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In California, power companies are trying hard to disincentivize solar. The worst time for the grid is when the sun starts going down but people are still runni

In California, power companies are trying hard to disincentivize solar. The worst time for the grid is when the sun starts going down but people are still running AC/laundry/dishwashers. Solar setups just generate power at the times when it's least needed, and utilities haven't built up enough battery capacity to take advantage of it for later. Another thing we saw with some utilities is that they had to raise rates during the drought to cover their costs. People were so good at reducing their water consumption that the utilities were having trouble covering their large fixed costs. It'll be interesting to see how things go once California implements the income-based fixed electric billing in the next few years.

dylan604 3y ago
>utilities haven't built up enough battery capacity to take advantage of it for later. After Tesla was able to supply a battery pack to the city in Australia after a Twitter bet, I'm really surprised that more storage has not been installed everywhere. Maybe I stopped paying attention to the story too soon, but did this battery buffer not fix the problem?
- nradov 3y ago
  Battery storage remains constrained by cell availability. There is no spare capacity and it can only be scaled up slowly due to supply chain issues. The battery storage that Tesla sold to Australia is a step in the right direction but capacity is only a tiny fraction of what we would need in the USA to enable a large scale transition to renewable energy. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/australia-switches-on-victoria-big-battery-powered-by-tesla-megapacks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/australia-switches-on-victor...
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  The California grid operator has a really cool website that shows realtime-ish graphs of supply and demand[1] and even daily battery reports[2]. One big takeaway is that the total battery capacity is kinda wimpy when you compare it to how much fossil fuel the state burns over the day. The way net metering worked in the past is that people with solar could offload their access generation to power companies and make storage or resale the utility's responsibility. Then 2.0 was a sorta-time of use implementation, and now we're up to Net Metering 3.0 and I haven't bothered to look into how that works. However people I know who have looked into Tesla powerwalls haven't found them to be economical for individual homeowners. [1]: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html [2]: http://www.caiso.com/Documents/DailyEnergyStorageReportJun22-2023.html http://www.caiso.com/Documents/DailyEnergyStorageReportJun22...
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> The worst time for the grid is when the sun starts going down but people are still running AC/laundry/dishwashers Isn't that trivial to at least mitigate via time-of-use rates?

dylan604 3y ago

>utilities haven't built up enough battery capacity to take advantage of it for later. After Tesla was able to supply a battery pack to the city in Australia after a Twitter bet, I'm really surprised that more storage has not been installed everywhere. Maybe I stopped paying attention to the story too soon, but did this battery buffer not fix the problem?

nradov 3y ago
Battery storage remains constrained by cell availability. There is no spare capacity and it can only be scaled up slowly due to supply chain issues. The battery storage that Tesla sold to Australia is a step in the right direction but capacity is only a tiny fraction of what we would need in the USA to enable a large scale transition to renewable energy. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/australia-switches-on-victoria-big-battery-powered-by-tesla-megapacks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/australia-switches-on-victor...
Rebelgecko 3y ago
The California grid operator has a really cool website that shows realtime-ish graphs of supply and demand[1] and even daily battery reports[2]. One big takeaway is that the total battery capacity is kinda wimpy when you compare it to how much fossil fuel the state burns over the day. The way net metering worked in the past is that people with solar could offload their access generation to power companies and make storage or resale the utility's responsibility. Then 2.0 was a sorta-time of use implementation, and now we're up to Net Metering 3.0 and I haven't bothered to look into how that works. However people I know who have looked into Tesla powerwalls haven't found them to be economical for individual homeowners. [1]: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html [2]: http://www.caiso.com/Documents/DailyEnergyStorageReportJun22-2023.html http://www.caiso.com/Documents/DailyEnergyStorageReportJun22...

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

> The worst time for the grid is when the sun starts going down but people are still running AC/laundry/dishwashers Isn't that trivial to at least mitigate via time-of-use rates?