5 ms·
California Solar Duck Curve Gets Bigger
- orenlindsey 3y agoGood to see solar power getting more common, but we need batteries and storage to truly end carbon emissions.
- verisimi 3y agoYes. And the consumer is meant to buy the batteries. And these (expensive) batteries only last 7 years of so. You could say, electricity production/generation is being outsourced to the consumer, who will still pay bills, but now will also assume some of the infrastructure costs too.
- yukkuri 3y agoWhere the heck did you get that idea from? The batteries discussed in this article are storage stations that are part of the grid, not something bought and maintained by the consumer.
- hrkfmud50k 3y agobecause NEM 3 makes new rooftop solar installations uneconomical without batteries. though even with batteries they're still pretty uneconomical
- ThatPlayer 3y agoBecause NEM2 wasn't sustainable long term. TFA is talking about we don't have enough batteries for all the solar and how it might be necessary to reduce solar production during peak times. That's why we don't want to keep incentivizing solar without batteries.
- verisimi 3y agoI'm responding to a comment that mentions batteries and talking about personal experience, for a home solution... This is relevant as a lot of solar uses private roofs. In the UK, you could sell all your unused excess roof solar energy back to the grid. But this is at a wildly reduced rate - fractions of the cost you would pay for electricity. So you would then need batteries to store the energy... But then you incur the drawbacks of these (high maintaince costs). With all these personal solar solutions, with batteries, panels etc being bought and provided by the consumer, it seems an obvious point to me that quite a lot of electric infrastructure is moving to the private domain, with discounted electricity then being sold back to the public utilities.
- vlovich123 3y agoSolar+batteries remains insanely expensive putting nuclear to shame (nuclear in many areas is still way cheaper than solar without batteries)
- natch 3y agorelevant: https://www.tesla.com/utilities https://www.tesla.com/utilities
- jrockway 3y agoI wonder if the economics are distorted here. It looks like there is 0 demand during the day, but people are obviously using electricity during the day. Should we not make electricity actually free at the hours when there is too much of it, to encourage its use? This seems like the best way to encourage battery installation and electric car usage, without requiring every house to get solar panels. The downside, I suppose, is that electric utilities are for-profit companies whose shareholders need a return. Thus it's hard to property subsidize. The power lines to your house cost money to maintain regardless of how much electricity is flowing through them. (Something I hate in general is this kind of usage-based billing that subsidizes fixed costs. You should pay a fixed fee to be on the grid, and then per-kWh for usage. But people hate being billed for things they don't use, so we try to combine to costs of the infrastructure with the cost of the incremental usage. It's really just a crazy security that should be in the domain of banks and not ordinary consumers, but it's also so normal and widespread we think nothing of it.)
- konschubert 3y agoYes, grid fees should be a flat payment based on your max power draw in the last year. Or maybe a time dependent fee that reflects current power grid congestion. Certainly not something that simply scales with the energy consumed.
- Analemma_ 3y agoMost utilities, including I assume California's, do have a flat component of the total bill to cover operational expenses like salaries, the fixed cost of infrastructure, hedging against huge spot price spikes, etc. In my case (Pacific Northwest), this amounts to about one-sixth of my total bill. But having 100% of your bill be a flat fee would just be crazy: there'd be no incentive to conserve energy and "based on max power draw" would encourage people to use 100% of their possible consumption all the time.
- konschubert 3y agoYou misunderstood me. The GRID FEES should be flat. They are just one component of the price that is charged by the utility, and currently they are charged per kWh consumed. The POWER PRICE should of course scale with the kWh that are being consumed - either as a fixed price, or better with a component that depends on the time of the day or the actual market price.
- nilsbunger 3y agoI’ve always wondered why the price of electricity on a time-of-use plan doesn’t match this curve. Our electricity is still “peak” pricing in middle of day at the bottom of the duck curve.
- nlh 3y agoThe duck curve chart is a bit misleading - it is "net load (or the demand remaining after subtracting variable renewable generation)", not total demand. Total demand is still highest mid-day, but there's enough solar being generated to lighten the net load. But your point is basically apt: As more and more at-home solar comes online, grid-demand WILL drop during the day and pricing SHOULD drop accordingly (but we all know it won't unless the utilities get a legislative requirement to do so).
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoDuck Curves that you see published are generally from the spring, (march to may in this case) when solar production is high and air-con demand is low. Time of Use rates are generally set anually, so need to account for the summer season.
- aidenn0 3y agoIt's an artifact of previous usage curves when PV was negligible. My utility has new peak hours starting around 6. I'm grandfathered in on the old plan for now, which is a difference of about $300/mo. in the summer.
- icegreentea2 3y agoIt is? Poking around it looks like peak rates are typically set from 5-9PM (https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/find-your-best-rate-plan/time-of-use-rate-plans.html https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/find-your-best-rat... for example).
- Podgajski 3y agoWhy are they not using the excess solar power to lift large weights above the ground that can be released and lowered to power generators during the night?
- teraflop 3y agoBecause the physical infrastructure to do that is very large and expensive. To put it in perspective: a cubic yard of concrete costs roughly US$125, and the amount of energy you can store by lifting one of those cubic yards 10 meters into the air is worth something on the order of $0.01, assuming perfect efficiency.
- Armisael16 3y agoSetting up large enough weights to lift is incredibly expensive - it’s a terrible way to use power, let alone store it.
- twic 3y agoJust make them out of water.
- anonporridge 3y agoStill very expensive you don't have geography that gives you elevated storage containers for free.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xt00 3y agoOne possible solution for this is to encourage employers to install more charging stations at their office -- which would mean a more consistent load throughout the day as tons of electric cars charge during the day. This would also be a huge benefit to employees who could effectively drive their electric car for free and the power company also gets the benefit of people putting less demand on the residential power grid.
- stouset 3y agoAt this point my (weak) personal observation is that there are more EV charging spots at most parking lots (in SF at least) than there are EVs using them. I think we just need to accelerate the rollout of EVs as quickly as possible.
- mauvehaus 3y agoIs this not basically equivalent to installing more batteries on the grid assuming the number of electric cars is mostly unaffected by the availability of employer-provided charging[0]? Those cars are batteries, and midday charging smooths demand the same as grid-connected battery storage[1]. [0] A big assumption, to be sure. [1] You could schedule your car to charge at the most off-peak hours that aren't midday, but we're getting pretty far from a first-order approximation if we're looking at that as a factor.
- ortusdux 3y agoSolar covered parking with charging.
- thelastgallon 3y agoIf they install more vertical solar, it will increase renewable output in the mornings and evenings, flattening the duck curve. Vertical solar can be deployed anywhere, works well with farms, consuming zero land. https://sunzaun.com/flattening-the-duck-curve-with-vertical-solar-panels/ https://sunzaun.com/flattening-the-duck-curve-with-vertical-... https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/pioneering-collaboration-introduces-us-first-vertical-agrivoltaics-system https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/pioneering-col...
- riku_iki 3y agoSomeone should run numbers to see if this will be economically viable, since output during morning and evening will be much lower, meaning electricity cost will be much more expensive after offsetting cost of panels, installation and maintenance.
- Scoundreller 3y agoOutput at the morning and evening should be higher with steeper panels as the sun hasn’t moved up as much. It is a hit to total production, but kWh aren’t fungible throughout the day. The morning and evening kWh are becoming worth more than the mid-day ones.
- aidenn0 3y agoTo do the comparison, it should be compared roughly with the cost of building (batteries + traditional solar). I say "roughly" because batteries can do more than levelize solar, they can levelize other intermittent sources as well, and can provide power on foggy mornings and/or evenings, while vertical solar cannot.
- Scoundreller 3y agoIndeed in an off-grid build, I know someone that optimized their panels to produce earlier in the morning instead of maximizing production, because switching off battery power a little earlier was most valuable to them. Losing some throughout the day and evening wasn’t as much of a concern because they were primarily charging for night-time. Focussing rooftop installs that have a more eastern or western angle, or steeper slope, could be a way of flattening this curve.
- 7thaccount 3y agoSome even say the duck curve looks more like a "canyon curve" now. https://www.powermag.com/epri-head-duck-curve-now-looks-like-a-canyon/ https://www.powermag.com/epri-head-duck-curve-now-looks-like...
- _ea1k 3y agoFortunately, they are adding massive amounts of battery capacity to compensate. Gridstatus.io is a great place to watch it in action: https://www.gridstatus.io/home https://www.gridstatus.io/home
- aidenn0 3y agoRight now batteries are 10% on CAISO and natural gas is 42%. That's closer than I thought it would be, but it's just after sundown. Later tonight it will drop down to 0%. This suggests it need 5x the power capacity and significantly more than 5x of the energy capacity it has today.
- _ea1k 3y agoIIRC, the battery discharge increases again in the early morning hours to compensate for the morning load peak. That's exactly what I'd expect to see, if the goal is to replace peaker plants.