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For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like

For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like we’re almost there and can stop caring. Just look at the excellent, accurate, and up-to-the-hour charts put out by the electricity market itself and you will see where and when the challenges we face still are. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

mgraczyk 3y ago
The most striking thing is how incredibly flat the line for nuclear is.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Governor just signed something letting Diablo Canyon run for a few more years. Thank god for that. Impossible to get new nuclear so have to keep what we have.
- connicpu 3y ago
  Nuclear makes for great base generating capacity because it has an incredibly stable output, but that also means the line needs to be kept flat or tons of energy will be wasted.
  - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
    [dead]
  - krasin 3y ago
    > or tons of energy will be wasted. There are good potential industrial loads for that intermittent extra energy (nuclear or solar): desalination, CO2->methane, air->ammonia, etc.
  - dvh 3y ago
    Counterpoint: Zaporozhye
  - jillesvangurp 3y ago
    Nuclear is indeed very inflexible. You can't really turn it off easily or cheaply. The only time it goes down is for maintenance. Typically for extended periods of time when that happens. However, battery is improving the capacity factor of renewables; especially solar by allowing two things: - when there's too much of it, you can charge batteries with energy that would otherwise be curtailed/wasted. - when there's not enough solar, you can discharge batteries. Both effects help dampen peaks and dips in renewable energy supply and demand. I.e. it helps flatten the curve similar to what you point out is the case with nuclear. The first effect is often over looked: we are actively curtailing renewable energy that we don't know what to do with. People talk about shortages but not about surpluses. And that's actually a lot of energy. It also leads to the fallacy in believing that having lots of EVs increases energy demand when actually it also allows for better utilization of surpluses. Which dampens the impact this has. Grids are bottle-necked on a lack of cable capacity. We have overproduction of energy in one region and shortages in another. Northern and southern Germany are a good example where on a windy day in the north, the wind energy can't get to the industries in the south that need it. So, they fire up coal plants. The same is the case in the UK where getting wind energy from Scotland south is a problem. Cables and batteries help improve utilization of renewables. The main thing that drives these things is cost. Nuclear is costly and very slow to deploy. Realistically, any nuclear we don't have right now, won't be there for at least a decade or two. And that's if we would be really diligent about getting to that right now, which of course we aren't. In the time until then, we'll be deploying solar by the TW/year. Same with batteries. And wind is also growing rapidly. And of course laying some more cables is a lot less controversial than building new nuclear plants. There has been quite a bit of talk of upgrading existing cables with better ones to effectively double capacity. This is even less controversial since the permitting is a lot easier and faster. In short, we'll deploy orders of magnitude more of all this than nuclear, and a lot earlier too. So much that nuclear might turn out to be a rounding error.
    - adev_ 3y ago
      Nuclear can scale up and down. It can do so from 20% to 100%, Reducing under 20% is problematic because it implies a reactor shutdown and restart. 20% is more than enough to modulate side by side with renewables. The French Grid does that all the time intraday. https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricite-par-filiere# https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
  - akira2501 3y ago
    > or tons of energy will be wasted How do you mean? Nuclear power plants can scale with demand. They're primarily steam generators and those feed turbines. You have many mechanisms you can use to control total power output in these systems. In the sense that you're wasting fuel lifetime, to a certain extent, but I imagine that also varies with the level of reactivity currently allowed in the vessel by the control rods.
    - connicpu 3y ago
      Other commenters also pointed it out, but ramping down a nuclear reactor is not an easily reversed process. After a ramp down the fuel needs a certain amount of time before it can be ramped back up again. The output can be modulated, but it's a process that must be performed over a long period of time.
- Kon5ole 3y ago
  It's flat on all sides though. https://www.tvo.fi/en/index/news/pressreleasesstockexchangereleases/2024/4764008.html https://www.tvo.fi/en/index/news/pressreleasesstockexchanger... Nuclear makes for square supply curves which are kind of hard to handle, especially if you have a large percentage of your supply from a few reactors like they do in Finland.
  - ReptileMan 3y ago
    Smelt aluminum
    - tankenmate 3y ago
      And make fresh water and hydrogen from sea water.
  - schnitzelstoat 3y ago
    Can't the control rods allow the output to be controlled?
    - Qwertious 3y ago
      Yes, but reducing power output won't reduce the plant's mortgage payments.
    - oneshtein 3y ago
      It will take hours, at least. Nuclear is sloooooooooow. You can make it hot very quickly, but it will take hours to days to cool down. Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant finally turned cold this month, 2 years after start of full scale Russian invasion and occupation of the plant.
- toast0 3y ago
  That's more about economics than operations. Nuclear can modulate output, but pretty much won't except for operational needs (maintenance, grid needs). Older reactors take longer to modulate output, but either way, the economics say the reactor cost so much to build that you should run it at capacity as much as possible, especially since its lifetime is limited.
bagels 3y ago
Thank you, the headline is just basically a lie then.
Roritharr 3y ago
Thank you, as a German paying absurd electricity prices I applaud this nuance.
- ctrw 3y ago
  If no one can afford electricity we can reach 100% renewables easily.
  - throwaway473825 3y ago
    While true, Germany's absurd electricity-to-gas price ratio makes electrification an uphill battle: https://www.ehpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Additional-slide-Elec-vs-gas-price-.png https://www.ehpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Additional-s...
- flakeoil 3y ago
  The high price is probably more related to the fact that Germany relied on gas and oil from Russia in addition to closing down all nuclear power plants. Short and medium term this will show in the price.
- piva00 3y ago
  I'd like to thanks the German government's policies for the past decades for making me pay absurd electricity prices since the Russian invasion started, even though I live in Sweden with 90+% of renewable electricity generation I'm forced to pay the highest spot price in the EU (aka, gas in Germany) because of Germany's decision to burn coal and gas all the way into 2022... The inertia on modernising Germany is starting to bite your neighbours.
  - varjag 3y ago
    Same in Norway. We in effect subsidize German poor decision making. And unlike when Greece collapse happened, the voices in Berlin are suspiciously quiet about austerity. Oh well, as long as they learn the lesson…
nocoiner 3y ago
Are you sure it’s only a few minutes at low demand times? I checked a few days in April at your link, and if I’m reading the graphs right, it looks like renewable production exceeded demand for at least several hours in the afternoon for each of the days I checked. The headline on the original article seems unhelpful and perhaps deliberately misleading, but unless I’m reading the graphs wrong (quite possible!) this also doesn’t seem, like, a 15 minute window at 2 a.m. where unexpectedly strong winds created a temporary blip of excess production.
- akira2501 3y ago
  It's also notable that battery capacity has increased quite a bit over the past year. The reduction in NG power plants output after sundown is pretty remarkable.
- stevenhuang 3y ago
  This is also what I see. Solar exceeded demand for hours in the few days I saw. I don't think parent actually clicked around in the link he provided.
snerc 3y ago
I'm not holding my breath until a Tokamak powers a building.
baseline-shift 3y ago
This is incorrect. It is not for a few minutes! We are way way past that at this point. The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day. Because of solar PV, the cheapest generation now, the daytime electricity supply is actually more than we need in California. Solar farms (and also wind farms)get curtailed here due to supplying more than the grid can take at times; this is usually for several hours. Source; reporter covering solar news through interviews with grid operators, solar developers and policymakers since 2008
- jahnu 3y ago
  And given the incoming tidal wave of DER and cheaper storage that curtailment will stop I bet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_generation
- timr 3y ago
  Those graphs clearly say that the state is pulling from non-renewable sources (primarily natural gas and "imports") between the hours of 7PM and 7AM. As I look at the page, right now (3:30AM local time), California is producing less than it needs, and the deficit is about 15,000MW. It isn't even close. It's fine to say that California is producing more than it needs on net, but adding up total production over 24h and subtracting total consumption over 24h and seeing a positive value isn't meaningful if you're actually dependent on conventional sources for 12 hours a day. But sure, it's more than a few minutes.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ac29 3y ago
  > The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day The article says renewable supply exceeded demand for “0.25-6 h per day”. This is great, but its not most of the day.
bradley13 3y ago
Nice link. At this specific moment in time, natural gas is 19.9%, nuclear is 5.6%, and here's the great lie imports are 38.5%. There's no telling what the source of that imported energy is.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  It's the middle of the night. You need to look during the daytime.
- roryirvine 3y ago
  So, at four and a half hours before sunrise. The big driver of renewables in California is solar - check the graph for the whole of yesterday, and you'll see how different the picture is during the day. Yes, there's still a gap overnight which over time will come to be filled by more wind and battery storage. But California's really lucky with solar - it's already so cheap and easy that it makes battery storage financially viable even using today's tech. It's now just a matter of continuing to scale it out...
flanked-evergl 3y ago
This headline is incredibly misleading. Thank you for sharing this.
lakis 3y ago
Take a look at https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html Scroll down to "Net demand trend" which is "System demand minus wind and solar" and compare yesterday vs last summer and a year ago Yesterday (4/15) lowest net demand was 366 MW Last summer, July 4th , lowest net demand was 2350 MW Last year (4/15/23) lowest net demand was 2227 MW You can see that last summer, with so much more "powerful" sun, the net demand never went below 2300 MW. Last year went down to 2227 MW. Today, we are down to 366 MW. We manage to produce so much more solar in the last year that the net demand minus renewables went down by ~1800 MW. That means a few more years of improvements like that and we will have excess power generation of solar/wind at least during the day for most days. So if we start storing that excess generated power, we will start making a dent on other times of max power (since we can discharge batteries when max demand is needed). That's the plan on how to keep lowering the net demand more and more.
- lakis 3y ago
  See also https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html and scroll down to "Batteries trend" and compare today vs a year ago. A year ago, batteries were discharging max 3MW and were drained by 10-11 pm. Yesterday batteries were discarging at max 5.3MW and were fully drained around 11:30. So batteries handled twice as much power for longer period of time.

mgraczyk 3y ago

The most striking thing is how incredibly flat the line for nuclear is.

renewiltord 3y ago
Governor just signed something letting Diablo Canyon run for a few more years. Thank god for that. Impossible to get new nuclear so have to keep what we have.
connicpu 3y ago
Nuclear makes for great base generating capacity because it has an incredibly stable output, but that also means the line needs to be kept flat or tons of energy will be wasted.
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  [dead]
- krasin 3y ago
  > or tons of energy will be wasted. There are good potential industrial loads for that intermittent extra energy (nuclear or solar): desalination, CO2->methane, air->ammonia, etc.
- dvh 3y ago
  Counterpoint: Zaporozhye
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Nuclear is indeed very inflexible. You can't really turn it off easily or cheaply. The only time it goes down is for maintenance. Typically for extended periods of time when that happens. However, battery is improving the capacity factor of renewables; especially solar by allowing two things: - when there's too much of it, you can charge batteries with energy that would otherwise be curtailed/wasted. - when there's not enough solar, you can discharge batteries. Both effects help dampen peaks and dips in renewable energy supply and demand. I.e. it helps flatten the curve similar to what you point out is the case with nuclear. The first effect is often over looked: we are actively curtailing renewable energy that we don't know what to do with. People talk about shortages but not about surpluses. And that's actually a lot of energy. It also leads to the fallacy in believing that having lots of EVs increases energy demand when actually it also allows for better utilization of surpluses. Which dampens the impact this has. Grids are bottle-necked on a lack of cable capacity. We have overproduction of energy in one region and shortages in another. Northern and southern Germany are a good example where on a windy day in the north, the wind energy can't get to the industries in the south that need it. So, they fire up coal plants. The same is the case in the UK where getting wind energy from Scotland south is a problem. Cables and batteries help improve utilization of renewables. The main thing that drives these things is cost. Nuclear is costly and very slow to deploy. Realistically, any nuclear we don't have right now, won't be there for at least a decade or two. And that's if we would be really diligent about getting to that right now, which of course we aren't. In the time until then, we'll be deploying solar by the TW/year. Same with batteries. And wind is also growing rapidly. And of course laying some more cables is a lot less controversial than building new nuclear plants. There has been quite a bit of talk of upgrading existing cables with better ones to effectively double capacity. This is even less controversial since the permitting is a lot easier and faster. In short, we'll deploy orders of magnitude more of all this than nuclear, and a lot earlier too. So much that nuclear might turn out to be a rounding error.
  - adev_ 3y ago
    Nuclear can scale up and down. It can do so from 20% to 100%, Reducing under 20% is problematic because it implies a reactor shutdown and restart. 20% is more than enough to modulate side by side with renewables. The French Grid does that all the time intraday. https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricite-par-filiere# https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
- akira2501 3y ago
  > or tons of energy will be wasted How do you mean? Nuclear power plants can scale with demand. They're primarily steam generators and those feed turbines. You have many mechanisms you can use to control total power output in these systems. In the sense that you're wasting fuel lifetime, to a certain extent, but I imagine that also varies with the level of reactivity currently allowed in the vessel by the control rods.
  - connicpu 3y ago
    Other commenters also pointed it out, but ramping down a nuclear reactor is not an easily reversed process. After a ramp down the fuel needs a certain amount of time before it can be ramped back up again. The output can be modulated, but it's a process that must be performed over a long period of time.
Kon5ole 3y ago
It's flat on all sides though. https://www.tvo.fi/en/index/news/pressreleasesstockexchangereleases/2024/4764008.html https://www.tvo.fi/en/index/news/pressreleasesstockexchanger... Nuclear makes for square supply curves which are kind of hard to handle, especially if you have a large percentage of your supply from a few reactors like they do in Finland.
- ReptileMan 3y ago
  Smelt aluminum
  - tankenmate 3y ago
    And make fresh water and hydrogen from sea water.
- schnitzelstoat 3y ago
  Can't the control rods allow the output to be controlled?
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    Yes, but reducing power output won't reduce the plant's mortgage payments.
  - oneshtein 3y ago
    It will take hours, at least. Nuclear is sloooooooooow. You can make it hot very quickly, but it will take hours to days to cool down. Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant finally turned cold this month, 2 years after start of full scale Russian invasion and occupation of the plant.
toast0 3y ago
That's more about economics than operations. Nuclear can modulate output, but pretty much won't except for operational needs (maintenance, grid needs). Older reactors take longer to modulate output, but either way, the economics say the reactor cost so much to build that you should run it at capacity as much as possible, especially since its lifetime is limited.

bagels 3y ago

Thank you, the headline is just basically a lie then.

Roritharr 3y ago

Thank you, as a German paying absurd electricity prices I applaud this nuance.

ctrw 3y ago
If no one can afford electricity we can reach 100% renewables easily.
- throwaway473825 3y ago
  While true, Germany's absurd electricity-to-gas price ratio makes electrification an uphill battle: https://www.ehpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Additional-slide-Elec-vs-gas-price-.png https://www.ehpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Additional-s...
flakeoil 3y ago
The high price is probably more related to the fact that Germany relied on gas and oil from Russia in addition to closing down all nuclear power plants. Short and medium term this will show in the price.
piva00 3y ago
I'd like to thanks the German government's policies for the past decades for making me pay absurd electricity prices since the Russian invasion started, even though I live in Sweden with 90+% of renewable electricity generation I'm forced to pay the highest spot price in the EU (aka, gas in Germany) because of Germany's decision to burn coal and gas all the way into 2022... The inertia on modernising Germany is starting to bite your neighbours.
- varjag 3y ago
  Same in Norway. We in effect subsidize German poor decision making. And unlike when Greece collapse happened, the voices in Berlin are suspiciously quiet about austerity. Oh well, as long as they learn the lesson…

nocoiner 3y ago

Are you sure it’s only a few minutes at low demand times? I checked a few days in April at your link, and if I’m reading the graphs right, it looks like renewable production exceeded demand for at least several hours in the afternoon for each of the days I checked. The headline on the original article seems unhelpful and perhaps deliberately misleading, but unless I’m reading the graphs wrong (quite possible!) this also doesn’t seem, like, a 15 minute window at 2 a.m. where unexpectedly strong winds created a temporary blip of excess production.

akira2501 3y ago
It's also notable that battery capacity has increased quite a bit over the past year. The reduction in NG power plants output after sundown is pretty remarkable.
stevenhuang 3y ago
This is also what I see. Solar exceeded demand for hours in the few days I saw. I don't think parent actually clicked around in the link he provided.

snerc 3y ago

I'm not holding my breath until a Tokamak powers a building.

baseline-shift 3y ago

This is incorrect. It is not for a few minutes! We are way way past that at this point. The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day. Because of solar PV, the cheapest generation now, the daytime electricity supply is actually more than we need in California. Solar farms (and also wind farms)get curtailed here due to supplying more than the grid can take at times; this is usually for several hours. Source; reporter covering solar news through interviews with grid operators, solar developers and policymakers since 2008

jahnu 3y ago
And given the incoming tidal wave of DER and cheaper storage that curtailment will stop I bet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_generation
timr 3y ago
Those graphs clearly say that the state is pulling from non-renewable sources (primarily natural gas and "imports") between the hours of 7PM and 7AM. As I look at the page, right now (3:30AM local time), California is producing less than it needs, and the deficit is about 15,000MW. It isn't even close. It's fine to say that California is producing more than it needs on net, but adding up total production over 24h and subtracting total consumption over 24h and seeing a positive value isn't meaningful if you're actually dependent on conventional sources for 12 hours a day. But sure, it's more than a few minutes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ac29 3y ago
> The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day The article says renewable supply exceeded demand for “0.25-6 h per day”. This is great, but its not most of the day.

bradley13 3y ago

Nice link. At this specific moment in time, natural gas is 19.9%, nuclear is 5.6%, and here's the great lie imports are 38.5%. There's no telling what the source of that imported energy is.

Symbiote 3y ago
It's the middle of the night. You need to look during the daytime.
roryirvine 3y ago
So, at four and a half hours before sunrise. The big driver of renewables in California is solar - check the graph for the whole of yesterday, and you'll see how different the picture is during the day. Yes, there's still a gap overnight which over time will come to be filled by more wind and battery storage. But California's really lucky with solar - it's already so cheap and easy that it makes battery storage financially viable even using today's tech. It's now just a matter of continuing to scale it out...

flanked-evergl 3y ago

This headline is incredibly misleading. Thank you for sharing this.

lakis 3y ago

Take a look at https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html Scroll down to "Net demand trend" which is "System demand minus wind and solar" and compare yesterday vs last summer and a year ago Yesterday (4/15) lowest net demand was 366 MW Last summer, July 4th , lowest net demand was 2350 MW Last year (4/15/23) lowest net demand was 2227 MW You can see that last summer, with so much more "powerful" sun, the net demand never went below 2300 MW. Last year went down to 2227 MW. Today, we are down to 366 MW. We manage to produce so much more solar in the last year that the net demand minus renewables went down by ~1800 MW. That means a few more years of improvements like that and we will have excess power generation of solar/wind at least during the day for most days. So if we start storing that excess generated power, we will start making a dent on other times of max power (since we can discharge batteries when max demand is needed). That's the plan on how to keep lowering the net demand more and more.

lakis 3y ago
See also https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html and scroll down to "Batteries trend" and compare today vs a year ago. A year ago, batteries were discharging max 3MW and were drained by 10-11 pm. Yesterday batteries were discarging at max 5.3MW and were fully drained around 11:30. So batteries handled twice as much power for longer period of time.