California Grid Ran On 100% Renewables For a Record 98 Days (electrek.co) 69
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: A new study published in the journal Renewable Energy (PDF) uses data from the state of California to demonstrate that no blackouts occurred when wind-water-solar electricity supply exceeded 100% of demand on the state's main grid for a record 98 of 116 days from late winter to early summer 2024 for an average (maximum) of 4.84 (10.1) hours per day. Compared to the same period in 2023, solar output in California is up 31%, wind power is up 8%, and batteries are up a staggering 105%. Batteries supplied up to 12% of nighttime demand by storing and redistributing excess solar energy.
And here's the kicker: California's high electricity prices aren't because of wind, water, and solar energy. (That issue is primarily caused (PDF) by utilities recovering the cost of wildfire mitigation, transmission and distribution investments, and net energy metering.) In fact, researchers from Stanford, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley found that states with higher shares of renewable energy tend to see lower electricity prices. The takeaway -- and the data backs it up -- is that a large grid dominated by wind, water, and solar is not only feasible, it's also reliable.
And here's the kicker: California's high electricity prices aren't because of wind, water, and solar energy. (That issue is primarily caused (PDF) by utilities recovering the cost of wildfire mitigation, transmission and distribution investments, and net energy metering.) In fact, researchers from Stanford, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley found that states with higher shares of renewable energy tend to see lower electricity prices. The takeaway -- and the data backs it up -- is that a large grid dominated by wind, water, and solar is not only feasible, it's also reliable.
Each of those days (Score:5, Informative)
I’m totally behind renewables. They’re clearly the future. Keep it up. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The grid is nowhere close to being green. We’re still burning more fermented dinosaur than ever in human history and the emissions curve has never been higher. It’s not just that we have a long way to go - we’ve basically made no progress yet. Talk to me when the emisions curve shows an actual negative slope. Until then, we’re still barreling towards a hothouse state with no brakes.
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Yes and the numbers climb steadily every year.
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"... we’ve basically made no progress yet."
From the article:
"Compared with the same period in 2023, solar, wind, and battery outputs in 2024 increased 31 % 8 %, and 105 %, respectively, dropping fossil gas use by an estimated 40 %."
Progress starts somewhere.
"Until then, we’re still barreling towards a hothouse state with no brakes."
H1Bs don't need air conditioning so long as Trump and Musk have theirs.
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was only at 100% renewable for 10minutes-10hours.
Yeah... these headlines from elektret that we're fed here every couple of months with the new record are Pravda level.
idk what the algorithm is for these "records" because the denominator keeps changing all the time.
Re: Each of those days (Score:2, Informative)
Curiously absent from the summary is the fact that California has to actually pay neighboring states to take the excess energy in order to avoid overloading its own grid, and then after the sun sets, they have to pay neighboring states again to bring in power because this state can't meet its own demand.
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Negative prices exist because of the way renewable energy credits are set up to encourage solar production. Solar farms can shut down instantly, unlike nuclear (and to a lesser degree, coal) which can't throttle in real-time. So the extent to which solar is being sold for negative prices is due to it being subsidized and not because it would overload the grid.
Now yes having to import power after the sun sets is a real problem that we'll need to solve.
Re: Each of those days (Score:2)
From:
https://www.newsweek.com/calif... [newsweek.com]
When California's solar farms produce a surplus which battery storage cannot handle, to prevent grid overload, the state exports power. This is frequently sold at below the market rate, essentially subsidized by California energy consumers, and at times other states have to be paid to take surplus electricity if they have no demand for it.
Though this has been a thing for well over a decade now.
Re: Each of those days (Score:3)
Bullshit. _We_, meaning the West, have made great strides towards a greener energy economy, and definitely cleaner air. It's far better than it was in the â(TM)70s. BUT, we still have a long way to go, and the third world is somewhere between those two points, where before they weren't a significant contributor.
We need to keep moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, the threat is still too theoretical to most of us Westerners. Until/Unless a sufficiently large proportion of our population have su
renewables does not mean green (Score:2)
U.S. biomass facilities emit on average 2.8 times the amount of pollution as that emitted by traditional fossil fuel facilities like oil and coal. https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
it was found that any supply of biomass, regardless of its type, is characterized by variable mercury content in dry matter. In the case of e.g. wood chips, the spread of results reaches 235.1 m/kg (in dry matter). Meanwhile, the highest mercury content, 472.4 m/kg (in dry matter) was recorded in the biomass of straw, wood pellets, and pellets from energy crops (sunflower husk). https://www.e3s-conferences.or... [e3s-conferences.org]
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It’s not merely that the threat is theoretical. It’s that people don’t even realise that some of the harms they experience is a result of climate change. For example, my aunt and uncle, along with tens of thousands of others in NW England, have had their house flooded yesterday evening. They won’t make the connection to climate change, but nonetheless this is what’s caused this flood to be as bad as it was, and why they’ve now had three “once in 100 years” flo
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I think the point here is that for decades we have had dire predictions of grid collapse if renewables ever get above 20, 50, 80%. Even when it's seen working fine elsewhere, there's always some reason why the US grid still come crashing down if it ever happens there.
Now it happens regularly in California and the lights stay on.
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So that's one half of the problem. The other half is battery backups, or something. Note that overnight batteries require extra solar to be installed so they can be charged during the day.
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More important than the total time where renewables provided >100% of total energy used is the total energy produced by renewables. In 2023 for California, that number was 54%. That is, over the entire year, 54% of all electricity was produced by utility-scale solar (16%), small-scale solar (12%), wind (6%), hydro (13%), geothermal (4%), and biomass (2%). The renewals number was 33.6% in 2021 and 36.4% in 2022. The recent progress toward increasing renewable energy production is significant.
For profit electric rates (Score:5, Interesting)
There is quite a difference between the investor owned and non investor owned electricity rates in California.
The below link as a graph showing the differences for 2023. Notice the hockey stick for rates in the 3 major investor owned utilities.
https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2023/07/10/not-all-of-californias-electricity-prices-are-high/
Re:For profit electric rates (Score:4, Interesting)
Interestingly enough, you glossed over the graph lower in the page [wordpress.com], in the section titled Size Matters.
PG&E delivers 78 million MWh annually to over 16 million people across 70,000 square miles. The scale of public power operations is much smaller. For example, Silicon Valley power (City of Santa Clara in the graphs) delivers 4.4 million MWh to approximately 60,000 customers across a more densely populated 18 square miles.
They list the miles of transmission and distribution lines running through High Fire Threat District (HFTD) areas as compared to the other power providers.
The investor-owned utilities dwarf the public-owned utility companies, because they have vastly larger infrastructure (and costs) to serve far more customers along significantly larger areas.
Looking at the Net Income [macrotrends.net] for PG&E, they made $2.242 billion in 2023, or roughly $140/person/year in the entire market they serve.
Since PG&E's rates have to be approved by the California Public Utilities Commission [wikipedia.org], who is made up of 5 commissioners appointed by CA Governor Gavin Newsom, well... they're getting what they voted for.
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The risk is that people with access to capital use it to get solar and batteries, reducing their costs and even going off grid. People without the capital are left payoy more and more as the customer base declines.
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The risk is that people with access to capital use it to get solar and batteries, reducing their costs and even going off grid. People without the capital are left payoy more and more as the customer base declines.
Disconnecting from the grid is illegal under current California building codes. A home without a grid connection is not considered to be fit for human habitation and is subject to being condemned. Many (most? all?) communities are not enforcing these requirements, but it if becomes a significant problem that's pretty easily remedied. It's easier if it's done sooner rather than later. Of course, homeowners aren't required to use the grid, but they're supposed to be connected, and supposed to pay the monthly
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There is quite a difference between the investor owned and non investor owned electricity rates in California.
The below link as a graph showing the differences for 2023. Notice the hockey stick for rates in the 3 major investor owned utilities.
https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2023/07/10/not-all-of-californias-electricity-prices-are-high/
Publicly owned utilities tend to be small, at the municipality level. Often very urban or suburban. Those utilities have far, far less exposure to things like wildfire (as they simply serve less area exposed to the risks), which matters in a state like California. There's also the added issue that publicly owned utilities can subsidize their operations via taxes and government rulemaking in a way that private utilities can't, but are very much a cost to ratepayers regardless of what the dollar amount on the
Water (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, hydroelectric.
There are those that claim hydroelectric power is not "green". Dams are slated for demolition all over the West. On the other hand, if hydro is "OK", then we've had far longer intervals of "100% renewable" sources in the Pacific Northwest than a measly 98 days.
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The problem we have with hydroelectric is that even if we dam up every body of water we can possibly get power from, which will definitely have negative environmental and economic effects, we still can't supply more than a fraction of the power needs of our nation.
Don't get me wrong, at around 20% it's a great boost, but it can't be counted to expand to cover everything.
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Dams are slated for demolition all over the West.
Since when? Citation needed.
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There are those that claim hydroelectric power is not "green".
I'd like to hear their argument. Care to share it?
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I presume he’s referring to the fact that dam construction can have bad impacts, particularly if done poorly. But obviously, once constructed, dams produce low carbon power with few other negative consequences
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I'd like to hear their argument. Care to share it?
Green != no carbon emissions. Green = no environmental impacts. Dams have huge ecological impacts both in the dam area as well as downstream massively affecting landscape, land use, and both land and water based life. For example the dams in California being demolished are being done so since they virtually wiped out a salmon population from the estuary. The are an environmental travesty.
Now one can argue whether we as humans have the ability to function without fucking up nature in general, and whether the
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For example the dams in California being demolished are being done so since they virtually wiped out a salmon population from the estuary.
We knew that damming rivers would block salmon migration. So we built fish hatcheries. The environmentalists whined that the fish were not "the same" and fought against them. Indian tribes are happy with them and have taken over their operation.
California listened to the environmentalists and not the people who had a stake in salmon run maintenance.
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Water is a dwindling resource in the West so we must think about other sources of energy.
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There are those that claim hydroelectric power is not "green".
Dams are objectively not "green". Green doesn't apply to just carbon emissions. Dams for all their massive benefit are an ecological travesty virtually everywhere where they are built affecting land, wildlife and massively changing the ecology of not just the surrounding area, but the downstream area as well.
They are however renewable and over time they are renewable and carbon neutral energy sources.
Slightly misleading on costs (Score:2, Troll)
> California's high electricity prices aren't because of wind, water, and solar energy.
> That issue is primarily caused (PDF) by utilities recovering the cost of wildfire mitigation, transmission and distribution investments, and net energy metering
And why does California need so much transmission and distribution investment, and net energy metering? Because of wind and solar energy.
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Citations please.
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https://www.engieimpact.com/in... [engieimpact.com]
Net metering is a utility billing mechanism that allows customers who generate any amount of their own power to receive credit for the electricity they contribute to the grid that is generated through solar or wind power.
[...]
As more customers take advantage of net metering, fewer fixed costs are paid into the system, resulting in higher rates for non-net metering customers.
Emphasis added in the first sentence and removed in the second.
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> That issue is primarily caused (PDF) by utilities recovering the cost of wildfire mitigation, transmission and distribution investments, and net energy metering
And why does California need so much transmission and distribution investment, and net energy metering? Because of wind and solar energy.
California needs transmission and distribution because of the geography of the country. California has net metering for political reasons. Trying to mix those costs together makes any resulting argument into nonsense.
I responded to your post in the thread because I thought you made the most valid point.
If you have difficult transmission and distribution, you're going to have higher energy costs and that might be unavoidable. But usi
Re:Slightly misleading on costs (Score:4, Informative)
Well, to complete the answer to the (stupid) demand for citations, distributed power generation and storage require more infrastructure because the power flow is more dynamic and goes in more directions. "Non-dispatchable" sources also need storage facilities to match supply and and demand across time.
Solar and wind are pretty distributed as they are currently being deployed, and are non-dispatchable, so they increase infrastructure costs for both reasons.
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And the wildfires are also because wind and solar? Or do you have a different hallucination for those costs?
Re:Then why Diablo Canyon? (Score:4, Informative)
The headline is all kinds of misleading. Over those 98 days the most the state ran on 100% renewable energy was just over 10 hours, some days it was only a few minutes. That's hardly something to get excited about.
Yup. They keep doing headlines like this every year, as though it is some amazing thing that they ran on renewable energy for a short period of time on several consecutive days. When we have 98 days straight without actually using any non-renewable energy, I'll be impressed, but we're decades away from that.
To give you an idea just how far away from the headline's implication reality is, the current California energy supply as I type this only has 6.9% from renewables. If you add in large hydro, that only goes up to 16.5%. Even if we assume that all of the power currently coming from batteries (24.3%) came from renewables (and this isn't a given), that brings ups to just 40.8%. This will fall further as the batteries run down overnight.
And the claim is actually even more misleading than you're implying. I spot checked a few random days in March, April, May, and June at the Cal ISO website [caiso.com], and I didn't find any days when natural gas power production dropped below 1200 megawatts. To be fair, the total power exported and stored in batteries exceeded the total power produced by nuclear and natural gas, so if California didn't export power and didn't store power for later use, then it could have run on renewables for a few hours per day during those days, but to do so, you have to argue that all of the batteries are storing excess nuclear and natural gas power, rather than renewable power.
In other words, using the methodology required to say that California ran on 100% renewable power for parts of those 98 days, you can't count the batteries as renewable.
We are a very long way from being able to run even one day on 100% renewable power. And by that, I mean that even if we tripled our solar power and stored it all in batteries and dribbled it out over the entire day, we still would only be able to run with 100% renewable power during a couple of months of the year.
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But at least, they got their gold start for participation.
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When you wrote that, the sun had just gone down. 40.8% from renewables and grid batteries right after sunset is actually not bad.
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When you wrote that, the sun had just gone down. 40.8% from renewables and grid batteries right after sunset is actually not bad.
No, it's not bad. It is certainly better than it has been, and slowly improving. The only thing that's bad is that two hours after sundown, only 6% is coming from batteries, and two-thirds of the power is either imported (unknown energy mix) or coming from fossil fuels, which means that we're really less than a third the way to the 100% number that the headline claims, at least by any normal reading of that headline. :-)
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I'm not sure I've ever seen the TX grid go 100% renewables, but I suspect some of that is you can't ramp down coal that fast and nuke (green but not renewable) never ramps down.
The solution to the problem of difficulties in varying output of nuclear power plants is batteries, or rather any kind of suitable energy storage system. There's been considerable advancement in thermal energy storage for thermal power plants, an improvement over batteries for not needing any rare/expensive materials, simpler to construct and maintain, by using hat directly from the heat source than electric resistance heat there's fewer energy conversion steps which improves efficiency, and if used with t
Was this 24/7? (Score:2)
Was california running on renewables (and storage) 24/7 on these days or were there times when dirty fossil fuels were powering the state?
Re: Bbbuuut ... (Score:2)
Economically obsolete. (Score:2)
Nuclear is economically obsolete.
And this is without calculating all the "externalities"
Read the first paragraph carefully (Score:2)
Re: Read the first paragraph carefully (Score:3, Informative)
Great solution (Score:1)
FTFY: 100% renewables 20% of the time for 98 days (Score:4, Funny)
TFA: "electricity supply exceeded 100% of demand on the state's main grid for a record 98 of 116 days from late winter to early summer 2024 for an average (maximum) of 4.84 (10.1) hours per day"
If you're 100% faithful to your spouse 4.84 hours/day on average, do not expect them to be happy. Even if that's an improvement over last year.
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Think of it more like abstaining from drug use (fossil fuels). A really bad addict of a number of drugs (opioids and alcohol come to mind) can't quit cold turkey without really bad consequences, including potentially death.
Cut use by like 10% a month though, and soon enough they'll be clean. If they get 10% more of their electricity (energy) from renewables a year, in 10 years they'll have transferred.
It doesn't need to, can't, happen overnight.
As they install more power, the periods where they're 100% re
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My favourite analogy for this remains: imagine you are being kicked in the bollocks every hour, on the hour. That’s using fossil fuels today. If you can reduce the kicks to once a day, that’s unequivocally better than once an hour. Is it perfect? No, obviously not. Is it still massively better than once an hour? Absolutely. And every kick you can avoid means a happier nutsack. Once a month? Much better? Once a year in the winter? Much, much better. Fewer bollock-kicks are always better than more
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Well, another way to look at it would be that we need infrastructure, factories, to produce green energy devices. You need factories to make solar panels and wind turbines.
Building factories is expensive, so you don't want to overbuild there. So you might build enough to build 1% of our annual energy needs.
We could say that design life for this stuff is 20 years. Solar panels can last longer, but nice even number.
That means that the design goal would be 5% of our annual needs in green tech per year. To
"Renewable" does not mean eco-friendly (Score:2, Interesting)
Watch "Planet of the Humans." Or just think about it. Burning wood is far more polluting than burning natural gas - per unit of energy produced. Trees may be "renewable" but I think it takes, at least, 9 years to be worth harvesting. And new trees are very poor substitute for old growth. Hydroelectric is "renewable" but a lot of environmentalist hate dams - and for good reasons. Wind turbines are killing whales and dolphins off the east coast. Wind turbines are also known as "bird blenders."
I could go on. J
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Funny troll.
Real data (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.gridstatus.io/live... [gridstatus.io]
Over the last 30 days typically renewables supplied only 25% of the demand overnight.
Very poor thread title (Score:2)
CAISO did not manage 100% renewables for one day, never mind 98
The summary is not bad, but the title is a lie.
44c/kWh (Score:3)
Yet I pay $.44/kWh to charge my electric car PG&E land which is roughly 3.50/gallon equivalent
pure BS (Score:2)
"California's high electricity prices aren't because of wind, water, and solar energy."
"utilities recovering the cost of ... net energy metering."
What is "net energy metering"? Um, paying for solar.
Title is dishonest (Score:2)
Yet California is largest power importer (Score:2)