is not a bad thing, it’s one of the major benefits of having the Western Interconnect at all.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > A deliberate underproduction to get "bailed out" is a strong accusation In 2019, 25% of its electricity was imported[1]. This is before California takes even more power offline and replaces it with variable power. [1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156
rsj_hn 5y ago
Given that California is in drought all the time, I don't see how this changes long term planning. FYI, there is a fun wikipedia page that lists California droughts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California The first sentence is: "Throughout history, California has experienced many droughts, such as 1841, 1864, 1924, 1928–1935, 1947–1950, 1959–1960, 1976–1977, 1986–1992, 1999-2004, 2006–2010, 2011–2017, 2018 and 2020-[1][2] 2021. " So the idea that OMG, we didn't realize there might be a drought - doesn't sound very plausible to me.
- cedilla 5y ago
  Uhm, okay, you have convinced me that droughts aren't a new phenomenon. The claim however was that they become more frequent and severe. Not every drought is the same. From your link: > the 2012–15 period was the driest in at least 1200 years Also, according to your link, about there was a drought in 12 of the last 20 years, with only one or two years in between droughts, where they previously usually were spaced by around a decade or more. The data listed there really doesn't seem to contradict the article's claim about more frequent droughts in the future.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    So is your claim that the 2012-2015 drought was unknown to California when it passed the 2018 law -- maybe the legislature is filled with slow readers? Again, I don't see how the possibility of severe droughts was some unforseen thing when the law was passed. In fact the law was passed in an environment of terrible fear about climate change, so you can't really argue that no one predicted this when writing the law, can you? Don't you think, if you believe the climate is changing, that your energy plan should include production of energy not dependent on the climate? > The data listed there really doesn't seem to contradict the article's claim about more frequent droughts in the future. FYI, California droughts have in the past lasted more than 200 years. The idea that you can count years in the last century and extrapolate drought risk doesn't work. The state goes through long secular wet and dry periods, and this is something we have known for some time. Therefore any energy plan that breaks down if there is a prolonged drought is not an energy plan suitable for the state of California in any period of time. In fact any policy at all that breaks down during a prolonged -- say 100 year -- drought is not one suitable for the state of California. We have the tree ring data, and we know that this used to be called "the Great American Desert". That is why we fought water wars and built enormous public works, it's why San Francisco considered breaking off icebergs and floating them down to the bay in order to get water. California as a state has a highly variable water supply susceptible to century-long droughts. Check out this article: https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-pa...

AwaAwa 5y ago

Just so that I'm sure I've understood this right. California decided to save the environment by shutting down "unclean" power within the state, with the idea that other states will provide them with their "dirty" generated power?

mensetmanusman 5y ago
Yes
- achenet 5y ago
  Not actually solving the problem, just shifting it elsewhere. Nice.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    Yes, we're talking about California.
jfoutz 5y ago
Excess power from any source. California has imported power from hover dam forever, for example.
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
Yes! Scream it from the roof tops. Most think California is green. What they did was outsource energy production to other states. This allowed them to move "dirty energy" from their balance sheet. But moving your coal plant to another state does not reduce GHG production. It only moves it across state lines. EDIT: [1] Here some context with a link about the different types of GHG measurement methods. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28714396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28714396 EDIT: the gist being that if we moved to "B. (Absolute) GHG footprint accounting" we wouldn't be creating policy based on false accounting and those "loopholes" would be obviously misguided.
toast0 5y ago
A large amount of California environmentalism is air quality, as measured in California; moving to cleaner sources within the state and dirtier sources outside the state helps tremendously with air quality as measured in the state. Of course, it doesn't help air quality near those other sources, and global measures aren't helped by simply moving coal plants elsewhere. It's also not great for grid reliability to increase the watt miles used (is there a real term for that?).

zz865 5y ago

Its the same for people with home solar panels. They dont pay for most of their electricity so they aren't contributing much for the grid or generators, but then they expect to be able to use power on a cold dark night and the infrastructure to just be there for them.

hasdf 5y ago
at least in my case I still pay 20 bucks worth of random fees every month even though I am generating more electricity than I use - so its more like the home solar panel people are still paying upkeep, just not paying for actual electricity

rrss 5y ago

> so California was planning on using the rest of the grid as a buffer Was this actually a plan, or just what ended up happening? My understanding is that CAISO has continued their resource adequacy program to ensure that there is guaranteed supply to meet the expected demand (plus margin), but the problem is that this program was developed before renewables and therefore the central metric is peak demand (which happens around 5pm), which is insufficient for planning when there is a lot of solar & wind generation, because then the most critical period is after peak demand (around 7pm). In other words, I thought that CAISO failed to plan properly, not that they planned to lean heavily on imports.

rsj_hn 5y ago
> Was this actually a plan, or just what ended up happening? It's a good question, and depends on your perspective. I said "planned to" because that is what the state has historically been doing -- relying on the rest of the west coast grid for 25-30% of its electricity, especially for swing capacity. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156 "The California Independent System Operator is soliciting power producers across the West to sell more megawatts to the state in July and August in anticipation of regionwide heat waves that will substantially boost electricity demand." -- back in 2021. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-scrambles-to-find-electricity-this-summer-as-blackout-risks-grow-11625666400?mod=article_inline https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-scrambles-to-find-el...) So the grid has always been what's bailed California out from it's poor energy policies and what has saved California during the summer. Now one can call this lack of planning, but if something's been going on for a few decades, then at some point it has to become part of the plan, although maybe not an official plan written down anywhere. But when someone discovers that the unofficial plan is not going to not work anymore, then you need to scramble. FYI, the whole Enron electricity scandal was all about selling energy to California, because California is constantly in need of energy. Why they didn't wake up after that scandal and start building out more energy sources remains a mystery. Instead, they went in the other direction to reduce domestic capacity. But that's not all, because a lot of the private utilities are being given mandates to get more green energy sources and storage that they are going to have a hard time meeting. You can't simply order someone to get battery power that lasts through the night when batteries last 4 hours. This is discussed in the article: "“We are literally on the cutting edge” of rapidly adding renewables, Mr. Wan [PG&E] said. “And along with that, there are some things we are learning by trial and error, and we are taking some risks in the process.”" In other words, you have the legislature giving mandates that the CPUC can't meet, and then the CPUC gives mandates to the producers that they can't meet, but everyone is shaking each other's hand at what a green future they are building. Meanwhile, the lights in California are kept on by coal and gas fired plants in the rest of the country. That system obviously doesn't work if the rest of the country tries to adopt California's model.