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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Arizona, Nevada, and Utah have quite a bit of area for solar PV. It’s fine for California to import from there as long as they use their leverage to force a move away from coal now, and natural gas later. Clean hydro from the PNW is no different than PJM and NYISO grids importing clean nuclear and hydro from Ontario, Canada (which they do).

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Drawing solar from states to the east would only make the duck curve worse though, right? Power production would taper off even earlier than the peak demand.

You can charge your residential or utility battery storage from the imported hydro or solar depending on spot prices, no need to consume immediately at that time.

Transmission is crucial for flexibility in balancing generation and consumption, as well as optimizing storage utilization. You can also assume there will be times you’ll throw away (curtail) clean energy as it’s cheaper than it would’ve been to store and then deliver it, but you still need that capacity available at other times (seasonal variability).

It would be made up for in the morning though when that solar starts producing sooner. Unless everything is renewable already, it could offset some non-renewables getting used before sunrise and allow battery charging to start earlier.

In theory that could be the case. I was reading how the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power actually owns a coal generating plant in Utah. They are now converting it to a natural gas powered plant, so that's a step in the right direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermountain_Power_Plant

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-utah-coal-los-angeles...

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