Solar Glut: Half of California's Solar Power Sometimes Goes to Waste, Research Shows (latimes.com) 192
Some days more than half of California's available solar power goes to waste, according to research from the California Institute for Energy and Environment. "In the last 12 months, California's solar farms have curtailed production of more than 3 million megawatt hours of solar energy," according to a data analysis by the Los Angeles Times — enough to power 518,000 California homes for a year.
And it was curtailed "either on the orders of the state's grid operator or because prices had plummeted because of the glut. The waste would have been even larger if California had not paid utilities in other states to take the excess solar energy, documents from the state's grid operator show." That means green energy paid for by California electricity customers is sent away, lowering bills for residents of other states. Arizona's largest public utility reaped $69 million in savings last year by buying from the market California created to get rid of its excess solar power. The utility returned that money to its customers as a credit on their bills. Also reaping profits are electricity traders, including banks and hedge funds. The increasing oversupply of solar power has created a situation where energy traders can buy the excess at prices so low they become negative, said energy consultant Gary Ackerman, the former executive director of the Western Power Trading Forum. That means the solar plant is paying the traders to take it. "This is all being underwritten by California ratepayers," Ackerman said...
The solar glut also means higher electricity bills for Californians, since they are effectively paying to generate the power but not using it. California's electric rates are roughly twice the nation's average, with only Hawaii having higher rates. Rates at Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric increased by 51% over the last three years. "Ratepayers aren't getting the energy they've paid for," said Ron Miller, an energy industry consultant in Denver. He calculates that the retail value of the solar energy thrown away in a year would be more than $1 billion.
Gov. Gavin Newsom's advisors and those who manage the state's electric grid say they are working to reduce the curtailments, including by building more industrial-scale battery storage facilities that soak up the excess solar power during the day and then release it at night. Officials in the governor's office declined to be interviewed, but issued a statement saying the curtailments are often because of congestion on transmission lines, rather than a statewide oversupply of power. The state has been spending heavily to upgrade transmission lines to ease the congestion. "It's also important to have extra energy resources available that can help the state during periods of extreme weather and historic heatwaves when demand is particularly high, which have happened the past few years," the statement said...
The commercial solar industry contends that the expansion of storage capacity to bank solar power will eventually eliminate the glut.
And it was curtailed "either on the orders of the state's grid operator or because prices had plummeted because of the glut. The waste would have been even larger if California had not paid utilities in other states to take the excess solar energy, documents from the state's grid operator show." That means green energy paid for by California electricity customers is sent away, lowering bills for residents of other states. Arizona's largest public utility reaped $69 million in savings last year by buying from the market California created to get rid of its excess solar power. The utility returned that money to its customers as a credit on their bills. Also reaping profits are electricity traders, including banks and hedge funds. The increasing oversupply of solar power has created a situation where energy traders can buy the excess at prices so low they become negative, said energy consultant Gary Ackerman, the former executive director of the Western Power Trading Forum. That means the solar plant is paying the traders to take it. "This is all being underwritten by California ratepayers," Ackerman said...
The solar glut also means higher electricity bills for Californians, since they are effectively paying to generate the power but not using it. California's electric rates are roughly twice the nation's average, with only Hawaii having higher rates. Rates at Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric increased by 51% over the last three years. "Ratepayers aren't getting the energy they've paid for," said Ron Miller, an energy industry consultant in Denver. He calculates that the retail value of the solar energy thrown away in a year would be more than $1 billion.
Gov. Gavin Newsom's advisors and those who manage the state's electric grid say they are working to reduce the curtailments, including by building more industrial-scale battery storage facilities that soak up the excess solar power during the day and then release it at night. Officials in the governor's office declined to be interviewed, but issued a statement saying the curtailments are often because of congestion on transmission lines, rather than a statewide oversupply of power. The state has been spending heavily to upgrade transmission lines to ease the congestion. "It's also important to have extra energy resources available that can help the state during periods of extreme weather and historic heatwaves when demand is particularly high, which have happened the past few years," the statement said...
The commercial solar industry contends that the expansion of storage capacity to bank solar power will eventually eliminate the glut.
Tax rebate helps (Score:3)
Having solar panels that you got for a discount helps. And there are some incentives now for battery storage. Which is good because PG&E doesn't really want to pay me much for my solar generation anymore.
Re:Tax rebate helps (Score:4, Interesting)
Having solar panels that you got for a discount helps. And there are some incentives now for battery storage. Which is good because PG&E doesn't really want to pay me much for my solar generation anymore.
That's exactly as it should be. The whole benefit of solar is that since it's in tiny units (each individual panel can easily be switchable on or off - just stop taking power) it's extremely flexible and able to stop and start in an instant. Compare that to a coal plant which can take hours to go from zero to full power or to nuclear where some older plants can only change power once a day and it takes ages. Even the most modern nuclear plants take tens of minutes, lose efficiency and can often only change power level a few times a day.
For the home generator, it's fine to just pay them low during the solar peak and encourage them to shift their power from then to the times of day when power is valuable. Whether they do it or not isn't going to have a big effect. As long as there's some shifting and it's reasonably predictable on average they become a net positive to the grid.
For the huge solar farms on the other hand, this is the value. Just like wind, you have a power source which is so cheap that you can afford to run it considerably off it's peak output so that when demand suddenly peaks that extra bank of power is available immediately without having to store that energy at high cost in the meantime. As long as you have a good interconnection to the places of demand, you will be able to support them with grid stability (during the day, in the case of solar - all the time with wind).
Compare that with old problematic inflexible power sources like nuclear. A nuclear plant is so expensive that if you weren't running it at full capacity 24/7, the plant would be loss making. Since power usage is inherently very variable it just doesn't match that and so there has to be storage or extra flexible generation somewhere else to offload the excess power in dips and fill in the peaks.
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The whole benefit of solar is that since it's in tiny units (each individual panel can easily be switchable on or off - just stop taking power) it's extremely flexible and able to stop and start in an instant. Compare that to a coal plant
When I compare solar to a coal plant, I find numerous benefits other than it being possible to stop using it.
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The problem with the current California solar contract model is that the investor owned utilities have been pushed to overpay for solar with long term contracts. Then they have little flexibility to manuver as more and more renewables are brough online. That's part of why my rates are so high.
I don't think it's a problem as such. It's just something that everyone has to admit to. Solar wasn't competitive but we knew it had a great future, so in order to get the investment needed to get it competitive people borrowed from the future. Now we are in that future, and we see that solar is the cheapest and one of the best sources of energy but that some of it's reputation is being falsely damaged by those old contracts, we have to be clear about what they achieved and work out the right way to unwind
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They could be exporting that energy and getting paid for it, if they had suitable long distance HVDC lines.
Re:Tax rebate helps (Score:4, Interesting)
They could be exporting that energy and getting paid for it, if they had suitable long distance HVDC lines.
California mainly consumes from the Pacific DC Intertie. Buying less power from it because there is plenty of wind and solar saves money. But it's unlikely they will ever produce enough power to sell much back to it. As Washington and Oregon are in a better position to generate power at or below the costs that California has.
For a massively populous state like California to sell power, they'd need to build an HVDC that goes through the Rockies to states that would be buying power. That would be a serious infrastructure project. It will probably happen one day. I'm not confident it would occur in my lifetime though.
Re: Tax rebate helps (Score:2)
I've heard that California has an old, abandoned rail right of way that they were planning to use many years ago. Perhaps they could re-purpose it as a transmission right of way. If the hobos haven't taken up residence on it, that is. Because their civil rights have paramount importance.
Holy Moly (Score:3, Insightful)
USD 0.37/kWh
And I thought we had it bad in Australia at USD0.21
Thats got to make for some mighty painful power bills.
There is so much grift in renewable energy.
Maybe Elon should think about nuclear instead or Mars!
Re:Holy Moly (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe Elon should think about nuclear instead or Mars!
At much higher prices? Great idea!
Re:Holy Moly (Score:5, Informative)
It's because the energy market is broken. Each generator bids to supply energy, and the lowest bids are taken up first. Renewables bid very low because they have extremely low overheads - no fuel, very little maintenance - which ensures that their energy gets bought first. They don't care if the price goes to zero, or negative.
The market was not designed to handle energy that cheap and plentiful. It needs to change, with more incentives to use energy when it is abundant and cheap, and more ability to export excess to where it is in demand. Storage is part of it, but it's the old energy model that is causing what should be a huge opportunity (massive amounts of near zero cost energy) to be a problem.
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Sure, but that's why you have a mix, you have offshore wind where it's more constant, you over-build to make sure you cover the lowest points of the year, you have storage, you have long distance transmission, and you do demand shaping/shifting. You can even keep some gas plants around to cover the rare times when needed, and offset the emissions. A bit like a hybrid car.
Renewables are so cheap that it is possible to enjoy an abundance of cheap energy 99% of days. The issue is existing, entrenched interests
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One unintended consequence of the plummeting cost of solar is it's making building grid scale solar plants unprofitable for companies.
Which is to say, *infrastructure* shouldn't be built as a profit making enterprise, nor owned by profit oriented entities. They are public goods and we need to treat them as such so the public reaps their benefit.
But that's more than a bajillion miles from the current reality in the US unfortunately.
Re: Holy Moly (Score:3)
A battery pack helps a lot, and it's usually on sunny days you use the AC most.
Re:Holy Moly (Score:4, Informative)
This video from Practical Engineering explains it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
About 9 minutes in he talks about how the market works. In summary each generator makes an offer for energy at a given price. The suppliers buy contracts for energy to meet forecast demand, starting with the cheapest source. Renewables often offer energy at $0, to ensure they are always the first to serve any demand, and because it does cost them very close to $0 to provide that energy anyway.
Once demand is met, all generators get the price offered by the most expensive generator that had to be contracted. In the video, that's a coal plant, i.e. the renewables get the coal plant price even though they could be offering that energy much cheaper.
That's one problem here - you have expensive generators that set the price, preventing you getting cheaper renewable prices.
The other problem is that those expensive generators don't want to shut down during the day, so they offer negative pricing to make sure they get the contracts instead of renewables. So they are paying suppliers to supply dirty energy. And because the generators are often owned by the suppliers, the suppliers ramp up consumer energy prices to make up for their inflexible fossil fuel and nuclear plants.
The suppliers need to improve their grids so they can move energy around, and add grid scale storage. They can also transition to more flexible forms of generation. If they don't, it will become a death spiral where more and more people get solar/batteries because it's cheaper than the suppliers, so demand goes down even further.
Re:Holy Moly (Score:4, Insightful)
The way to actually solve this problem is to decouple the grid from generation. Whether the grid is operated privately or publicly, the same entity must not control generation. Right now PGE runs the grid (very, very poorly) and ALSO owns a significant percentage of the generation capacity, and this has to change before anything can improve because it gives them every incentive to sabotage improvement.
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So you might favor the Texas model of grid management instead of the California model of generation management?
The operative statement in the Texas model is: As the independent system operator for the region, ERCOT schedules power on an electric grid that connects more than 54,100 miles of transmission lines and 1,250 generation units.
Texas consumers pay part of their single unified electricity bill to the distribution system operator (no consumer choice there) and part to the consumer's choice of generati
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So you might favor the Texas model of grid management instead of the California model of generation management?
Never go full Texas, but parts of it make sense, sure.
As for the Texas PUC and it's lack of enforceable mandates on generator operators that caused the The Great Freeze Out...
Yeah, we shouldn't implement that part of the Texas plan. ERCOT is a corporation, it might be a nonprofit but it's still doing a job that should be done by a government agency instead.
Re: Holy Moly (Score:3)
That is how the American energy markets work. It's interesting that the European energy markets are so different.
https://www.ferc.gov/introduct... [ferc.gov]
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Electricity rates largely have little to do with solar energy. What you're paying depends on the market, regulations, transmission design, and is also very much tied to resources.
For example I'm currently paying USD 0.49/kWh. Why? Well turns out gas prices changed. I still remember how little we were paying in Australia, then the prices started shooting up due to market deregulation - long before any talk of renewable energy.
Maybe Elon should think about nuclear instead or Mars!
So you think the solution is to make power production even more expensive?
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Loving it in Nebraska where we are about 8c per kw depending on the time of year.
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I'm in Northern CA, have done a lot of work to make my house energy efficient, and we're still paying an average of $0.42/kWh throughout this calendar year. It's a lot.
So why is it so expensive?
First and foremost, the grid (the actual cables and wires) is moderately old and the in the places where it has faltered, it has caused deadly wild fires. The utility in my area (Pacific Gas & Electric) was sued for $13.5 BILLION dollars for its part in a couple such fires and committed to updating its infrastruc
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Oh, I forgot to add one more thing -- if we were to subtract the effects of the settlement on rates, we'd be paying around $0.30/kWh.
supply charge (Score:2)
" it's pretty shit that you still have to pay a "supply charge" even when you're completely self-contained and off-grid... just because there are power lines going past your door." I don't, why do you?
Re:supply charge (Score:4, Insightful)
For the same reason we pay for a lot of things we may not ever use. It was put there for there for everyone based on a need for some people. Schools and roads are good examples. Some folks never have kids but they pay for schools. People pay for road taxes but they don't drive on most of them.
The idea is that we all pay for things that are deemed for the majority or the greater good. You may not need (or want) them now but they are there if and when you need them.
Re: supply charge (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only "there if you want them" but they contribute to making your community a desirable place to be. If you run a store, you won't have customers if you're in a place with terrible schools and terrible roads and no public utilities -- even if you don't use those things.
Re:Nuclear is much more expensive (Score:4, Informative)
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Someone can't read. It is more like 6 to 8.5 cent/kWh, and unsubsidized is more like 14 to 22 cent.
That is higher than average PV.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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Batteries not Included (Score:2)
The huge advantage with nuclear is that no batteries are needed because you can control when it provides power. If it were not for that solar and
Wait, what? (Score:3)
Am I reading this correctly? California pays other utilities to take electricity it cannot use? How can that possibly make sense? Surely they can find a neighboring state (or Mexico) willing to buy the electricity?
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There's limited transmission capacity, so we can't export power to say, the east coast, and take advantage of the time difference to send them solar during their late afternoon/early evening.
As a result, to prevent grid overload, we either need to idle generation capacity, or pay people to do something with it. These people happen to be utilities in neighboring states and energy traders exploiting huge swings in spot power prices.
It is pretty silly if you think about it - we have consumers who would gladly
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Informative)
The reason people don't "run their appliances during the day" is b/c this news piece is anti-solar propaganda. During this same period that electricity is "oversupplied" and at negative prices, CPUC is charging their customers almost 50 cents/kWh. Why would they pay neighboring utilities money to take the power but not their own customers?
If you stop and think about it for 5 seconds it's obvious there's crucial info missing here.
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Kickbacks? Graft?
If I were a ratepayer and being charged 0.50/Kwh at a point in time where I should be paying near zero, I'd have to ask... how much more expensive is the power that I'm using at other times that they'd be forcing me to subsidize it?
Certainly that runs counter to current trends:
https://energized.edison.com/s... [edison.com]
SoCal Edison is moving customers to time of use to incentivize things like timeshifting loads to off peak hours (apparently 9pm until 4pm).
LADWP still has its TOU set such that peak i
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> CPUC is charging their customers
CPUC doesn't charge anyone. They are a regulator, not a utility business, so they do not have "customers."
> Why would they pay neighboring utilities money to take the power but not their own customers?
Without even looking into it (because again, CPUC does not have "customers" so the premise of the question is wrong), the first plausible reason would be grid saturation [youtu.be]. Just because power is available at location A does not mean you can sell it to locations B and C, be
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It's always incompetence and greed.
Why would the utility company pay the customer to use electricity when they can still charge $0.50 / kwh? They will take a small fraction of that income and pay someone else to deal with the extra generation.
Sure, theoretically they could make slightly more money if they charged the customers less and the customers use up the excess, but it's hard to get people to respond quickly, and it's very likely that by the time a large enough number of them start using electricity,
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> Why would the utility company pay the customer to use electricity when they can still charge $0.50 / kwh?
Because it's physically impossible to sell the power, because the wires that carry the power are at maximum capacity. So your choices are to either curtail generation (get producers to stop producing) or keep lowering the price to encourage consumption of the excess. Thanks to the economic forces at play, sometimes negative prices are still cheaper than turning everything off.
> pay someone else
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The crucial info missing here is an understanding of how the utility grid actually works. It's really easy to blame corruption, incompetence, or nefarious plot when you don't actually understand the problem.
The problem is corruption and incompetence, and it seems to be a nefarious plot but I haven't located the smoking gun yet.
It has manifested in the form of PG&E not only not doing the maintenance they are contractually obligated to do, but also not expanding transmission capacity to regions where there is a lack of it.
Meanwhile they are doing buybacks and paying dividends, so we know their claims about not being able to afford it are lies. Yet they are never held accountable for their actions, why is tha
Re: Wait, what? (Score:2)
The problem is corruption and incompetence, and it seems to be a nefarious plot but I haven't located the smoking gun yet.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
Of course finding, or manufacturing some sub-rosa plot will save face for a bunch of morons who shouldn't have been running the show in the first place. So, keep looking for that smoking gun. Hundreds of incompetent politicians are counting on you. Just don't look in the mirror around election time.
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Does California not have a deregulated energy market? In the UK you can choose your energy supplier, and there are ones that offer half hour pricing that tracks the cost of energy. You can even get a feed-in tariff for your own generation (solar/battery) that tracks grid prices. With some effort you can turn a profit that way.
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We can choose our suppliers, but they all have to supply across a grid owned and "maintained" by PGE at exorbitant costs due to mismanagement which if it is not incompetent is willfully hostile, so it seldom ever saves you any money. There is not a whole lot of competition.
Re: Wait, what? (Score:2)
Welcome to the world of utility economics. Where capital costs accumulate whether you use the power or not.
We (in the Pacific Northwest) have near zero energy costs as well (hydroelectric power). But someone has to pay for the T&D infrastructure. Or transmission line clamps break and set fire to the state. That sort of economics puts to a lie the whole concept of independant generation as a profitable enterprise standing on its own. There are undoubtedly some multi-millionaire greenies who figured that
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>> I can tell you one customer who would love to set up shop and get paid for burning your extra electrons: cryptocoin miners.
Nope. Those want a constant baseload, not occasional peaking, which would break their economics.
They are unwanted bad guys.
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>> free electricity for 4 hours a day 1 minute at a time
Nope. wrong calculation. It is not 4 hours a day.
On yearly average, it is only like 5% of the time. So perhaps 1hour 12 min per day.
At that low usage rate, fixed costs overtake massively, and Hardware becomes obsolete before having massive hours.
Economics don't compute.
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cryptocoin miners.
Nope. After miners have invested billions in their rigs, they want to run them 24/7, not just the 5% of the time there's excess power.
Crypto can help with the inverse problem and drop out during infrequent shortfalls in power. They can accept 95% uptime. But 5%? No way.
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The summary also says that the power stations are paying people to take electricity from them. Whenever you read that you know there's something going on in the background and the author doesn't really know what they're talking about. Especially when you're talking about solar, which you can just turn off.
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That is because you do not understand how a power-grid works.
Yeah, but the reason they don't understand is that large parts of the media are giving out disinformation. "grid stability" is the ability to provide power exactly when it's needed in order to keep everything working. Instead of explaining that it is an extremely valuable and expensive service, which solar and wind generators are able to provide better than most other sources of power, they run stories like this one which misunderstand the reasons behind the payment structure and so end up criticising the
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That is because you do not understand how a power-grid works.
Yeah, but the reason they don't understand is that large parts of the media are giving out disinformation. "grid stability" is the ability to provide power exactly when it's needed in order to keep everything working. Instead of explaining that it is an extremely valuable and expensive service, which solar and wind generators are able to provide better than most other sources of power, they run stories like this one which misunderstand the reasons behind the payment structure and so end up criticising the very systems that actually keep the power up and working.
Indeed. And then add the Dunning-Kruger effect to get people making aggressive claims about power grids that are complete nonsense. These things are _complicated_. For example, the nuclear idiots keep stating France does well because it typically has a daily electricity export plus. That is very far from the truth. France exports in low usage times at crappy prices because reducing reactor output is more expensive. Then they import at high-usage times at premium prices because they cannot generate enough el
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You are asking in bad faith. I will ignore your fake question.
Re: Wait, what? (Score:3)
Now you understand why the recent US election went the way it did.
PGE's fault for not having time-shifting prices (Score:5, Interesting)
When prices go negative, PGE doesn't drop the cost of my electric power. If they did, I'd be running my AC and charging my car. Instead, I pay the same amount from midnight to 3PM. PGE can burn, like they made the state burn.
Re:PGE's fault for not having time-shifting prices (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if PGE (and other electric companies around the country), were to invest into battery storage the result would be the same. The sun simply puts out more energy than we can reasonably expect to use in our current state of development. PGE would eventually have enough energy storage to keep it's customers powered for weeks without topping off. At that point, PGE as a company no longer makes financial sense. From a long-term economic perspective, it does. We need investment to maintain the grid, and research for future energy storage / production when our energy usage inevitably catches up to the sun's output. At that point however it makes more sense as a publicly owned utility funded through taxes (society needs the services), rather than a for profit enterprise. (but the only profit motive would be to harm society by creating artificial shortages and inefficiencies.)
But yes, PGE specifically should burn for the harm it's caused already.
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They charge more for electricity during these periods of extreme oversupply than the rest of the country charges during periods of excess demand. Clearly there's extreme corruption going on.
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Would you post the same thing when prices shoot through the roof and you're still paying your retail contractual rate?
In many places you can have the option to pay different types of tariffs, the fact you're on a fixed price contract isn't PGE's fault. Switch to a variable / wholesale system, just don't come here complaining when you one day get a $1000 bill because you forgot to turn the AC off - like the people in Texas who were on this system when they had their gas plants shutdown 2 years ago.
Something is amiss. (Score:2, Troll)
Congestion-related curtailment is the dominant reason for curtailment.
What this really means is that CAISO [caiso.com] is refusing to build out the transmission lines in a timely manner and it's getting worse. Since CAISO is a shareholder driven organization, I wouldn't be surprised if the process is being intentionally retarded by fossil fuel investors.
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Transmission is a temporary solution and a bit of a waste.
All regions are still getting extra solar too, eventually the industrial regions will almost all the solar they need locally. Unless seasonal storage conversion (most likely into hydrogen) is centralized in existing industrial regions, the rural power doesn't need to be there in the future. The hydrogen conversion can be done decentralized where the power is, without HV grid expansion. Distribute the hydrogen instead.
For now just build out battery st
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Transmission is a temporary solution and a bit of a waste.
Reliability through redundancy looks like a waste until it saves your ass. You sound like a CEO who thinks testing of backups is an unnecessary expense.
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Decentralized storage and generation is a form of redundancy.
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Decentralized storage and generation is a form of redundancy.
Only if there is overproduction. Otherwise, when some of your storage is islanded, you will have underproduction.
Distributed battery storage (Score:3)
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Two things need to happen. 1. The cost of solar installation needs to drop 50% to be comparable to the rest of the world. and 2. Battery prices need to drop. The latter is happening every year, although consumers are still being heavily overcharged compared to utilities. The former has yet to happen and probably never will.
If I lived in california (Score:3, Informative)
If I lived in California, I'd probably do solar+battery at home and disconnect from the grid unless it's absolutely necessary.
I am consistently and reliably informed that solar is cheap, so it should come to far less than the absurdly expensive 30c/kWh grid-connected Californians pay. (Right now I pay 12c CAD/kWh for hydro.)
It would a surprise to me if it's legal not be connected to the grid. I'd do the bare minimum, have the hookup, but leave the main (grid) breaker turned off.
Keeping the grid tie disconnected ensures that my batteries are getting the most juice, NOT the electric company, or even other states (!).
(If you are Californian and your knee-jerk response was to say "you couldn't afford it here anyway," check your Tech Bro Wealth Privilege.)
Re:If I lived in california (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the way.
You probably can get away with paying the minimum for interconnect service (monthly charge for the line). In some places you might be able to completely escape being connected and still be allowed a certificate of occupancy.
https://www.primalsurvivor.net... [primalsurvivor.net]
"Off-Grid Electricity in California
Off-grid electricity used to be illegal in California under Title 24. The law required residential homes to have an âoeinterconnection pathway.â However, the law has recently been updated and specifically allows off-grid electricity."
What this means probably varies by the jurisdiction. Kern county probably will let you do this since there's a lot of agriculturally zoned land. City of Los Angeles probably will not, since DWP handles water/sewer, power and trash on a single account (I could be wrong - someone please correct me if there's a way to disconnect from DWP for power but still keep trash and water/sewer.)
"Paying to generate..." (Score:2)
Not when it's all installed and set up... right? There isn't fuel to feed in and pay for. And I assume little extra work they'd not be doing for the current customers.
That's about 1% yearly production (6% solar) (Score:5, Insightful)
"more than 3 million megawatt hours of solar energy" is 3000 gigawatt-hours.
Total utility-scale electric generation for California was 287,220 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in 2022, up 3.4 percent (9,456 GWh) from 2021.
Utility-scale renewable generation increased 10.2 percent (9,520 GWh) in 2022 to 102,853 GWh from 93,333 GWh in 2021.
Solar generation increased 24.1 percent (9,492 GWh) to 48,950 GWh in 2022 from 39,458 GWh in 2021.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data... [ca.gov].
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This MUST happen in summer (Score:5, Interesting)
So, I have 6kW of solar panels on my roof.
In July, I generated 1150 kWh. That's enough for my A/C, and will be enough for an electric stove and dryer when I replace my current gas ones.
In December, I only generated 450 kWh. That's nowhere near enough for a heat pump, electric stove, and dryer.
Batteries will not help that problem. They're fine for shifting power from the middle of the day to the evening (~3-4 hours of capacity). But shifting power from the summer to the winter requires *thousands* of hours of capacity. That's simply not affordable.
In comparison, adding more panels is relatively cheap. If I double the size of my system, I'd have enough in the winter months. But right now there's nowhere for that power to go in the summer, so it's going to get wasted. That's fine; it's still a good deal for me and for the planet.
On a larger scale, that's what's happening in California.
Re: This MUST happen in summer (Score:2)
We have 23 kW of panels on the roof. Peak summer month is over 4000 kWh production. Low winter month is under 1000 kWh.
Our electricity consumption is a little higher in the winter due to the need for heat in our EVs. About 2000 kWh/month
Home and water heating is still natural gas.
There is no way that batteries would help with seasonal adjustments to production and consumption. Connecting power grinds across hemispheres might help. There's gonna be some transmission losses.
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The crazy thing about all this though, is that electricity usage is relatively easy to predict. You can just calculate what someone has used over the last, say, 2 - 3 years and you're going to be very close. Aggregated across a population group you're going to be almost exactly right, other than weather variations. Even with EVs, you can predict what you're going to need by just looking at EV sales trends for an area, and other energy trends (such as improvements in efficiency) are generally slow moving so
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I don't think the problem here is having a market, I think the problem is how the market was designed to protect fossil fuel energy production at a time when we need to be moving away from it.
You only get "free" (or as close as possible) markets when the markets aren't designed to be the opposite. And only "free" markets progress towards sensible ends. Anything else protects shitheels.
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In the UK we deal with that by having tariffs that are cheaper at night when there is excess energy available, usually from wind. Heat your home at night, and the insulation helps it coast through the day with minimal energy use.
We even have smart tariffs where you tell it you want your car to have X% charge by HH:MM the next day, and it you get a special heavily discounted rate in return for letting the supplier choose the exact times when the charger is active to achieve that.
Of course you can just charge
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Electricity Costs Trending Down (Score:2)
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"Birth rates should begin to recover within the next ten or twenty years"
That assumes that he economy has anything to do with birth rates. It hardly does. See Norway - 1.4 children per woman and they transfer wealth from men to women constantly. 1.2 million per woman per lifetime, that is only the tax returns. There's never been a society that supports women and children to this degree...yet they do not procreate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Here, listen to this researcher who is on the brink of cancel
Framing, as always, matters. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is somehow being framed as a "solar glut" instead of "California is over-subsidizing fossil fuels, and is stuck giving away clean power so that fossil fuel plants can keep their profit margins up."
HVDC is the answer.. (Score:3)
No shit! And also, Great! (Score:5, Informative)
Some of us have been promoting renewables for decades and we have been talking about overproduction all along.
Some of you haven't been listening, so you think this is a problem.
This is not a problem, it is an opportunity for storage projects.
The first step in renewables is to overproduce. This is cheaper than building new non-renewable generation! You achieve reliability through overproduction.
Once you have overproduction, it incentivizes storage projects which buy up that cheap power and sell it back when it's worth something.
No part of this is a problem, but also, no part of this is unexpected.
Luckily, we expected a lot of whining and confusion, so we are not surprised to see it, only typically dismayed at widespread willful ignorance. It can only be willful because we have been explaining this to you all along.
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To add to this, I want to point out that having excess capacity is the norm with fossil fuels as well. With fossil fuels, we typically average 50% capacity factor where we are only producing half as much power as we could be, and the rest of the production capacity is sitting idle. This is essential to be able to deal with variable demand and emergencies.
The excess energy these solar panels are producing isn't "going to waste" any more than those idle peaker plants are going to waste, or all the sunlight th
Yep, failure. (Score:2)
Sand batteries (Score:2)
Sure, turning electrical power into heat and then recovering that power to do useful work is inefficient and wasteful. But it's a LOT less wasteful than simply turning off solar power sources because the grid can't accept that power. Storing it in electrical batteries or using it to pump water to a reservoir for later hydro-electric recovery would be better - but those options are a LOT more expensive, and they take longer to bring online.
Simple heat storage is cheap and fast, and would allow recovering at
Shame ... (Score:2)
Lack of grid storage including hydro dams (PES) (Score:2)
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A cheaper and better use would be to capture the excess energy via gravity battery, pumped hydro, flow battery, compressed air, or thermal batteries. Reuse the stored energy after the sun goes down. Store it near the generation point so transmission-line congestion is minimized. That way all electrical customers benefit from the temporary overproduction.
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The official line is that they're working on it - installing battery and other power storage systems to soak up the excess power.
But remember that perfect is the enemy of "good enough". It may be cheaper to waste the power for a few hours a few days a year than to try to capture it, meanwhile the power is used handily the other 99% of the time it is operating.
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Re:If it weren't CA, Bitcoin could solve this (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who would believe bitcoin bro's would restrict their energy demands to off-peak hours, or to "extra" supply, is an idiot.
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Bitcoin bro's are looking to make money though. They're not going to set up where electricity is 3X the price of elsewhere. If Texas will sell them energy at around 9 cents/kWh, and California wants 30, they'll go to Texas.
If the cheapest power plans involve electricity rates rising to over $1/kWh in select circumstances that only happen once every few years or so, they'll shut the servers off during those times.
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To be fair, the crapcoin assholes are all either idiots or scammers, and many are both.
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ROFL! Thanks for that! I can't disagree. I might at "venal" to the list, just because.
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Anyone who would believe bitcoin bro's would restrict their energy demands to off-peak hours, or to "extra" supply, is an idiot.
There is very simple technology available to force this. It's called smart meters which can be shut down remotely. When you sell them service, sell them two connections: a puny service which runs lights, monitoring, the equipment needed to shut down and start up the other equipment... and another service which is remotely switched which operates the mining equipment. Give them a little notice before you shut down, they can always suspend and hibernate if they are in the middle of mining a coin.
This is exist
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You're right about the technology, of course. I have to wonder, though, whether the will to force its use exists. Given the financial resources of these guys, a sufficient number of Senators and Congresscritters to stymie such legislation could be bought out of petty cash.
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panels don't generete at max capacity all the time, the allso degrade over time
Modern panels are warranted to produce their rated output for decades.
I would imagine thet the newer controllers can also turn of panels when they are not needed due to enugh being created by the other cells in the array.
Modern solar farms use microinverters, either per-panel or per-pair usually. Some of these can be shut off remotely.