11 ms·

California Electricity Mix Live Dashboard

107 points by hackerlight 2y ago

nippoo 2y ago
The fun bit here, for those who missed it, is the spot price being negative - ie there's so much solar being generated that industrial consumers are being paid to consume electricity!
- gpm 2y ago
  Why is there still a gigawatt of natural gas based energy being produced when energy costs are negative? Is pricing regional so some power is still valuable or something?
  - calgarymicro 2y ago
    I'd guess it maybe takes time and money to ramp up/down natural gas capacity, so it makes financial sense to maintain capacity at a loss for now to better/more rapidly profit when solar capacity drops and prices go positive again? If I'm reading the day ahead chart on that page correctly, prices should go positive again around 5PM.
    - gpm 2y ago
      I'm definitely under the impression that that's the case for nuclear (which is famously bad at reacting to changing demand), but I would have thought that even slow gas plants could turn off for hours profitably. Could be wrong.
      - remus 2y ago
        Plants will typically have a normal operating range (where the minimum is >0). A gas plant can respond fairly quickly within that range, but a cold start requires more time.
        ssl-3 2y ago
        So they're paying money (or at least, producing little income) to keep the plants working when it is not needed, so that things are ready to go when it inevitably becomes possible for the plants to spool up and make money when their need increases. Makes sense.
        remus 2y ago
        Exactly. They can do this (i.e. keep producing power when the spot price is negative) because a plant that can respond rapidly to increased demand can charge a large premium in times of need.
      - bombcar 2y ago
        It could be that solar or wind can “shut down” much faster than offline natural gas can be brought online, so it’s better to run them at some sort of “idling” power than to turn them off entirely.
      - giantrobot 2y ago
        Keep in mind it's not just generation that needs to shut down but also re-routing that power. Transmission lines and substations have certain capacities. Shutting down a gas plant for a few hours can mean transferring power from elsewhere in the grid over lines not really designed for that load. It could be easier/cheaper to keep the plant running than to build out higher capacity transmission to power that part of the grid.
  - adrianN 2y ago
    At least here in Germany transmission is the bottleneck.
  - aspanu 2y ago
    I thought that too on the graph, but I think that's a bug in labeling. When I look at the actual scale, that colour appears to be nuclear (and the other straight line is geothermal). This also makes more sense as they are sources that actually cannot be turned down to respond to electricity demand the way in which natural gas can.
    - gpm 2y ago
      I see 1.14 GW nuclear, and 1.1 GW natural gas at 12:20 PM PST, the nuclear is a flat line at the bottom of the graph (and I agree it makes sense), the natural gas is a dark blue section in the middle-ish, which shrunk from ~3GW overnight and does vary with time. I don't think that what I'm seeing suggests a bug with labeling.
  - mlwiese 2y ago
    Note you can toggle off sources in the chart by tapping on them in the legend. Gas plants can respond quickly to changes in load, but they need to be up and running to do that. In the future this will be done with batteries but we don’t have enough of those yet. California does have about 20x more batteries than it did a few years ago, check out the Record Tracker link. There was a new record for battery discharging 5 days ago.
  - jonatron 2y ago
    It could be inertia, solar doesn't have any spinning mass to maintain the frequency. https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/how-do-we-balance-grid/what-inertia https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/how-do...
    - gpm 2y ago
      Would the 2.5 GW of nuclear/geothermal/hydro not do that? Maybe not enough (or geographically distributed properly)?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - wiredfool 2y ago
    There's a blog post on net ramps, which covers a lot of it: https://blog.gridstatus.io/net-load-ramps/ https://blog.gridstatus.io/net-load-ramps/
- nostrademons 2y ago
  It's interesting how renewables have suddenly made time-of-day critical in energy consumption. IMHO, not enough attention has been paid to how important better insulation + workplace EV charging are to the energy transition. If homes were insulated like they are in Northern Europe (where you can go a week without heat and your home will still be tolerable when you get home) rather than Northern California (where your furnace cycles on after an hour despite it being 55F out), you could run basically all residential HVAC during daylight hours, when solar is producing abundantly, and turn the housing stock into a giant thermal battery. And similarly, if everybody charged at work rather than at night, you power transportation on solar rather than on natural gas.
  - trunnell 2y ago
    This is the way... I have solar, a powerwall battery, a high efficiency heat pump, and... a poorly insulated 70-year old home in Silicon Valley. It can be wildly expensive to properly mitigate poor insulation: you need good air sealing, insulation around the entire building envelope, double or triple paned windows, and a different HVAC setup with dedicated fresh air ventilation. In other words, it requires a major remodel in some cases. Homes need to be built with energy efficiency as a top concern, and I wonder sometimes if that is going to require re-training and incentivizing the entire construction industry. Fewer than 1 in 10 contractors I talked to even knew what I was talking about when I asked for how they would do my project. "What's an ERV?" is a common question I heard. Many still think that gaps are good because "a house needs to breathe."
    - r00fus 2y ago
      I have a 60 year old home and have made a huge dent in my winter therms and summer AC usage by simply adding some roof insulation and double-layer windows/sliding doors a few years ago. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. You are not going to eliminate all gaps.
  - jvm 2y ago
    If consumers paid close to wholesale rates for their home energy they would be highly incentivized to do these sorts of things: they'd pay almost nothing (or maybe even less than nothing) in the day and big bucks from 5 PM to 8 PM. There would be whole industries helping people shift consumption to daylight hours. Unfortunately legislatures have consistently been acting to shield consumers from variable time of day costs, preventing behavior adjustment.
- mbrumlow 2y ago
  Yet I am charged 40+ cents a kWh and have a bill of about 1k a month and still have a true up bill that adds about another 900 a month. Yes I have solar, and it does not seem to help. Meanwhile in Texas with the AC running 24/7 never had a bill over 300.
  - gedy 2y ago
    People balk at it, but I've decided to avoid back feeding solar to the grid, and only consume/charge my property.
    - janpieterz 2y ago
      Why did you choose not to feed it back?
      - bagels 2y ago
        Because our electric utilities are ripping us off.
      - gedy 2y ago
        Long story, but basically there is a push in California gov't to deemphasize rooftop solar, in favor of big solar farms. (I've heard this is a favor to construction unions). So we get paid very little per watt now, and it no longer balances out if you say use 20kWH from the grid and feed 20kWH to the grid (like it used to).
        mbrumlow 2y ago
        What is worse, is they seem to want to change it so they can charge you for solar you generate and use.
        gedy 2y ago
        Yeah it's really ridiculous and leaves me very cynical that California gov't cares anything about climate change aside from scaring people into more bureaucracy and power for themselves.
- wolpoli 2y ago
  That's really confusing: If there is so much solar generated that they have to pay industrial user to consume electricity, why don't the solar companies just stop sending power to the grid instead of paying money? Are the solar companies unable to turn off their system due to a limitation in their system?
  - rnrn 2y ago
    i suspect this could be related to the renewable production tax credit. I think maybe it works out that the US government is paying, not the solar companies. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/federal-solar-tax-credits-businesses https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/federal-solar-tax-credits-...
- himinlomax 2y ago
  That's not a positive thing. Another way to spin it: renewable electricity (except hydro) is literally worthless. You get it when you don't need it, but you don't have any guarantee it'll be available when you do.
  - peddling-brink 2y ago
    People don’t use electricity during the day?
    - himinlomax 2y ago
      There is a glut of solar power during the day, hence the spot price goes down to zero. There is zero solar power at night, you know, the time when you need the lights on.
- acidburnNSA 2y ago
  Paid to consume...by whom? Rate payers?
  - Cerium 2y ago
    Negative rates are paid by power plants that cannot reduce production.
- BenoitP 2y ago
  That'd be great if it could absorb the surplus, but right now at 12GW production it is curtailed at 0.29 GW. This means neither pumped storage, nor batteries, nor exports can deal with it. On one hand it might create a new market, hopefully H2 electrolysis that replaces coal or gas in industrial processes rather than Bitcoin farms. On the other it also signals that any additional Solar is going to evict about as much capacity into such curtailments. Anyway, California is the record-breaking market and all eyes are on it to helps us guide the global energy future.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - audunw 2y ago
    I think this will be solved by decarbonisation of heat intensive industries. There’s some very good thermal storage battery solutions now, that can store thermal energy at hundreds of degrees C for a very long time. So once there’s enough of this excess energy you’ll start to see industry soaking up as much of it as they can get. If you “only” need ~200°C there’s some very powerful heat pumps entering the market that can give you more than 100% efficiency.
hackerlight 2y ago
Why load is higher at 3am than at midday?
- spenrose 2y ago
  Off-grid solar "appears" as missing load
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    Yeah, there's a bunch of British wind power which you can only see in public data as a small but noticeable dip in demand when there's wind power available. If you own a hilltop farm in England, unless your neighbours are complete assholes with political power (e.g billionaires or maybe MPs) you're going to install a small wind turbine because it's free electricity - it's not environmentalism it's just capitalism, and when it's blowing your small industrial processes are run off the turbine whereas when weather is calm you pay like anyone else. Needing a loan for a net-profitable business investment isn't a novelty for a farmer, and this one at least isn't predicated on future food prices - it's predicated on electricity costing money, so your bank manager will be happier.
- p1mrx 2y ago
  I would guess a combination of electric heat (it's colder at night) and rooftop solar.
tshtf 2y ago
The official California ISO page is awesome by itself, as are the mobile apps: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
cwal37 2y ago
Heyo everyone, cool to see this here. I'm a co-founder and head of product at Grid Status if anyone has specific questions about the site. I see some energy market questions here about CAISO and natural gas, net load, etc., so here's a link to a blog we wrote last year that covers some of these topics, might be helpful[0]. The market has been setting a bunch of records recently, which you can see here[1]. Also, as a bonus, if you click this link[2] while logged in it will enable a preview of our nodal price map app which people tend to enjoy playing around with. [0] https://blog.gridstatus.io/balancing-act/ https://blog.gridstatus.io/balancing-act/ [1] https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso [2] https://www.gridstatus.io/map?nodalMapPreview https://www.gridstatus.io/map?nodalMapPreview
pnw 2y ago
Great site, super interesting. The fuel mix pie chart in the top left would be far more readable as a horizontal bar chart with the labels displayed. I probably don't need to give my usual lecture on why pie charts suck to the HN crowd.
dntrkv 2y ago
Look at that beautiful nuclear baseload. Providing clean, consistent power no matter the time of day or season.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  Which would be great if demand didn't vary by time of day and season. But, it's neat the way that flaw has been rebranded as "baseload". The extra energy you need when people wake up and go to work? That's someone else's problem.
  - gimmeThaBeet 2y ago
    I’m gonna be blunt, that’s a strange position. I mean, even just math wise/FFT, you can break down a lot of stuff into a dc component plus your variable component. But the other part is you can absolutely adjust the output of a nuclear reactor, we just don’t because the availability is there. Look up the largest power stations in the us/globally, and sort by capacity factor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_statio...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Ringz 2y ago
  „The venerable “baseload” concept—that grid stability needs gigawatt-scale, steadily operating thermal (steam-raising) power plants—reflects the valid and vital economic practice of dispatching power at least operating cost, so resources with lowest operating costs are run most. This traditional role of giant thermal plants led many people to suppose that such plants are always needed. But now that renewables with no fuel cost are taking over the “baseload” role of being dispatched whenever available, those big thermal plants are relegated to fewer operating hours, making the term “baseload” an obsolete honorific. Thermal plants must now adapt to follow the net load left after cost-effective efficiency, demand response, and real-time “base-cost” renewable supply have been dispatched. Nuclear power’s limited flexibility, and its technical and economic challenges when cycled, have thus become a handicap, complicating least-cost and stable grid operation with a rising share of zero-carbon, least-cost variable renewables. That is why Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) found that early closure of its well running Diablo Canyon reactors would save customers money and, by making the grid more flexible, raise renewables’ share. Those reactors had become cheaper to close than to run: the power systems’ shift to renewables had turned them from an asset to a liability, so they’ll be replaced by competitively procured low-carbon resources, saving both money and carbon.“ Source: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industry-Status-Report-2019-HTML.html#npved https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industr...
hendry 2y ago
UK version: https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ written in PHP: https://github.com/KateMorley/grid https://github.com/KateMorley/grid
demondemidi 2y ago
Right now cali is gettin 77% of its electricity from solar??? That’s crazy. I had no idea it was that high.
- sgt 2y ago
  Yes, because the sun is out. They can crank down the hydro, natural gas, etc. It's very impressive.
noreiley 2y ago
On the CAISO page, how can they get to negative CO2 emissions? I doubt this includes CO2 capture, so their math with exports must be shady, no? https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/emissions.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/emissions.html
- cbhl 2y ago
  It means they're exporting zero CO2 solar power and offsetting fossil-fuel-based-generation in the other state. You'll see that the imports value is also negative (implying exports).
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    And also they know the CO2 values of the other grids which they display as a positive CO2 when importing electricity from them.
Ringz 2y ago
German version (in English): https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&l=en https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&l...
r00fus 2y ago
Does battery storage show up on this chart?
powerbroker 2y ago
I'm stunned to see upwards of 2 gigawatts of solar being curtailed at mid-day. As I understand it, those solar generators are producing beyond what the transmission grid can carry or beyond what native load there is. Can anyone comment on what is the greater impact: transmission bottlenecks or lack of sufficient demand? FYI, my back of the envelope calculation for daily curtailment is 11.4 gigawatt-hours. I'm assuming that would be bigger but for the presence of battery storage on the grid.
- spenrose 2y ago
  1. It's complicated. 2. Peak curtailment is mid-April through June: peak hydro and solar production, plenty of wind, and little HVAC load: http://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/ManagingOversupply.aspx http://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/ManagingOversupply.aspx 3. Yes, you can see that batteries are charging from solar on CAISO Today's Outlook. 4. There is an enormous amount of home solar which shows up as a drop in "Demand": http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html#section-demand-trend http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html#section-... . Set the date widget to April 8, and notice "demand" rise to 20GW at the 11:15 partial eclipse peak and drop almost 6GW over the next couple hours. Figure > 10 GW of peak output from home solar 5. Grid and home solar together (> 25GW) are roughly comparable to total load (~26GW on this cool spring day). 6. Neither the transmission nor the distribution networks can efficiently send supply to load; both have bottlenecks. 7. This waste is an opportunity for more batteries, grid-scale electrolysis, etc. 8. A GWh is worth roughly $50,000. In the context of California's (~$4T/year ÷ 365=)$10B of daily economic activity, wasting $500k is not that big a deal. Particular matter from the state's natural gas plants kills many people a day.
  - hackerlight 2y ago
    What will the plan be to meet demand before sunrise? They've gone so heavy on solar there's not much scope to add wind to cover pre-sunrise. I assume they just keep installing more lithium ion batteries to the point they can run them all night, but I read somewhere that the cost sweet spot for lithium ion is 2-3 hours, although I don't know how reliable that claim was
hedora 2y ago
The mix graph does a pretty good job explaining why nuclear makes sense at night. (Newer reactors use a big pool of molten salt as a battery and can time shift production. I wonder if the same trick could be used instead of grid-scale battery storage. I also wonder if it’s possible to play games with heat pumps to convert from electricity back to stored heat. That might be easier to ramp than new nuclear.)
Havoc 2y ago
Really cool site. Looks like cali needs to incentivise more dual side vertical solar panels to catch morning and evening sun to spread the curtailment
andbberger 2y ago
we have a live supply dashboard at home, courtesy of CAISO's unnecessarily good website [1] [1] https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx#section-supply-trend https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx#sectio...

107 points by hackerlight 2y ago

The fun bit here, for those who missed it, is the spot price being negative - ie there's so much solar being generated that industrial consumers are being paid to consume electricity!

gpm 2y ago
Why is there still a gigawatt of natural gas based energy being produced when energy costs are negative? Is pricing regional so some power is still valuable or something?
- calgarymicro 2y ago
  I'd guess it maybe takes time and money to ramp up/down natural gas capacity, so it makes financial sense to maintain capacity at a loss for now to better/more rapidly profit when solar capacity drops and prices go positive again? If I'm reading the day ahead chart on that page correctly, prices should go positive again around 5PM.
  - gpm 2y ago
    I'm definitely under the impression that that's the case for nuclear (which is famously bad at reacting to changing demand), but I would have thought that even slow gas plants could turn off for hours profitably. Could be wrong.
    - remus 2y ago
      Plants will typically have a normal operating range (where the minimum is >0). A gas plant can respond fairly quickly within that range, but a cold start requires more time.
      - ssl-3 2y ago
        So they're paying money (or at least, producing little income) to keep the plants working when it is not needed, so that things are ready to go when it inevitably becomes possible for the plants to spool up and make money when their need increases. Makes sense.
        remus 2y ago
        Exactly. They can do this (i.e. keep producing power when the spot price is negative) because a plant that can respond rapidly to increased demand can charge a large premium in times of need.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      It could be that solar or wind can “shut down” much faster than offline natural gas can be brought online, so it’s better to run them at some sort of “idling” power than to turn them off entirely.
    - giantrobot 2y ago
      Keep in mind it's not just generation that needs to shut down but also re-routing that power. Transmission lines and substations have certain capacities. Shutting down a gas plant for a few hours can mean transferring power from elsewhere in the grid over lines not really designed for that load. It could be easier/cheaper to keep the plant running than to build out higher capacity transmission to power that part of the grid.
- adrianN 2y ago
  At least here in Germany transmission is the bottleneck.
- aspanu 2y ago
  I thought that too on the graph, but I think that's a bug in labeling. When I look at the actual scale, that colour appears to be nuclear (and the other straight line is geothermal). This also makes more sense as they are sources that actually cannot be turned down to respond to electricity demand the way in which natural gas can.
  - gpm 2y ago
    I see 1.14 GW nuclear, and 1.1 GW natural gas at 12:20 PM PST, the nuclear is a flat line at the bottom of the graph (and I agree it makes sense), the natural gas is a dark blue section in the middle-ish, which shrunk from ~3GW overnight and does vary with time. I don't think that what I'm seeing suggests a bug with labeling.
- mlwiese 2y ago
  Note you can toggle off sources in the chart by tapping on them in the legend. Gas plants can respond quickly to changes in load, but they need to be up and running to do that. In the future this will be done with batteries but we don’t have enough of those yet. California does have about 20x more batteries than it did a few years ago, check out the Record Tracker link. There was a new record for battery discharging 5 days ago.
- jonatron 2y ago
  It could be inertia, solar doesn't have any spinning mass to maintain the frequency. https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/how-do-we-balance-grid/what-inertia https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/how-do...
  - gpm 2y ago
    Would the 2.5 GW of nuclear/geothermal/hydro not do that? Maybe not enough (or geographically distributed properly)?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- wiredfool 2y ago
  There's a blog post on net ramps, which covers a lot of it: https://blog.gridstatus.io/net-load-ramps/ https://blog.gridstatus.io/net-load-ramps/
nostrademons 2y ago
It's interesting how renewables have suddenly made time-of-day critical in energy consumption. IMHO, not enough attention has been paid to how important better insulation + workplace EV charging are to the energy transition. If homes were insulated like they are in Northern Europe (where you can go a week without heat and your home will still be tolerable when you get home) rather than Northern California (where your furnace cycles on after an hour despite it being 55F out), you could run basically all residential HVAC during daylight hours, when solar is producing abundantly, and turn the housing stock into a giant thermal battery. And similarly, if everybody charged at work rather than at night, you power transportation on solar rather than on natural gas.
- trunnell 2y ago
  This is the way... I have solar, a powerwall battery, a high efficiency heat pump, and... a poorly insulated 70-year old home in Silicon Valley. It can be wildly expensive to properly mitigate poor insulation: you need good air sealing, insulation around the entire building envelope, double or triple paned windows, and a different HVAC setup with dedicated fresh air ventilation. In other words, it requires a major remodel in some cases. Homes need to be built with energy efficiency as a top concern, and I wonder sometimes if that is going to require re-training and incentivizing the entire construction industry. Fewer than 1 in 10 contractors I talked to even knew what I was talking about when I asked for how they would do my project. "What's an ERV?" is a common question I heard. Many still think that gaps are good because "a house needs to breathe."
  - r00fus 2y ago
    I have a 60 year old home and have made a huge dent in my winter therms and summer AC usage by simply adding some roof insulation and double-layer windows/sliding doors a few years ago. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. You are not going to eliminate all gaps.
- jvm 2y ago
  If consumers paid close to wholesale rates for their home energy they would be highly incentivized to do these sorts of things: they'd pay almost nothing (or maybe even less than nothing) in the day and big bucks from 5 PM to 8 PM. There would be whole industries helping people shift consumption to daylight hours. Unfortunately legislatures have consistently been acting to shield consumers from variable time of day costs, preventing behavior adjustment.
mbrumlow 2y ago
Yet I am charged 40+ cents a kWh and have a bill of about 1k a month and still have a true up bill that adds about another 900 a month. Yes I have solar, and it does not seem to help. Meanwhile in Texas with the AC running 24/7 never had a bill over 300.
- gedy 2y ago
  People balk at it, but I've decided to avoid back feeding solar to the grid, and only consume/charge my property.
  - janpieterz 2y ago
    Why did you choose not to feed it back?
    - bagels 2y ago
      Because our electric utilities are ripping us off.
    - gedy 2y ago
      Long story, but basically there is a push in California gov't to deemphasize rooftop solar, in favor of big solar farms. (I've heard this is a favor to construction unions). So we get paid very little per watt now, and it no longer balances out if you say use 20kWH from the grid and feed 20kWH to the grid (like it used to).
      - mbrumlow 2y ago
        What is worse, is they seem to want to change it so they can charge you for solar you generate and use.
        gedy 2y ago
        Yeah it's really ridiculous and leaves me very cynical that California gov't cares anything about climate change aside from scaring people into more bureaucracy and power for themselves.
wolpoli 2y ago
That's really confusing: If there is so much solar generated that they have to pay industrial user to consume electricity, why don't the solar companies just stop sending power to the grid instead of paying money? Are the solar companies unable to turn off their system due to a limitation in their system?
- rnrn 2y ago
  i suspect this could be related to the renewable production tax credit. I think maybe it works out that the US government is paying, not the solar companies. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/federal-solar-tax-credits-businesses https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/federal-solar-tax-credits-...
himinlomax 2y ago
That's not a positive thing. Another way to spin it: renewable electricity (except hydro) is literally worthless. You get it when you don't need it, but you don't have any guarantee it'll be available when you do.
- peddling-brink 2y ago
  People don’t use electricity during the day?
  - himinlomax 2y ago
    There is a glut of solar power during the day, hence the spot price goes down to zero. There is zero solar power at night, you know, the time when you need the lights on.
acidburnNSA 2y ago
Paid to consume...by whom? Rate payers?
- Cerium 2y ago
  Negative rates are paid by power plants that cannot reduce production.
BenoitP 2y ago
That'd be great if it could absorb the surplus, but right now at 12GW production it is curtailed at 0.29 GW. This means neither pumped storage, nor batteries, nor exports can deal with it. On one hand it might create a new market, hopefully H2 electrolysis that replaces coal or gas in industrial processes rather than Bitcoin farms. On the other it also signals that any additional Solar is going to evict about as much capacity into such curtailments. Anyway, California is the record-breaking market and all eyes are on it to helps us guide the global energy future.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- audunw 2y ago
  I think this will be solved by decarbonisation of heat intensive industries. There’s some very good thermal storage battery solutions now, that can store thermal energy at hundreds of degrees C for a very long time. So once there’s enough of this excess energy you’ll start to see industry soaking up as much of it as they can get. If you “only” need ~200°C there’s some very powerful heat pumps entering the market that can give you more than 100% efficiency.

hackerlight 2y ago

Why load is higher at 3am than at midday?

spenrose 2y ago
Off-grid solar "appears" as missing load
- tialaramex 2y ago
  Yeah, there's a bunch of British wind power which you can only see in public data as a small but noticeable dip in demand when there's wind power available. If you own a hilltop farm in England, unless your neighbours are complete assholes with political power (e.g billionaires or maybe MPs) you're going to install a small wind turbine because it's free electricity - it's not environmentalism it's just capitalism, and when it's blowing your small industrial processes are run off the turbine whereas when weather is calm you pay like anyone else. Needing a loan for a net-profitable business investment isn't a novelty for a farmer, and this one at least isn't predicated on future food prices - it's predicated on electricity costing money, so your bank manager will be happier.
p1mrx 2y ago
I would guess a combination of electric heat (it's colder at night) and rooftop solar.

tshtf 2y ago

The official California ISO page is awesome by itself, as are the mobile apps: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

cwal37 2y ago

Heyo everyone, cool to see this here. I'm a co-founder and head of product at Grid Status if anyone has specific questions about the site. I see some energy market questions here about CAISO and natural gas, net load, etc., so here's a link to a blog we wrote last year that covers some of these topics, might be helpful[0]. The market has been setting a bunch of records recently, which you can see here[1]. Also, as a bonus, if you click this link[2] while logged in it will enable a preview of our nodal price map app which people tend to enjoy playing around with. [0] https://blog.gridstatus.io/balancing-act/ https://blog.gridstatus.io/balancing-act/ [1] https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso [2] https://www.gridstatus.io/map?nodalMapPreview https://www.gridstatus.io/map?nodalMapPreview

pnw 2y ago

Great site, super interesting. The fuel mix pie chart in the top left would be far more readable as a horizontal bar chart with the labels displayed. I probably don't need to give my usual lecture on why pie charts suck to the HN crowd.

dntrkv 2y ago

Look at that beautiful nuclear baseload. Providing clean, consistent power no matter the time of day or season.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago
Which would be great if demand didn't vary by time of day and season. But, it's neat the way that flaw has been rebranded as "baseload". The extra energy you need when people wake up and go to work? That's someone else's problem.
- gimmeThaBeet 2y ago
  I’m gonna be blunt, that’s a strange position. I mean, even just math wise/FFT, you can break down a lot of stuff into a dc component plus your variable component. But the other part is you can absolutely adjust the output of a nuclear reactor, we just don’t because the availability is there. Look up the largest power stations in the us/globally, and sort by capacity factor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_statio...
- deleted 2y ago
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Ringz 2y ago
„The venerable “baseload” concept—that grid stability needs gigawatt-scale, steadily operating thermal (steam-raising) power plants—reflects the valid and vital economic practice of dispatching power at least operating cost, so resources with lowest operating costs are run most. This traditional role of giant thermal plants led many people to suppose that such plants are always needed. But now that renewables with no fuel cost are taking over the “baseload” role of being dispatched whenever available, those big thermal plants are relegated to fewer operating hours, making the term “baseload” an obsolete honorific. Thermal plants must now adapt to follow the net load left after cost-effective efficiency, demand response, and real-time “base-cost” renewable supply have been dispatched. Nuclear power’s limited flexibility, and its technical and economic challenges when cycled, have thus become a handicap, complicating least-cost and stable grid operation with a rising share of zero-carbon, least-cost variable renewables. That is why Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) found that early closure of its well running Diablo Canyon reactors would save customers money and, by making the grid more flexible, raise renewables’ share. Those reactors had become cheaper to close than to run: the power systems’ shift to renewables had turned them from an asset to a liability, so they’ll be replaced by competitively procured low-carbon resources, saving both money and carbon.“ Source: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industry-Status-Report-2019-HTML.html#npved https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industr...

hendry 2y ago

UK version: https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ written in PHP: https://github.com/KateMorley/grid https://github.com/KateMorley/grid

demondemidi 2y ago

Right now cali is gettin 77% of its electricity from solar??? That’s crazy. I had no idea it was that high.

sgt 2y ago
Yes, because the sun is out. They can crank down the hydro, natural gas, etc. It's very impressive.

noreiley 2y ago

On the CAISO page, how can they get to negative CO2 emissions? I doubt this includes CO2 capture, so their math with exports must be shady, no? https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/emissions.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/emissions.html

cbhl 2y ago
It means they're exporting zero CO2 solar power and offsetting fossil-fuel-based-generation in the other state. You'll see that the imports value is also negative (implying exports).
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  And also they know the CO2 values of the other grids which they display as a positive CO2 when importing electricity from them.

Ringz 2y ago

German version (in English): https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&l=en https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&l...

r00fus 2y ago

Does battery storage show up on this chart?

powerbroker 2y ago

I'm stunned to see upwards of 2 gigawatts of solar being curtailed at mid-day. As I understand it, those solar generators are producing beyond what the transmission grid can carry or beyond what native load there is. Can anyone comment on what is the greater impact: transmission bottlenecks or lack of sufficient demand? FYI, my back of the envelope calculation for daily curtailment is 11.4 gigawatt-hours. I'm assuming that would be bigger but for the presence of battery storage on the grid.

spenrose 2y ago
1. It's complicated. 2. Peak curtailment is mid-April through June: peak hydro and solar production, plenty of wind, and little HVAC load: http://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/ManagingOversupply.aspx http://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/ManagingOversupply.aspx 3. Yes, you can see that batteries are charging from solar on CAISO Today's Outlook. 4. There is an enormous amount of home solar which shows up as a drop in "Demand": http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html#section-demand-trend http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html#section-... . Set the date widget to April 8, and notice "demand" rise to 20GW at the 11:15 partial eclipse peak and drop almost 6GW over the next couple hours. Figure > 10 GW of peak output from home solar 5. Grid and home solar together (> 25GW) are roughly comparable to total load (~26GW on this cool spring day). 6. Neither the transmission nor the distribution networks can efficiently send supply to load; both have bottlenecks. 7. This waste is an opportunity for more batteries, grid-scale electrolysis, etc. 8. A GWh is worth roughly $50,000. In the context of California's (~$4T/year ÷ 365=)$10B of daily economic activity, wasting $500k is not that big a deal. Particular matter from the state's natural gas plants kills many people a day.
- hackerlight 2y ago
  What will the plan be to meet demand before sunrise? They've gone so heavy on solar there's not much scope to add wind to cover pre-sunrise. I assume they just keep installing more lithium ion batteries to the point they can run them all night, but I read somewhere that the cost sweet spot for lithium ion is 2-3 hours, although I don't know how reliable that claim was

hedora 2y ago

The mix graph does a pretty good job explaining why nuclear makes sense at night. (Newer reactors use a big pool of molten salt as a battery and can time shift production. I wonder if the same trick could be used instead of grid-scale battery storage. I also wonder if it’s possible to play games with heat pumps to convert from electricity back to stored heat. That might be easier to ramp than new nuclear.)

Havoc 2y ago

Really cool site. Looks like cali needs to incentivise more dual side vertical solar panels to catch morning and evening sun to spread the curtailment

andbberger 2y ago

we have a live supply dashboard at home, courtesy of CAISO's unnecessarily good website [1] [1] https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx#section-supply-trend https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx#sectio...