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Power United States

California Exceeds 100% of Energy Demand With Renewables Over a Record 30 Days (electrek.co) 215

Posted by BeauHD from the new-reality dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California's main grid for 30 of the past 38 days. Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson has been tracking California's renewables performance, and he shares his findings on Twitter (X) when the state breaks records. Jacobson notes that supply exceeds demand for "0.25-6 h per day," and that's an important fact. The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day but in the fact that it's happening on a consistent daily basis, which has never been achieved before.

At the two-week record mark, Ian Magruder at Rewiring America made this great point on LinkedIn: "And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January ...), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight." On April 2, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) recommended 26 new transmission projects worth $6.1 billion, with a big number being devoted to offshore wind. In response, Jacobson predicted on April 4 that California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035.

California Exceeds 100% of Energy Demand With Renewables Over a Record 30 Days More | Reply

California Exceeds 100% of Energy Demand With Renewables Over a Record 30 Days

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  • Instead of curtailing generation at the solar and wind farms when we don't need the power we need more storage - it could be batteries, pumped hydro, gravity batteries, whatever -- so that we can soak up the excess renewable energy and use it when it *is* needed.
    • In the future, we will need the ability to use solar power at night. The only way to do that is some form of storage. But that immediate use of big battery storage is to store power from off the grid when it is cheap and sell it back to the grid when electricity is expensive. That may reduce emissions or increase them depending on whether the cheap power used for storage has higher or lower emissions than the expensive power it replaces. I think its important to realize that even when there is excess solar

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by shilly ( 142940 )

        We need a less centralised grid than today, but we still need plenty of large solar and wind projects.

        Wind, because it’s roughly counter-cyclical with solar so it improves supply stability and cuts storage requirements (which remain more expensive).

        Solar, because there’s plenty of uses that can’t be served by on-site solar (skyscrapers, for one). And large solar farms are substantially better bang for buck than on-site.

        There’s room for it all, and we need all of it.

      • In the future, we will need the ability to use solar power at night. The only way to do that is some form of storage.

        We can do that now -- with giant flashlights. Charge up the batteries during the day using the excess electricity, ... :-)

      • We would be better off with everyone putting solar on their rooftop and batteries in their basement while still being connected to the grid.

        Yes and no.

        First, putting solar on rooftops before putting it in all the more convenient places, like over car parks, is ignorant.

        Second, centralized batteries potentially make much more sense. They could be designed to reduce fire risk, for example; if designed intelligently they could prevent fire in one battery (or container of batteries) from reaching others. You can't really accomplish this with residential batteries. Spreading the batteries out across many residences also spreads out the fire risk and

        • I just got a battery installed. There is almost no fire risk. We're far more interested in the real risks like brush and electrical fires.

          • I just got a battery installed. There is almost no fire risk. We're far more interested in the real risks like brush and electrical fires.

            Most battery systems run at 48VDC or higher /w hundreds to many thousands of amps available on the battery bus. Poor crimps or corrosion can easily cause a fire. For grounded battery systems a single short in any battery in the array can cause flows of thousands of amps that will all go into plasma/heat and bypass circuit protection. DC arcs at those voltages and currents are nasty AF.

            The Internet is of course full of ESS and related component failures starting fires:
            https://diysolarforum.com/foru... [diysolarforum.com]

            Even

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )

      I doubt it will be gravity with the exception of hydro. More likely if it's not conventional batteries then energy will be stored as heat.

  • ... for a small fraction of 30 of the last 38 days (Score:5, Informative)

    by rta ( 559125 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @12:32AM (#64397224)

    ah... the good ole "for 0.25 to 6 hours in 30 of the last 38 days record".
    What the heck kind of tortured cherry picked thing is this?

    The plain reading of "Exceeds 100% of Energy Demand With Renewables Over a Record 30 Days" is "did not dip below 100% for 30 consecutive days" which is very far from this.

    Seriously what threshold is being claimed? is it "there has never before been a period of 38 days during which 100% was breach during 30 of them ?"

    I'm glad if it's working out but this kind of boosterism (in the headline and article, not in tracking the peak performance) is just bizarre.

    • Re: ... for a small fraction of 30 of the last 38 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by madbrain ( 11432 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @01:06AM (#64397258) Homepage Journal

      That is a pretty strange metric, I have to agree. Using that, my home probably outperforms the CA grid. It has produced 1520 kWh this month, and consumed 974 kWh during the same period. 1249 kWh were exported to the grid, and 702 kWh imported from the grid. The consumption during sunshine hours is just low. Most of it is afternoon, evening and nights. We have some north facing panels that produce until late, but it is a fraction of noon production
      We don't have batteries but are on NEM2, so it still works out.

      • While it is a strange metric, the milestone is important for many less-good reasons. It basically means that more storage is going to keep being needed.

        • Yes. Way more storage. That is not a surprise, though. The question is whether we need a battery sized in minutes, hours, days, weeks or months of grid usage to get to 100% renewable grid. A 6 months battery that works across seasons will never be feasible. Maybe linking electric grids across hemispheres would work ;) There would be quite the transmission losses, and costs, if it is even feasible.

      • That is a pretty strange metric, I have to agree. Using that, my home probably outperforms the CA grid. It has produced 1520 kWh this month, and consumed 974 kWh during the same period. 1249 kWh were exported to the grid, and 702 kWh imported from the grid. The consumption during sunshine hours is just low. Most of it is afternoon, evening and nights. We have some north facing panels that produce until late, but it is a fraction of noon production
        We don't have batteries but are on NEM2, so it still works out.

        Producing more electricity than you can ever use with rooftop PV arrays in a given year is relatively cheap and easy in a huge chunk of the country at least in terms of material costs.

        Unfortunately what is orders of magnitude more expensive is merely converting energy generated when convenient into energy available when needed. There simply isn't an economically feasible technology at present to enable that at required scales.

        The saturation of energy market by intermittent renewables like PV and to a far l

        • I am well aware of this. The major utilities pushed for NEM3 which has killed 80% of the solar market in CA in the last 12 months. This is very unfortunate.
          Batteries are still quite expensive, and wear out faster than solar panels and inverters.

          I will install one in 6 years, when my 20 years of NEM1/NEM2 are up, and I'm switched onto NEM3. Probably not one day before that though.
          If I want to shift production and loads across TOU periods, I would need a significant battery. And for backup, I would want at le

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by CaptQuark ( 2706165 )

      Ah, the good old "if it isn't maintained for 100% of the time, it isn't a milestone."

      I'm sure you'd have poo-pooed the the claim by Chuck Yeager that he broke the sound barrier in 1947. "But he got a free ride to altitude in a B-29 and it only lasted for a few minutes. Breaking the sound barrier doesn't count if the plane doesn't take off on its own and stay supersonic for the entire flight."

      Reaching a milestone of 100% of the electrical demand met by renewables for 30 days in a 38-day windows is still a

    • Well done, rta! You get second runner-up first prize!

    • Re:... for a small fraction of 30 of the last 38 d (Score:4, Informative)

      by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @05:06AM (#64397470) Journal

      > What the heck kind of tortured cherry picked thing is this?

      It's pretty simple? For 30 of the past 38 days, renewable energy production exceeded energy demand for at least 15 minutes.

      While the 38 days part is a little strange, this is overall good information. Paired with their burgeoning energy storage capacity [slashdot.org] it means we are starting to catch a glimpse of the break-over point where we have 100% renewable energy 24/7. 15 minutes of surplus means 15 minutes of not burning fossil fuels after the sun sets.

      It's a start, and already more than the shills told us was impossible.
      =Smidge=

    • The plain reading of "Exceeds 100% of Energy Demand With Renewables Over a Record 30 Days" is "did not dip below 100% for 30 consecutive days"

      So you are saying that "was more than" means "was not less than".

    • Re:... for a small fraction of 30 of the last 38 d (Score:4, Interesting)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @08:45AM (#64397846)
      I won't defend the wording of the headline, but it is an important threshold, because it's the point at which the conversion to renewable energy gets harder and more expensive.

      As long as renewables are just cutting into demand for fossil fuels, you don't have to worry about storage / demand shaping / discarding energy. But now California has reached that point.

    • Also, we are currently in the most temperate time of the year. Wait until you can exceed the demand during winter or summer before running your victory lap... or are rolling blackouts no longer a thing in California?

  • Low energy demand (Score:5, Insightful)

    by buzz_mccool ( 549976 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @01:50AM (#64397304)
    At 40 cents a kWh, much demand has been destroyed.

    • Re:Low energy demand (Score:5, Funny)

      by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @03:26AM (#64397386)
      Look on the bright side, at least you won't get any crypto-farms in your neighbourhood.

    • At 40 cents a kWh, much demand has been destroyed.

      At 40c / kWh California is showing what energy costs to produce when you don't externalise all the horrific waste from its generation. If electricity cost this much everywhere in America, maybe you'd no longer be the most wasteful western nation when it comes to energy consumption per capita.

      • This story from a couple months ago says "Texas is the only state in the U.S. that generates more than a third of its electricity from wind and solar energy."

        https://www.newsweek.com/texas... [newsweek.com]

        And yet, electricity in Texas cost 11.36 cents / kWh vs 19.90 cents / kWh in California in Jan 2024.

        https://www.electricchoice.com... [electricchoice.com]

        So where does that leave the idea that renewable energy must be very expensive?

        Also I'm curious where 40 cents above came from.

      • The CEO of utility PG&E was paid $51.2M in 2021. My most recent off-peak rate is $0.48843/kWh, peak rate is $0.51678. There is a small and varying "baseline credit". The kWh rates vary according to some formula devised by Dr.Evil and a coven of cauldron stirrers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Rising grid energy prices are partly in response to people installing solar and batteries to reduce demand. The energy companies don't want their profits to fall so they collude to jack up prices. They also whine about how their old fossil and nuclear plants can't cope with rapid demand changes or being redundant for hours a day, so they should get paid for that generation even if it is not wanted.

      The real dangers here are that we create a new divide between those who generate their own electricity and thos

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drnb ( 2434720 )

      At 40 cents a kWh, much demand has been destroyed.

      And much casual crypto mining prevented.

  • Come back in July/august (Score:3)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @02:01AM (#64397310)
    When most buildings are running air conditioners and EVs are charging and tell us how the electric grid is doing

  • Title correction (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Larsrc ( 1285062 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @03:28AM (#64397390)

    100% of _electricity_ demand. There's a big difference, though - electricity accounts for less than a quarter of the energy consumption. https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/co... [llnl.gov]

    This confusion of energy and electricity drives me nuts! It hides how much work there still is to get to net zero.

  • I am an electrician, from what they told me at school (and they had good arguments for that too) the demand and supply must always match - this means that that you produce more than you need and have to either sell outside (if you have to the price may be negative) or switch off the source. OTOH they talk 30 days but in the article they say max 6h which points to the problem with this whole nonsense - the och so cheap renewable energy requires not so cheap backups. If on the other hand they invested in say

    • > the demand and supply must always match

      Correct. Overproduction results in increase in grid frequency which can cause a lot of damage.

      > this means that that you produce more than you need and have to either sell outside ... or switch off the source

      Or import less (Cali imports up to ~30% of its power from Arizona and Utah). In this case, the a good chunk of that excess power seems to have been absorbed by temporarily increasing demand through charging grid scale batteries. That energy can be (and has

  • FALSE impression - LOOK at the charts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @04:51AM (#64397456)

    The charts clearly show that the 100% is only hit for a few brief minutes at the top of the day with solar panels at max output. For 2/3 of the 24 hour day, those "renewables" are not even managing to produce 60%... which means that for the vast majority of the time, traditional power is MANDATORY to prevent extreme blackouts. Oh, and because the renewables are getting in there for their chunk of energy supply (at the time and volume convenient to THEM) the traditional sources must adapt - which makes THEM more expensive and is part of what has driven electricity prices through the roof in California. If you have to have a gas plant, but you no longer need to run it at an essentially consistent rate 24/7, and instead need to adjust around the massive swings in wind and solar, the plant needs all the staffing and maintenance it always needed, but it's getting a lot less revenue, therefore it MUST charge more per megawatt - this is NOT brain surgery.

    • The charts clearly show that the 100% is only hit for a few brief minutes at the top of the day with solar panels at max output.

      The moment renewables were able to do >100% someone was going to put out a story about it. Make sure people understand the context sure, but it's hardly a gotcha.

      For 2/3 of the 24 hour day, those "renewables" are not even managing to produce 60%... which means that for the vast majority of the time, traditional power is MANDATORY to prevent extreme blackouts.

      The chart only went to ~14:15 but renewables were 60% at 8am and peaked at 13:00 so I'd say they were above 60% for about 10 hours of the day.

      But that's a fairly naive way to look at. The bulk of that is from solar, and clouds don't actually affect solar that much, making it super dependable. Double the solar installation and you've got a reliab

  • At what cost? (Score:3)

    by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @05:21AM (#64397492)

    How much are Californians paying per kWh?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by drnb ( 2434720 )

      How much are Californians paying per kWh?

      $0.27 - $0.54 depending on the time of day. At least in parts of southern california.
      https://www.sce.com/residentia... [sce.com]

    • Using Los Angeles's LADWP, last month I paid $0.204 / kWh. Plus there is another 10% City utility tax on top of that. And there is also a monthly BS "power access charge" of $17 flat fee. So all told, it is $0.26 / kWh.

      According to this website, LADWP's power is 13% coal and 35% natural gas and 0.1% biomass, with the rest being renewable energies of various types.

      https://www.ladwp.com/who-we-a... [ladwp.com]

    • My cheapest option is currently about $0.45/kWh with PG&E.

  • Stop with the marketing shit California.

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