23 ms·

California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

432 points by lizparody23 5y ago

pmalynin 5y ago
Then why is it so damn expensive. Honestly one of the reasons I can’t wait to own a house is to purchase enough solar panels and batteries to give a huge middle finger to PG&E and go off-grid
- rcpt 5y ago
  California (rightly) prices in externalities of power generation https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP294.pdf https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP294.pdf
- ceeplusplus 5y ago
  It's honestly insane how PG&E is going bankrupt despite charging 35 cents/kWh. Where is all the money going??
  - not2b 5y ago
    Paying damages from all the wildfires they have caused.
  - Trias11 5y ago
  - bryan0 5y ago
    one place: > PG&E Corp. put a cost estimate of more than $25 billion Thursday on its effort to plant thousands of miles of power lines underground in an effort to tamp down wildfire risks. https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article258249655.html https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article25824965...
    - jimbob45 5y ago
      Shame that they're not getting better publicity as a result of this. Our main complaint about the internet companies is that they pocket the money meant to speed up networks for their subscribers. This is exactly what utility companies ought to do to prepare for the future.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        They’re doing it because they went bankrupt over $30B in liability from not preparing in this fashion. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/business/energy-environment/pge-bankruptcy-ends.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/business/energy-environme... > PG&E sought bankruptcy protection in January 2019 after accumulating an estimated $30 billion in liability for fires started by its poorly maintained equipment. One of the blazes, the 2018 Camp Fire, killed scores of people and destroyed the town of Paradise. It wasn’t voluntary, really.
        bcrosby95 5y ago
        A large part of why they're doing it because they're guaranteed a certain percentage return on investments. There's ways to fix this problem without a $25bil investment, but you won't make nearly as much profit on that.
        bryan0 5y ago
        what's a better, cheaper way to fix the wildfire problem?
        sagarm 5y ago
        People who choose to live in the Wildlands urban interface should bear the cost for undergrounding the wires they rely on IMO. Probably politically infeasible, unfortunately.
        dntrkv 5y ago
  - NelsonMinar 5y ago
    $0.35 would be a bargain. It's more like $0.40 / kWh, it's complicated depending on which rate plan you have and what time of day / year you're using power. https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-rates-work/Residential-Rates-Plan-Pricing.pdf https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra... Meanwhile my neighbors 30 miles away are paying half that rate to SMUD. https://www.smud.org/en/Rate-Information/Compare-rates https://www.smud.org/en/Rate-Information/Compare-rates As a bonus, SMUD doesn't generally kill people and burn down cities.
    - sagarm 5y ago
      Presumably the Sacramento utility district doesn't serve high risk fire areas, so their customers don't have to subsidize people that choose to live on the wildlands-urban interface.
      - simfree 5y ago
        They also have never had to pay out dividends unlike PG&E, or been forced to optimize for what will deliver the most value to their shareholders. https://www.pgecorp.com/investors/shareholders/dividend_history.shtml https://www.pgecorp.com/investors/shareholders/dividend_hist...
      - samtho 5y ago
        SMUD does operate HV lines into the Sierras as part of the Upper American River Project consisting of 11 dams and eight power generating facilities. It’s capable of powering most of Sacramento in a pinch but is typically used only when they need more capacity. Throughout the course of a year, it ends up providing about 20% of Sacramento’s power. SMUD has very strict preventative maintenance procedures for their HV transmission lines, clearing all underbrush from below the 15KV lines almost yearly. We have not had any major incidents involving electrical fires in my lifetime that I am aware of.
  - outworlder 5y ago
    It's incredible. Even more so if we consider that Silicon Valley Power (serving Santa Clara) charges a fraction of that and is more reliable.
    - bink 5y ago
      Seems unfair to compare a utility covering 18 square miles to one covering 160k+ square miles across some of the harshest terrain in the country. But I agree that PG&E charges way too much.
- haliskerbas 5y ago
  I’ve been trying to do the math for my own home, are solar panels actually cash flow positive, once you account for efficiency decrease overtime etc.? It always seemed like one barely breaks even in 2 decades
  - swid 5y ago
    Sounds about right for the power only, but you also probably get a battery with it to deal with power outages… I don’t know how to price the utility of that, but it’s why I bought solar.
    - Forgeties79 5y ago
      How long have you been able to stretch that battery out when your power is out? Don’t have a point to make or anything, I’m just curious. I hadn’t really considered that.
      - brianwawok 5y ago
        24kW can lost a long time if you don’t need AC. Should be days
      - swid 5y ago
        I only have 10kw but most days that is enough to get through the night. Air conditioning will go through it, but I don’t typically need it, especially after the sun sets.
    - RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
      35k for a 8kwh, 24kwh battery storage system. ~15k in credits? Solar loan ends up at 175 a month. I got in before the recent ridiculousness around fuel prices. I'm sure I'm net positive at this point but haven't done the precise math. One addition I'm considering, is some bitcoin/ crypto rigs to take care of excess power during the peaks. Even with my batteries, I produce a lot of extra power and don't get paid spit from the power company, and what I do get I can only use as credit. https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/-bitmain-antminer-s17e-(64th) https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/-bitmain-a... Thing costs ~1.25k, but at ~$10/ day it will pay its self off in a quarter.
- jweir 5y ago
  You do not pay market rate for electricity. Texas does allow consumers to pay market rate for electricity, you may have heard about last winter people getting bills in the several thousands of dollars when prices spiked. CAISO was 97% renewable for only a moment, not the entire day. The 3rd was a Sunday, not a peak day. And the average price for energy for the day was $30.77 (day head) $27.1 (real time) for TH_SP15_GEN-APND (per MWh)
  - m463 5y ago
    > You do not pay market rate for electricity. however it should be ... vaguely ... related. In california it is not. it's easy to pay 40-50 cents/Kwh (~$500/MWh)
  - samkater 5y ago
    My understanding, to put it in AWS EC2 pricing terms, is that we do not pay the market "spot" rate for electricity (variable, often less than what you might pay elsewhere, but could spike up) - which is what Texas allowed. Typically we pay the "on demand" rate which is fixed. Large energy users probably negotiate "reserved" pricing. My point being, we pay the market rate, those massive hikes are just built-in over a long period of time.
    - ajross 5y ago
      That only works if the demand curve (the price the market will bear at given levels of shortage) and the cost curve (the actual price to produce the energy) match up. In fact they never do, especially in this market. Texas producers weren't spending 100x (or whatever) more to produce that electricity, that spike just reflected the amount that customers who "had to keep the lights on" were willing to bear. In fact total utility costs are basically flat. They didn't hire 100x more employees or work 100x more hours to get things running again. They didn't have to build 100x more substations, etc... And that's why spot pricing is a disaster for consumers. It creates a perverse incentive for producers to reduce supply.
      - csours 5y ago
- ejb999 5y ago
  Every time I do the math, any money I would spend on a solar system, would be better invested in an energy utility and just collect the dividend to pay my electric bill. If you want to do solar for the environment, fine - I won't fault you - but if you are doing it to save/make money, there are better places to invest.
  - simfree 5y ago
    The provider space seems quite volatile, where investors risk being wiped out (ala Griddy's investors), severely reduced in value (eg: PG&E), PG&E: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4441976-formerly-bankrupt-pge-corp-still-a-terrible-investment https://seekingalpha.com/article/4441976-formerly-bankrupt-p...
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    Who is your utility and what part of the country? My panels are earning me about 12% per annum post tax, low risk, with insurance against capital loss (home insurance in event of hailstorm, hurricane.) I don’t see stock market investment opportunities competing.
    - ejb999 5y ago
      I am in new england, electric rates are a lot less here (for now anyway) than CA (if that is where you are), and thus the calculations for you may be better than they are for me. Its been a few years since I did the math, but last time I was quoted about 60K for a complete system - 60K at 5% dividend (NGG at the time), would give me $3K per year, enough to cover my bill. AT the end of 20-30 years, a solar system will be worth nothing, or almost nothing, whereas I will still own the same stock in the same company hopefully the stock will have appreciated as well), and will still be covering my electric bill. This of course makes lots of assumptions: I need to invest in company that will still be around for decades, that electric costs don't go thru the roof during that time, and the dividend doesn't go away etc. - but also would have to make assumptions about how long a solar system would last - its impossible for any of us to see out 30 years, but for the time being, I feel like on a purely financial basis, it didn't make sense for me today. But trust me, I would love to pay one sunk cost today and not have to pay an electric bill for the next 30+ years, if only I could see that far in the future with some certainty.
- GloriousKoji 5y ago
  As a Californian I think the electricity itself is pretty cheap at ~9cents/kwh but the total delivery costs are 3x that.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- outside1234 5y ago
  In addition to what others have said -- renewable does not mean necessarily cheap.
- secabeen 5y ago
  Going off-grid is really expensive unless you're willing to make significant quality of life cuts when you go outside your system capacity. A string of overcast days that only produce 50% of normal, or a series of hot or cold days that drive large A/C or Heat Pump usage can put you in a situation where you are shedding load during the day so you can bridge across the overnight period. I expect it's just probably doable in a really temperate climate like SF, where you can live without running heating or cooling year-round and try to get your other electric usage way down, but anywhere with hot summers or cold winters is going to risk battery depletion.
kelnos 5y ago
The grid operator cited is the California Independent System Operator. How much of CA's electricity consumption is fed by that operator? In the article they mention 23GW from wind and solar. A quick search says in 2018 CA's electrical generation capacity was 80GW (which I assume has only gone up). So this 97% is a bit misleading, no? It doesn't represent 97% of total CA electricity usage... it's less than 30%?
- kmonsen 5y ago
  That's assuming everything else is 0.
- danans 5y ago
  > How much of CA's electricity consumption is fed by that operator? 80% of California and part of Nevada also. Don't confuse the grid operator with the utility. Those are separate entities. The ISO is the market maker for electricity - ultimately responsible for keeping supply and demand on the grid in balance. They contract with numerous entities to achieve that. The utility is responsible for some combination of generation, transmission, distribution, and billing, depending on where you are located. There are many other players in the markets, including spinning reserves, independent generators, demand aggregators, community-choice-aggregators, and some that play multiple roles.
- selectodude 5y ago
  CAISO doesn't cover the city of Los Angeles, but that's about it.
  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    > but that's about it isn't that the major consumer?
    - selectodude 5y ago
      Covers the Bay Area and the entirety of Southern California except for the city limits of Los Angeles. So all but about 4 million people.
Arubis 5y ago
Article doesn't get into this level of detail, but I'd be interested in how they define "renewable". Does it include hydropower, which is renewable but has strong non-carbon-related undesirable environmental consequences? Is burned trash "renewable"?
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  > Does it include hydropower, which is renewable but has strong non-carbon-related undesirable environmental consequences? IIUC, the vast majority of ecological impact caused by hydro is already done. It is not making things exponentially worse. Am I missing something?
  - emteycz 5y ago
    No hydro - no obstacle in the waterway, migration paths are affected but still functional. Hydro - it's a meatgrinder.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Depending on location, hydroelectric power can have (mostly because of decomposing vegetation) carbon-equivalent emissions ranging from several grams of CO₂ per kWh, all the way up to around two thousand grams (!) per kWh. This greatly depends on location, with shallow, large-area tropical dams being the worst offenders, and cold, high altitude Nordic dams being the most environmentally friendly.
- CaliforniaKarl 5y ago
  Cal ISO's web site is at https://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx https://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx On there you can dig in and find what sources are counted as renewable.
  - Arubis 5y ago
    That’s clarifying; thanks!
- jhgb 5y ago
pydry 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengning_Pumped_Storage_Power_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengning_Pumped_Storage_Powe... Looks like California should start building one of these 3.6GW 40GWh batteries since at this rate routine 120-150% renewable power days dont look so far off and it'll take about 6 years to build.
- CaliforniaKarl 5y ago
  Here's a start: https://www.sdcwa.org/projects/san-vicente-pumping-facilities/ https://www.sdcwa.org/projects/san-vicente-pumping-facilitie...
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Sounds big but California built over 2GW/8GW-h of battery capacity last year, so I think we're on pace. Nothing fancy, just a lot of batteries in cabinets.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Tesla at Moss Landing went live 2 days ago. 256 Megapacks, 182.5 MW / 730 MWh. The facility will eventually host 1,500MW/6,000MWh of battery storage. Tesla has also broken ground on a Megapack manufacturing facility (Lathrop, CA) employing 1000 people to build roughly 50GWh of storage per year. https://www.montereycountyweekly.com/blogs/news_blog/pg-es-new-tesla-powered-system-gives-moss-landing-another-battery-storage-boost/article_c6233e3e-bf41-11ec-b500-f3deb6b9ab0e.html https://www.montereycountyweekly.com/blogs/news_blog/pg-es-n...
  - bckbyunpopulard 5y ago
rubyist5eva 5y ago
Is this why Calfornia energy is so expensive and constantly having blackouts?
- standardUser 5y ago
  Viewers of a certain cable channel seem to have a uniquely long memory about this. But the last time there was widespread problems with the electric grid in California was a generation ago.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  No, because California isn't constantly having blackouts. There was one really infamous (among habitual Fox News viewers) capacity-related blackout in late 2020, in which fewer than 1% of customers were disconnected for less than 1 hour. That was precipitated by the sudden shutdown of Diablo Canyon, a nuclear power station. California hasn't had a capacity-related intentional disconnect since then.
  - cge 5y ago
    There have also been the intentional blackouts of a sort, if I recall correctly, but those were to mitigate fire risk, not because of capacity, and aren't particularly related to electricity generation.
    - svachalek 5y ago
      Yup, thanks to poor power line maintenance burning down big swathes of the state, we established the totally modern, first world solution of shutting off the power when it's hot and windy. But massive unintentional blackouts like say, Texas, nope not here.
    - rubyist5eva 5y ago
      Thanks for the extra context - went back and refreshed my memory and you are both correct. These are the articles I remember reading about CA blackouts from: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/california-wildfires-power-outages-1.5332313 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/california-wildfires-power-out... https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/california-heat-wave-1.5687895 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/california-heat-wave-1.5687895
aatharuv 5y ago
What I wonder is the breakdown of sources. Solar? Hydro electric? (I wonder if roof top solar is included here). Also, note this was over a very short period of time. And there's still night time, when solar doesn't operate, except for whatever got stored into batteries.
- BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
  > Also, note this was over a very short period of time. That's usually how setting a "record" (i.e. a high water mark) works. It doesn't mean the trend line isn't moving in the right direction.
- outside1234 5y ago
  Consumed roof top solar would not be included (but the portion put into the grid would) - which makes this number even more impressive
- qndreoi 5y ago
  There's a website for that: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#section-renewables-trend https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#sectio...
no-dr-onboard 5y ago
Disclaimer: this comment is not about environmentalism or even the environmental impact. I’m not wading in those waters with HN. It’s difficult to see this as a net positive given the financial hardship brought about to even make this headline a reality (note that even the headline is misleading and requires context). It’s a bit like the person who goes out and purchases a vehicle, spends countless hours away from his family working on it, takes out additional loans to modify it, crashes it, repairs it and then wins 2nd place at the local meetup. You have to ask yourself, at what point was this worth it?
- jhgb 5y ago
  What financial hardship? Pretty much all the other pathways are even more expensive, either in externalities or in internalized costs. There really are not that many realistic options that remain open (at least in the US).
- gibolt 5y ago
  Yes, it is. Solar pays for itself in raw kWh over ~8 years, probably even better at utility scale which negotiates huge panel purchases. Batteries cost more, but can apply stored power when they can earn the most (during peak), reducing viability of polluting alternatives. The cherry on top is that all future energy uses no more material and creates no more pollution, with materials mostly all recyclable at end of life. Over a 30 year horizon, fossil fuel infra cannot compete.
  - heavenlyblue 5y ago
    >Solar pays for itself in raw kWh over ~8 years AFAIK in this thread the calculation that gave the answer of 8 years also included the bonus that comes from the government subsidies. What is the number if we excluded that subsidy?
    - gibolt 5y ago
      That is part of the cost analysis. Costs continue to fall, only rising recently due to macro materials costs. In a few years when the subsidy vanishes, the difference should be nearly made up for by reduced cost. And this subsidy only applies to residential AFAICT, not grid-scale which is the main discussion. Grid scale tends to come in far cheaper
tppiotrowski 5y ago
> More than 15,000 MW of grid-connected solar power capacity and almost 8,000 MW of wind are now online. > The system currently has more than 2,700 MW of storage, most of it in lithium-ion batteries, and that number is projected to grow to about 4,000 MW by June 1. Storage should be in MWh I assume? Anyways, those batteries can hold 11 minutes of peak solar power production. But by June 1st, battery capacity is set to go up by 50% while new solar production will only go up about by 5%.
- tedsanders 5y ago
  No, it's common to measure storage with MW when you're talking about dispatchable power. For example, a 10 MW battery can replace a 10 MW gas generator (assuming it has enough capacity to cover the relevant peak, which is usually a fair assumption because that's what they're designed for). If you only know a battery has 20 MWh, that's not enough information to know what equivalent amount of generation or ramp it can replace.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  It's battery storage as a power source so it's about its delivery capacity. 2.7 GW of storage means when the time comes it can deliver at 2.7 GW.
tomohawk 5y ago
What a meaningless stat. What is the minimum capacity that renewables are guaranteed to provide? That's the number that matters.
- mschaef 5y ago
  > What is the minimum capacity that renewables are guaranteed to provide? Zero... same as any other technology. ie: Texas lost around 25GW of needed NatGas capacity in Feb 2021, not to mention the failed coal, wind, and nuclear that also occurred during that event. (Texas had similar shortages in 2011 and 1989.) > That's the number that matters. You need to take a portfolio view when thinking about energy supply issues... reality is both your number and their number matter. What 97% does mean, is less consumption of two finite resources, namely the ability of the atmosphere to absorb carbon and the amount of carbon we have available to us to burn. Of course, it also means there's a need to either scale the rest of the generation in the ISO down to 3% or export the excess to a neighboring market. Larger base load plants, particularly nuclear, are very bad at lowering their output (Which is why sometimes wholesale electricity prices are negative. These are generators willing to pay people to take their power so they don't have to shut down or otherwise reduce output.)
  - tomohawk 5y ago
    So we can't make engineering calculations because black swan events throw all that out the window? That doesn't seem like a winning strategy. Power grids require serious engineering, not magical thinking, if they are to be economical and reliable. If windmills do not provide base load power, then what will? Something will, and that something will need to be built, and that something will cost money, and that something will have a level of reliability. It is not peak capacity that is important in engineering these things, and it isn't average capacity either. Engineering based on those will give you a very unreliable power grid, kind of like what California has now.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      > that something will need to be built If renewables (and batteries) are deployed at a scale where they produce enough electricity except during black swan events, then we can just keep the gas power stations around and use them a couple of days a year. The rest of the year we can run atmospheric carbon capture facilities (or just try to capture the CO2 from the gas power stations).
tomas789 5y ago
CAISO Materials on the event http://www.caiso.com/Documents/California-ISO-Hits-All-Time-Peak-of-More-Than-97-Percent-Renewables.pdf http://www.caiso.com/Documents/California-ISO-Hits-All-Time-...
lauv0x 5y ago
polote 5y ago
> In another sign of progress toward a carbon-free power grid. This is clearly not the case, this is a sign of progress of carbon free production capacity but not the grid. It doesn't mean we should not be happy about it. But we need to stop mixing everything
outside1234 5y ago
And this doesn't measure the 100% renewable power being consumed when the house is being powered by a solar panel... ... in any case, great progress, let's get to 100% California!
- Aachen 5y ago
  What percentage of industries and cars are electric currently? Is 100% also continuous during winter? There's a long way to go after "100%" unfortunately :/
shtopointo 5y ago
Did it also set the record for highest cost per kWh?
analyte123 5y ago
This is a cool milestone, but it belies the current state of CA renewables, shown here at a very fine grain (data not current, need to go back a week): http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html To summarize, CA has to burn a lot of natural gas and import a lot of (mostly non-renewable) electricity from other states at night, and even more in the shoulder periods at morning and evening. Only untold billions in new batteries at the expense of ratepayers, and (barring storage breakthroughs) new nuclear or geothermal generation will fundamentally change this situation. A cool thing is that you can see grid demand drop hard during the days when behind-the-meter rooftop solar is on.
- julienb_sea 5y ago
  This is inevitably the case with renewable options that don't offer on-demand capacity (i.e. not hydro). The success metric for renewable adoption must take into account the need for on-demand generation, at present the most viable and cleanest option being natural gas.
  - belorn 5y ago
    The condition that renewables success currently require fossil fuel is the point of contention between those who advocate for renewables vs those that advocate in favor of nuclear. Take away natural gas and the success metric for renewable goes away.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  The interesting thing to know is what amount of the base load is used for which purposes. A tax on all non-renewable power could be used to incentivize a reduction of carbon-emitting base load on the grid - either by shutting down stuff like street lights, advertising and other wasteful usage, or by providing on-site battery storage. In any case, reducing light pollution would be a worthy goal on its own. The income from said tax could then be used to build out the transnational capacity of the grid, to subsidize transformations that save energy or to build out grid-scale battery storage.
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
Does this include the power that California imports from across state lines?
newaccount2021 5y ago
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codercatdev 5y ago
I really want to know when the US will actually make it on the carbon neutral list! Nice work Bhutan and Suriname, wherever those are. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/race-to-net-zero-carbon-neutral-goals-by-country/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/race-to-net-zero-carbon-neu...
offmycloud 5y ago
Their math seems off. I really don't see how you get to 97% renewable when the state was burning natural gas to generate 2.8 GW of non-renewable power and had about 1.1 GW of nuclear at the time. There might be some funny math here where they assign all of the "dirty" power generated in the state to exports and can claim that that California is running on renewable power. Source: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
- rtkwe 5y ago
  The energy is pretty perfectly fungible so it makes about as much sense credited to the state as it does to the wider grid. If you just look at CA it generated 97% of its energy needs in state from renewable energy at that time. That it was connected to a larger grid so it was generating excess power dirtily doesn't really change that math.
  - trenchgun 5y ago
    You basically just told us you don't understand how electric grids and electricity markets function.
  - rogers18445 5y ago
    In that case the metric of how much power the state requires in the context of renewable energy is useless. Instead state the % of overall energy production in the state being renewable.
    - SamBam 5y ago
      Disagree. "97% of some state's energy production was renewable" doesn't tell you much, because they could be a state that hardly burns any fossil fuels. "California managed to produce enough renewable energy to power 97% of the needs of a state the size of California" actually tells you how much renewable energy it generated, and why that's a big deal.
      - 5y ago
tamaharbor 5y ago
Electricity use during spring weekends is typically the least you will see throughout the entire year.
acidburnNSA 5y ago
This cool but not as great as you might think. I made a animated graph showing this moment and its implications here https://youtu.be/Sq9Uq1DqhU8 https://youtu.be/Sq9Uq1DqhU8 To deeply decarbonize you need to meet current demand and also make enough to charge the energy storage systems...on a cloudy string of winter days. However we will see headlines like this for the next 20 years at least.
WalterBright 5y ago
If electricity is cheaper to generate when the sun is shining, the retail price of electricity should reflect that. In fact, the retail price should fluctuate minute by minute, so that demand can be shaped to match supply. Trying to match variable supply to a fixed retail electric rate is certain to cause energy gluts and shortages. For example, I'd be happy to charge my electric car during price minima, heat the electric water heater to the max when power is cheap, and run the A/C to the cold end of comfort when electrons are plentiful.
- elcomet 5y ago
  This makes prices unpredictable, and I think it's a bad thing. You cannot plan when you can charge your car. Why not have just two prices which are predictable (one day and one night for example) ?
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    The price of pump gas changes every day. Is that a bad thing? I'm old enough to remember when pump gas was regulated. Two things happened - gluts and shortages, at the same time! This all ended abruptly when Reagan signed his first Executive Order to repeal all that nonsense.
    - elcomet 5y ago
      Every day, not every minute. And the office does not change while you are buying it.
- robbiep 5y ago
  The wholesale price does fluctuate minute by minute. The grid and the average consumer/retail user is not yet sophisticated to take advantage of what you propose. We know this because until recently, this ‘ideal situation’ that you propose was available by a company called Griddy, that went balls up when their consumers got absolutely slammed during the Texas snowstorms, and the idea of having the wholesale price if you’re a retail consumer became a very very silly idea
larsrc 5y ago
97% of electricity, not energy. As a rule of thumb, electricity accounts for about a quarter of energy usage.
coryfklein 5y ago
FYI, in the year 2020 renewables produced 33% and fossil fuels fulfilled 40% of California's total energy budget in 2020, and this 97% figure – while impressive – is not representative of typical energy production [0]. [0] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2020-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
xtat 5y ago
California = PG&E = extreme corruption so no idea about any of this

432 points by lizparody23 5y ago

Then why is it so damn expensive. Honestly one of the reasons I can’t wait to own a house is to purchase enough solar panels and batteries to give a huge middle finger to PG&E and go off-grid

rcpt 5y ago
California (rightly) prices in externalities of power generation https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP294.pdf https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP294.pdf
ceeplusplus 5y ago
It's honestly insane how PG&E is going bankrupt despite charging 35 cents/kWh. Where is all the money going??
- not2b 5y ago
  Paying damages from all the wildfires they have caused.
- Trias11 5y ago
- bryan0 5y ago
  one place: > PG&E Corp. put a cost estimate of more than $25 billion Thursday on its effort to plant thousands of miles of power lines underground in an effort to tamp down wildfire risks. https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article258249655.html https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article25824965...
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    Shame that they're not getting better publicity as a result of this. Our main complaint about the internet companies is that they pocket the money meant to speed up networks for their subscribers. This is exactly what utility companies ought to do to prepare for the future.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      They’re doing it because they went bankrupt over $30B in liability from not preparing in this fashion. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/business/energy-environment/pge-bankruptcy-ends.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/business/energy-environme... > PG&E sought bankruptcy protection in January 2019 after accumulating an estimated $30 billion in liability for fires started by its poorly maintained equipment. One of the blazes, the 2018 Camp Fire, killed scores of people and destroyed the town of Paradise. It wasn’t voluntary, really.
      - bcrosby95 5y ago
        A large part of why they're doing it because they're guaranteed a certain percentage return on investments. There's ways to fix this problem without a $25bil investment, but you won't make nearly as much profit on that.
        bryan0 5y ago
        what's a better, cheaper way to fix the wildfire problem?
        sagarm 5y ago
        People who choose to live in the Wildlands urban interface should bear the cost for undergrounding the wires they rely on IMO. Probably politically infeasible, unfortunately.
        dntrkv 5y ago
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  $0.35 would be a bargain. It's more like $0.40 / kWh, it's complicated depending on which rate plan you have and what time of day / year you're using power. https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-rates-work/Residential-Rates-Plan-Pricing.pdf https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra... Meanwhile my neighbors 30 miles away are paying half that rate to SMUD. https://www.smud.org/en/Rate-Information/Compare-rates https://www.smud.org/en/Rate-Information/Compare-rates As a bonus, SMUD doesn't generally kill people and burn down cities.
  - sagarm 5y ago
    Presumably the Sacramento utility district doesn't serve high risk fire areas, so their customers don't have to subsidize people that choose to live on the wildlands-urban interface.
    - simfree 5y ago
      They also have never had to pay out dividends unlike PG&E, or been forced to optimize for what will deliver the most value to their shareholders. https://www.pgecorp.com/investors/shareholders/dividend_history.shtml https://www.pgecorp.com/investors/shareholders/dividend_hist...
    - samtho 5y ago
      SMUD does operate HV lines into the Sierras as part of the Upper American River Project consisting of 11 dams and eight power generating facilities. It’s capable of powering most of Sacramento in a pinch but is typically used only when they need more capacity. Throughout the course of a year, it ends up providing about 20% of Sacramento’s power. SMUD has very strict preventative maintenance procedures for their HV transmission lines, clearing all underbrush from below the 15KV lines almost yearly. We have not had any major incidents involving electrical fires in my lifetime that I am aware of.
- outworlder 5y ago
  It's incredible. Even more so if we consider that Silicon Valley Power (serving Santa Clara) charges a fraction of that and is more reliable.
  - bink 5y ago
    Seems unfair to compare a utility covering 18 square miles to one covering 160k+ square miles across some of the harshest terrain in the country. But I agree that PG&E charges way too much.
haliskerbas 5y ago
I’ve been trying to do the math for my own home, are solar panels actually cash flow positive, once you account for efficiency decrease overtime etc.? It always seemed like one barely breaks even in 2 decades
- swid 5y ago
  Sounds about right for the power only, but you also probably get a battery with it to deal with power outages… I don’t know how to price the utility of that, but it’s why I bought solar.
  - Forgeties79 5y ago
    How long have you been able to stretch that battery out when your power is out? Don’t have a point to make or anything, I’m just curious. I hadn’t really considered that.
    - brianwawok 5y ago
      24kW can lost a long time if you don’t need AC. Should be days
    - swid 5y ago
      I only have 10kw but most days that is enough to get through the night. Air conditioning will go through it, but I don’t typically need it, especially after the sun sets.
  - RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
    35k for a 8kwh, 24kwh battery storage system. ~15k in credits? Solar loan ends up at 175 a month. I got in before the recent ridiculousness around fuel prices. I'm sure I'm net positive at this point but haven't done the precise math. One addition I'm considering, is some bitcoin/ crypto rigs to take care of excess power during the peaks. Even with my batteries, I produce a lot of extra power and don't get paid spit from the power company, and what I do get I can only use as credit. https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/-bitmain-antminer-s17e-(64th) https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/-bitmain-a... Thing costs ~1.25k, but at ~$10/ day it will pay its self off in a quarter.
jweir 5y ago
You do not pay market rate for electricity. Texas does allow consumers to pay market rate for electricity, you may have heard about last winter people getting bills in the several thousands of dollars when prices spiked. CAISO was 97% renewable for only a moment, not the entire day. The 3rd was a Sunday, not a peak day. And the average price for energy for the day was $30.77 (day head) $27.1 (real time) for TH_SP15_GEN-APND (per MWh)
- m463 5y ago
  > You do not pay market rate for electricity. however it should be ... vaguely ... related. In california it is not. it's easy to pay 40-50 cents/Kwh (~$500/MWh)
- samkater 5y ago
  My understanding, to put it in AWS EC2 pricing terms, is that we do not pay the market "spot" rate for electricity (variable, often less than what you might pay elsewhere, but could spike up) - which is what Texas allowed. Typically we pay the "on demand" rate which is fixed. Large energy users probably negotiate "reserved" pricing. My point being, we pay the market rate, those massive hikes are just built-in over a long period of time.
  - ajross 5y ago
    That only works if the demand curve (the price the market will bear at given levels of shortage) and the cost curve (the actual price to produce the energy) match up. In fact they never do, especially in this market. Texas producers weren't spending 100x (or whatever) more to produce that electricity, that spike just reflected the amount that customers who "had to keep the lights on" were willing to bear. In fact total utility costs are basically flat. They didn't hire 100x more employees or work 100x more hours to get things running again. They didn't have to build 100x more substations, etc... And that's why spot pricing is a disaster for consumers. It creates a perverse incentive for producers to reduce supply.
    - csours 5y ago
ejb999 5y ago
Every time I do the math, any money I would spend on a solar system, would be better invested in an energy utility and just collect the dividend to pay my electric bill. If you want to do solar for the environment, fine - I won't fault you - but if you are doing it to save/make money, there are better places to invest.
- simfree 5y ago
  The provider space seems quite volatile, where investors risk being wiped out (ala Griddy's investors), severely reduced in value (eg: PG&E), PG&E: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4441976-formerly-bankrupt-pge-corp-still-a-terrible-investment https://seekingalpha.com/article/4441976-formerly-bankrupt-p...
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Who is your utility and what part of the country? My panels are earning me about 12% per annum post tax, low risk, with insurance against capital loss (home insurance in event of hailstorm, hurricane.) I don’t see stock market investment opportunities competing.
  - ejb999 5y ago
    I am in new england, electric rates are a lot less here (for now anyway) than CA (if that is where you are), and thus the calculations for you may be better than they are for me. Its been a few years since I did the math, but last time I was quoted about 60K for a complete system - 60K at 5% dividend (NGG at the time), would give me $3K per year, enough to cover my bill. AT the end of 20-30 years, a solar system will be worth nothing, or almost nothing, whereas I will still own the same stock in the same company hopefully the stock will have appreciated as well), and will still be covering my electric bill. This of course makes lots of assumptions: I need to invest in company that will still be around for decades, that electric costs don't go thru the roof during that time, and the dividend doesn't go away etc. - but also would have to make assumptions about how long a solar system would last - its impossible for any of us to see out 30 years, but for the time being, I feel like on a purely financial basis, it didn't make sense for me today. But trust me, I would love to pay one sunk cost today and not have to pay an electric bill for the next 30+ years, if only I could see that far in the future with some certainty.
GloriousKoji 5y ago
As a Californian I think the electricity itself is pretty cheap at ~9cents/kwh but the total delivery costs are 3x that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
outside1234 5y ago
In addition to what others have said -- renewable does not mean necessarily cheap.
secabeen 5y ago
Going off-grid is really expensive unless you're willing to make significant quality of life cuts when you go outside your system capacity. A string of overcast days that only produce 50% of normal, or a series of hot or cold days that drive large A/C or Heat Pump usage can put you in a situation where you are shedding load during the day so you can bridge across the overnight period. I expect it's just probably doable in a really temperate climate like SF, where you can live without running heating or cooling year-round and try to get your other electric usage way down, but anywhere with hot summers or cold winters is going to risk battery depletion.

kelnos 5y ago

The grid operator cited is the California Independent System Operator. How much of CA's electricity consumption is fed by that operator? In the article they mention 23GW from wind and solar. A quick search says in 2018 CA's electrical generation capacity was 80GW (which I assume has only gone up). So this 97% is a bit misleading, no? It doesn't represent 97% of total CA electricity usage... it's less than 30%?

kmonsen 5y ago
That's assuming everything else is 0.
danans 5y ago
> How much of CA's electricity consumption is fed by that operator? 80% of California and part of Nevada also. Don't confuse the grid operator with the utility. Those are separate entities. The ISO is the market maker for electricity - ultimately responsible for keeping supply and demand on the grid in balance. They contract with numerous entities to achieve that. The utility is responsible for some combination of generation, transmission, distribution, and billing, depending on where you are located. There are many other players in the markets, including spinning reserves, independent generators, demand aggregators, community-choice-aggregators, and some that play multiple roles.
selectodude 5y ago
CAISO doesn't cover the city of Los Angeles, but that's about it.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  > but that's about it isn't that the major consumer?
  - selectodude 5y ago
    Covers the Bay Area and the entirety of Southern California except for the city limits of Los Angeles. So all but about 4 million people.

Arubis 5y ago

Article doesn't get into this level of detail, but I'd be interested in how they define "renewable". Does it include hydropower, which is renewable but has strong non-carbon-related undesirable environmental consequences? Is burned trash "renewable"?

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
> Does it include hydropower, which is renewable but has strong non-carbon-related undesirable environmental consequences? IIUC, the vast majority of ecological impact caused by hydro is already done. It is not making things exponentially worse. Am I missing something?
- emteycz 5y ago
  No hydro - no obstacle in the waterway, migration paths are affected but still functional. Hydro - it's a meatgrinder.
- jhgb 5y ago
  Depending on location, hydroelectric power can have (mostly because of decomposing vegetation) carbon-equivalent emissions ranging from several grams of CO₂ per kWh, all the way up to around two thousand grams (!) per kWh. This greatly depends on location, with shallow, large-area tropical dams being the worst offenders, and cold, high altitude Nordic dams being the most environmentally friendly.
CaliforniaKarl 5y ago
Cal ISO's web site is at https://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx https://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx On there you can dig in and find what sources are counted as renewable.
- Arubis 5y ago
  That’s clarifying; thanks!
jhgb 5y ago

pydry 5y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengning_Pumped_Storage_Power_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengning_Pumped_Storage_Powe... Looks like California should start building one of these 3.6GW 40GWh batteries since at this rate routine 120-150% renewable power days dont look so far off and it'll take about 6 years to build.

CaliforniaKarl 5y ago
Here's a start: https://www.sdcwa.org/projects/san-vicente-pumping-facilities/ https://www.sdcwa.org/projects/san-vicente-pumping-facilitie...
jeffbee 5y ago
Sounds big but California built over 2GW/8GW-h of battery capacity last year, so I think we're on pace. Nothing fancy, just a lot of batteries in cabinets.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Tesla at Moss Landing went live 2 days ago. 256 Megapacks, 182.5 MW / 730 MWh. The facility will eventually host 1,500MW/6,000MWh of battery storage. Tesla has also broken ground on a Megapack manufacturing facility (Lathrop, CA) employing 1000 people to build roughly 50GWh of storage per year. https://www.montereycountyweekly.com/blogs/news_blog/pg-es-new-tesla-powered-system-gives-moss-landing-another-battery-storage-boost/article_c6233e3e-bf41-11ec-b500-f3deb6b9ab0e.html https://www.montereycountyweekly.com/blogs/news_blog/pg-es-n...
- bckbyunpopulard 5y ago

rubyist5eva 5y ago

Is this why Calfornia energy is so expensive and constantly having blackouts?

standardUser 5y ago
Viewers of a certain cable channel seem to have a uniquely long memory about this. But the last time there was widespread problems with the electric grid in California was a generation ago.
jeffbee 5y ago
No, because California isn't constantly having blackouts. There was one really infamous (among habitual Fox News viewers) capacity-related blackout in late 2020, in which fewer than 1% of customers were disconnected for less than 1 hour. That was precipitated by the sudden shutdown of Diablo Canyon, a nuclear power station. California hasn't had a capacity-related intentional disconnect since then.
- cge 5y ago
  There have also been the intentional blackouts of a sort, if I recall correctly, but those were to mitigate fire risk, not because of capacity, and aren't particularly related to electricity generation.
  - svachalek 5y ago
    Yup, thanks to poor power line maintenance burning down big swathes of the state, we established the totally modern, first world solution of shutting off the power when it's hot and windy. But massive unintentional blackouts like say, Texas, nope not here.
  - rubyist5eva 5y ago
    Thanks for the extra context - went back and refreshed my memory and you are both correct. These are the articles I remember reading about CA blackouts from: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/california-wildfires-power-outages-1.5332313 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/california-wildfires-power-out... https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/california-heat-wave-1.5687895 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/california-heat-wave-1.5687895

aatharuv 5y ago

What I wonder is the breakdown of sources. Solar? Hydro electric? (I wonder if roof top solar is included here). Also, note this was over a very short period of time. And there's still night time, when solar doesn't operate, except for whatever got stored into batteries.

BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
> Also, note this was over a very short period of time. That's usually how setting a "record" (i.e. a high water mark) works. It doesn't mean the trend line isn't moving in the right direction.
outside1234 5y ago
Consumed roof top solar would not be included (but the portion put into the grid would) - which makes this number even more impressive
qndreoi 5y ago
There's a website for that: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#section-renewables-trend https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#sectio...

no-dr-onboard 5y ago

Disclaimer: this comment is not about environmentalism or even the environmental impact. I’m not wading in those waters with HN. It’s difficult to see this as a net positive given the financial hardship brought about to even make this headline a reality (note that even the headline is misleading and requires context). It’s a bit like the person who goes out and purchases a vehicle, spends countless hours away from his family working on it, takes out additional loans to modify it, crashes it, repairs it and then wins 2nd place at the local meetup. You have to ask yourself, at what point was this worth it?

jhgb 5y ago
What financial hardship? Pretty much all the other pathways are even more expensive, either in externalities or in internalized costs. There really are not that many realistic options that remain open (at least in the US).
gibolt 5y ago
Yes, it is. Solar pays for itself in raw kWh over ~8 years, probably even better at utility scale which negotiates huge panel purchases. Batteries cost more, but can apply stored power when they can earn the most (during peak), reducing viability of polluting alternatives. The cherry on top is that all future energy uses no more material and creates no more pollution, with materials mostly all recyclable at end of life. Over a 30 year horizon, fossil fuel infra cannot compete.
- heavenlyblue 5y ago
  >Solar pays for itself in raw kWh over ~8 years AFAIK in this thread the calculation that gave the answer of 8 years also included the bonus that comes from the government subsidies. What is the number if we excluded that subsidy?
  - gibolt 5y ago
    That is part of the cost analysis. Costs continue to fall, only rising recently due to macro materials costs. In a few years when the subsidy vanishes, the difference should be nearly made up for by reduced cost. And this subsidy only applies to residential AFAICT, not grid-scale which is the main discussion. Grid scale tends to come in far cheaper

tppiotrowski 5y ago

> More than 15,000 MW of grid-connected solar power capacity and almost 8,000 MW of wind are now online. > The system currently has more than 2,700 MW of storage, most of it in lithium-ion batteries, and that number is projected to grow to about 4,000 MW by June 1. Storage should be in MWh I assume? Anyways, those batteries can hold 11 minutes of peak solar power production. But by June 1st, battery capacity is set to go up by 50% while new solar production will only go up about by 5%.

tedsanders 5y ago
No, it's common to measure storage with MW when you're talking about dispatchable power. For example, a 10 MW battery can replace a 10 MW gas generator (assuming it has enough capacity to cover the relevant peak, which is usually a fair assumption because that's what they're designed for). If you only know a battery has 20 MWh, that's not enough information to know what equivalent amount of generation or ramp it can replace.
renewiltord 5y ago
It's battery storage as a power source so it's about its delivery capacity. 2.7 GW of storage means when the time comes it can deliver at 2.7 GW.

tomohawk 5y ago

What a meaningless stat. What is the minimum capacity that renewables are guaranteed to provide? That's the number that matters.

mschaef 5y ago
> What is the minimum capacity that renewables are guaranteed to provide? Zero... same as any other technology. ie: Texas lost around 25GW of needed NatGas capacity in Feb 2021, not to mention the failed coal, wind, and nuclear that also occurred during that event. (Texas had similar shortages in 2011 and 1989.) > That's the number that matters. You need to take a portfolio view when thinking about energy supply issues... reality is both your number and their number matter. What 97% does mean, is less consumption of two finite resources, namely the ability of the atmosphere to absorb carbon and the amount of carbon we have available to us to burn. Of course, it also means there's a need to either scale the rest of the generation in the ISO down to 3% or export the excess to a neighboring market. Larger base load plants, particularly nuclear, are very bad at lowering their output (Which is why sometimes wholesale electricity prices are negative. These are generators willing to pay people to take their power so they don't have to shut down or otherwise reduce output.)
- tomohawk 5y ago
  So we can't make engineering calculations because black swan events throw all that out the window? That doesn't seem like a winning strategy. Power grids require serious engineering, not magical thinking, if they are to be economical and reliable. If windmills do not provide base load power, then what will? Something will, and that something will need to be built, and that something will cost money, and that something will have a level of reliability. It is not peak capacity that is important in engineering these things, and it isn't average capacity either. Engineering based on those will give you a very unreliable power grid, kind of like what California has now.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > that something will need to be built If renewables (and batteries) are deployed at a scale where they produce enough electricity except during black swan events, then we can just keep the gas power stations around and use them a couple of days a year. The rest of the year we can run atmospheric carbon capture facilities (or just try to capture the CO2 from the gas power stations).

tomas789 5y ago

CAISO Materials on the event http://www.caiso.com/Documents/California-ISO-Hits-All-Time-Peak-of-More-Than-97-Percent-Renewables.pdf http://www.caiso.com/Documents/California-ISO-Hits-All-Time-...

lauv0x 5y ago

polote 5y ago

> In another sign of progress toward a carbon-free power grid. This is clearly not the case, this is a sign of progress of carbon free production capacity but not the grid. It doesn't mean we should not be happy about it. But we need to stop mixing everything

outside1234 5y ago

And this doesn't measure the 100% renewable power being consumed when the house is being powered by a solar panel... ... in any case, great progress, let's get to 100% California!

Aachen 5y ago
What percentage of industries and cars are electric currently? Is 100% also continuous during winter? There's a long way to go after "100%" unfortunately :/

shtopointo 5y ago

Did it also set the record for highest cost per kWh?

analyte123 5y ago

This is a cool milestone, but it belies the current state of CA renewables, shown here at a very fine grain (data not current, need to go back a week): http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html To summarize, CA has to burn a lot of natural gas and import a lot of (mostly non-renewable) electricity from other states at night, and even more in the shoulder periods at morning and evening. Only untold billions in new batteries at the expense of ratepayers, and (barring storage breakthroughs) new nuclear or geothermal generation will fundamentally change this situation. A cool thing is that you can see grid demand drop hard during the days when behind-the-meter rooftop solar is on.

julienb_sea 5y ago
This is inevitably the case with renewable options that don't offer on-demand capacity (i.e. not hydro). The success metric for renewable adoption must take into account the need for on-demand generation, at present the most viable and cleanest option being natural gas.
- belorn 5y ago
  The condition that renewables success currently require fossil fuel is the point of contention between those who advocate for renewables vs those that advocate in favor of nuclear. Take away natural gas and the success metric for renewable goes away.
mschuster91 5y ago
The interesting thing to know is what amount of the base load is used for which purposes. A tax on all non-renewable power could be used to incentivize a reduction of carbon-emitting base load on the grid - either by shutting down stuff like street lights, advertising and other wasteful usage, or by providing on-site battery storage. In any case, reducing light pollution would be a worthy goal on its own. The income from said tax could then be used to build out the transnational capacity of the grid, to subsidize transformations that save energy or to build out grid-scale battery storage.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

Does this include the power that California imports from across state lines?

newaccount2021 5y ago

[dead]

codercatdev 5y ago

I really want to know when the US will actually make it on the carbon neutral list! Nice work Bhutan and Suriname, wherever those are. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/race-to-net-zero-carbon-neutral-goals-by-country/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/race-to-net-zero-carbon-neu...

offmycloud 5y ago

Their math seems off. I really don't see how you get to 97% renewable when the state was burning natural gas to generate 2.8 GW of non-renewable power and had about 1.1 GW of nuclear at the time. There might be some funny math here where they assign all of the "dirty" power generated in the state to exports and can claim that that California is running on renewable power. Source: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

rtkwe 5y ago
The energy is pretty perfectly fungible so it makes about as much sense credited to the state as it does to the wider grid. If you just look at CA it generated 97% of its energy needs in state from renewable energy at that time. That it was connected to a larger grid so it was generating excess power dirtily doesn't really change that math.
- trenchgun 5y ago
  You basically just told us you don't understand how electric grids and electricity markets function.
- rogers18445 5y ago
  In that case the metric of how much power the state requires in the context of renewable energy is useless. Instead state the % of overall energy production in the state being renewable.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    Disagree. "97% of some state's energy production was renewable" doesn't tell you much, because they could be a state that hardly burns any fossil fuels. "California managed to produce enough renewable energy to power 97% of the needs of a state the size of California" actually tells you how much renewable energy it generated, and why that's a big deal.
    - 5y ago

tamaharbor 5y ago

Electricity use during spring weekends is typically the least you will see throughout the entire year.

acidburnNSA 5y ago

This cool but not as great as you might think. I made a animated graph showing this moment and its implications here https://youtu.be/Sq9Uq1DqhU8 https://youtu.be/Sq9Uq1DqhU8 To deeply decarbonize you need to meet current demand and also make enough to charge the energy storage systems...on a cloudy string of winter days. However we will see headlines like this for the next 20 years at least.

WalterBright 5y ago

If electricity is cheaper to generate when the sun is shining, the retail price of electricity should reflect that. In fact, the retail price should fluctuate minute by minute, so that demand can be shaped to match supply. Trying to match variable supply to a fixed retail electric rate is certain to cause energy gluts and shortages. For example, I'd be happy to charge my electric car during price minima, heat the electric water heater to the max when power is cheap, and run the A/C to the cold end of comfort when electrons are plentiful.

elcomet 5y ago
This makes prices unpredictable, and I think it's a bad thing. You cannot plan when you can charge your car. Why not have just two prices which are predictable (one day and one night for example) ?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  The price of pump gas changes every day. Is that a bad thing? I'm old enough to remember when pump gas was regulated. Two things happened - gluts and shortages, at the same time! This all ended abruptly when Reagan signed his first Executive Order to repeal all that nonsense.
  - elcomet 5y ago
    Every day, not every minute. And the office does not change while you are buying it.
robbiep 5y ago
The wholesale price does fluctuate minute by minute. The grid and the average consumer/retail user is not yet sophisticated to take advantage of what you propose. We know this because until recently, this ‘ideal situation’ that you propose was available by a company called Griddy, that went balls up when their consumers got absolutely slammed during the Texas snowstorms, and the idea of having the wholesale price if you’re a retail consumer became a very very silly idea

larsrc 5y ago

97% of electricity, not energy. As a rule of thumb, electricity accounts for about a quarter of energy usage.

coryfklein 5y ago

FYI, in the year 2020 renewables produced 33% and fossil fuels fulfilled 40% of California's total energy budget in 2020, and this 97% figure – while impressive – is not representative of typical energy production [0]. [0] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2020-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

xtat 5y ago

California = PG&E = extreme corruption so no idea about any of this