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> At peak, renewables provide up to ~90% of California's electricity In fact, renewable generation regularly hit more than 100% of load in California during Ap
by kmax12 3y ago
> At peak, renewables provide up to ~90% of California's electricity
In fact, renewable generation regularly hit more than 100% of load in California during April and June of this year. The peak was 132% of load [0]!
How can generation be more than 100% of load? California was exporting power to other regions.
We track all this data and more across the United States at Grid Status: https://www.gridstatus.io/home https://www.gridstatus.io/home
[0] https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Renewables%20To%20Load%20Ratio https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Ren...
- jandrese 3y agoThis seems like a good thing. Export sun power from sunny parts of the US to less sunny parts.
- jamiek88 3y agoYep. It’s why the Texas situation is so silly.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIt's possible to still net lose money by exporting power. So much so that it might even still make sense to not do it even after a catastrophic failure every decade or two. The actual calculation will need to be done by those who have the figures and exact costs handy.
- jamiek88 3y agoWho the hell was talking about the marginal profits when the clear alternative is ‘occasional catastrophe’. What a ghoulish, inhumane, MBA (but i repeat myself) perspective.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago> Who the hell was talking about the marginal profits when the clear alternative is ‘occasional catastrophe’. You are the first to bring up 'marginal profits', so it seems like arguing against your own idea, or at best a self-imagined strawman. Did you intend to reply to the post instead? Though the closest in what Patrick wrote is still not this concept.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoWhy even go down the road of trying to rationalize catastrophes for millions of people if you don't even have any numbers or evidence? Your post boils down to "maybe it's fine (based on nothing) for people to freeze or die in heat from a grid that's isolated for political reasons"
- MichaelZuo 3y agoDid you misread my comment? If not, what 'numbers or evidence' are you referring to? The only thing I mentioned, costs and figures, are explicitly not known by me, so it seems bizarre to think I made judgements based on non existent knowledge. The rest seems like your own rambling thoughts.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoDid you misread my comment? Texas has an isolated grid. They can't buy or export power. This causes grid overloads. People have ended up freezing and dying in heat waves due to power outages. You said "maybe it ok, maybe it saves money even if there are catastrophes, but I don't even know what the money is like". Why would you say that a terrible power grid induces crisis is ok at all, let alone when you don't even know how the money breaks down?
- jamiek88 3y agoThank you. This is precisely what I wanted to reply but didn’t trust myself last night to not get in trouble with dang. He is the one who specifically brought up profits as a potential reason to accept catastrophe then got all offended and aggressive, name calling etc when people challenged this. Even going as far as to deny bringing profits into it THEN admitting he had no idea of the numbers but STILL doubling down on the ‘don’t believe your lying eyes about what I wrote’. I genuinely questioned whether it was just me until I checked back in the thread this morning.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
- Kirby64 3y agoThere are already DC ties to the other grids in Texas. They do buy and sell power from other regions. They just aren't particularly large ties, maybe capable of 2GW total?
- bryanlarsen 3y agoYou'd think so, but it often turns out that distribution is more expensive than inefficient local generation.[1] We still want to do lots of distribution, but it'll be for reliability reasons rather than cost. 1: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-electricity-is-local/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
- kyleee 3y agoDoes that still hold if various negative externalities are included in the comparison?
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoNot if local generation is fossil fuel with its unpriced externalities and shadow subsidies. Bring on the sodium ion grid storage! Also, I'd think California has the terrain to do pumped hydro storage.
- marcosdumay 3y agoNow that you pointed it, the patent-hell around molten sodium batteries should have ended already. Yet, I haven't hear about anybody doing anything with them. Is there some action happening?
- vGPU 3y agoI believe some new developments in that area are supposed to be hitting the market next year.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoThe article is about local solar vs distant solar.
- pydry 3y agoIf you get 1MWh with 50% efficiency from a solar panel that's still better than burning 1MWh's worth of gas.
- sanderjd 3y agoI love love love gridstatus! Both the website and the open source library. Thank you for your work!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jwcrux 3y agoOh wow, gridstatus is super cool! I noticed that you have a page on records that have been set. It looks like Ercot released this data today that might be of interest: https://www.ercot.com/news/release/2023-09-14-ercot-provides-new https://www.ercot.com/news/release/2023-09-14-ercot-provides... I’m curious why there appears to be a pretty significant delta between their data and yours. Also, if you’re open to suggestions, I had trouble finding the pricing for gridstatus. Entirely possible I was missing something obvious, but I wanted to see how much it might cost to get the long term Ercot generation-by-source dataset and couldn’t seem to get a clear answer. Regardless, building things like this takes a ton of effort, and I appreciate all you’re doing. Keep up the great work!
- kmax12 3y agowe report the instantaneous load records while that page is reporting the hourly average. I wouldn’t say the results are that different. They point to about the same times even if numbers have a small delta. My focus right now is to make this data more available and easier to use. Haven’t done much to monetize yet. If you just want that data source, happy to get it to you for free. Shoot me an email at max@gridstatus.io or sign up for a free api key and grab it from the site