Good intentions doesn't make a good government. California politicians seem to have a lot of good intentions on homelessness, jail reform, education, healthcare, but the reality is just an awful hell zone.
Not only this, but while making other aspects of life worse or more expensive, it will also make the environment worse. Anyone who feels 'middle class' in CA has enormous buying power for consumer goods, and an obvious one for this problem is a gas/propane generator. When the accepted wisdom is for all the California suburbanites to have generators as buffers against unreliable power grids, the environment loses.
Solar and Wind have been the biggest suppressor for developing longer term base load. Why would anyone who is remotely sane take a risk to develop base load power when politicians shift priorities on whatever the flavor of the day is. This has been going on for decades which is why we are now where we are. Base load generation takes a significant commitment and requires long term planning, but current politics place a high penalty on anything requiring a long term commitment.
Talk about a tragedy of commons :p
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
My reading suggests that this won't impact anything that you should consider plugging your house into. Instead, it's targeting stuff like this:
https://www.harborfreight.com/generators-engines/generators/...
However, that model is twice as expensive as the one harbor freight was selling before the bill passed. The old one wasn't an inverter, so the frequency / voltage would drift around when the load changed, and couldn't be used with computers (or modern appliances). It wouldn't surprise me if they slapped a catalytic converter on it while they were upgrading the electronics.
Been though those, I don't really think "storm knocks out power lines" is the kind of problem people are talking about when it comes to grid reliability though. No amount of coal is going to keep the line from getting cut.
Once we have a bunch of storage, and are used to doing grid ops on lots of intermittent generation sources, grid reliability will go up because a power line going down will have lots of potential mitigations that are not possible today.
https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/dangerous-heat-causi...
https://www.wdrb.com/news/a-southern-indiana-utility-warns-r...
I'm from EU, a relatively "cold" (French Alps at 1030m) place but definitively not that cold (peak cold -25℃/-13℉ in early morning, -8/10℃ (14/18℉) during the day between January and February), with a new home witch means well insulated, with a proper VMC, water-water heat-pump etc, and well... The MINIMUM load during night and early morning is around 1kW. IF Sun shine during the day, well, the load is not much an issue from 9h30 AM to 3 PM, but for the rest is on grid.
Of course old homes heat with gas/oil/wood/* so need far less electricity (still IME a bit more than 2-300W base load though) BUT apart of wood coupled with large hot water storage (to been able to sleep instead of charging wood every hour) if you are not living in a relatively cold place I doubt you have a 6-12 month gas/oil/wood reserve at home and during such "cold episode", being very rare so far, getting new "fuel" would probably be not that easier...
I've made a small p.v. with lithium storage as a very expensive UPS for the house, being relatively autonomous in summer I hardly can be autonomous in winter: in some RARE winters like the last one where Sun shine almost all day I can survive a day to the next cutting the heating depending on battery SOC, but in case of a day without enough Sun light I'm still on grid or on emergency generator backup... Having a real autonomy IME is more a dream than something feasible, at least something feasible at human prices because spending the price of a house just in batteries who might last at maximum 10 years for some rare episode is not really a sustainable price...
About natural gas: if the outage is widespread I doubt you can get it: who pump it in the pipeline without energy?
Natural gas has not gone out here for a while and is a much larger issue if it did. Gas company would have to come out and lit all the gas appliances. I assume they spend a lot to prevent that cost and can use themselves to power their infrastructure.
Sure, but they were (and still are?) like so because normal climate conditions do not demand that. Being able to sustain "any climate" is damn expensive, giving a certain margin while designing a home is natural, the home itself have a value, but going much further it's simply too costly at best. Now, insulation is good BOTH for hot and cold, but for instance if with mild insulation and p.v. you can live well because it's hot only during the sunny day you hardly invest in real insulation.
Beside that during a snowstorm a p.v. does not produce so if you have a battery you can recharge it on a generator, but no more than that. It's far cheaper to run than a 24/7 generator online, but it's still roughly expensive and demand a significant quantity of fuel you normally do not have at home.
About natural gas, well, I suppose their infra are designed to be "a bit" disaster proof, but how much and how in realty it's hard to tell up front. I remember for instance that a day in my original town a flood happen and for some reasons water penetrated the piping infra. Gas completely stops for two days. They have had some water pumping systems for condensation and other phenomenon but it wasn't ever used and even those who have designed it have designed for clear water without mood and sand. Apparently an event that break a pipe and push water in the net was not much assessed. Most physical infra, even critical ones, never have nor can afford doing Chaos Monkey things on their systems...
Some of them also require non-trivial time to build.
I have a self-made p.v. with storage, I dream to being able just to integrate car's inverter power demand with p.v. inverter available capacity: most cars do not even offer MQTT/ModBUS communications to slowly regulate power demands. Just to regulate my hot water heater (a modern Daikin heat-pump) depending on p.v. available energy I have to craft some absurd home-assistant automation because NO ONE at Daikin really know what does it means "a solar-ready heat-pump" and no one who produce p.v. inverters really think that perhaps it's a good idea offering a good API to regulate devices in the house for maximum self-consumption.
Potentially we can improve self-consumption by more than 10% with just let's say +10USD per high-power device, no such thing exists on sale. The best you can get are "smart switches" who power-on or off devices with crappy automation and power routers with a smart meter if you have to limit injection to the grid.
Potentially cars can be used coupled with a fixed p.v. system and a small storage (for when you are not at home, but still need power for fridge and co) with a canbus open and universal API. Potentially. I'm curious if even find ONE BEV on sale who do that just with an open API...
BTW the "ecosystem" is not there IMO because no one who design such systems use them, really. I have a modern Daikin hot water system formally "integrated with the solar" etc. It's not integrated AT ALL, people who sell it do not even know how to use it's crappy ModBUS interface and that is designed just to tweak it's functioning based on the current energy price from the grid NOT depending on a p.v. system and that's one of the state-of-art new gears...
Essentially IMO no one have ever tried to tackle nor maximum self-consumption nor autonomy.
And this is the very first issue. The second issue is that nobody ever try to push standards. They sold crap in a state in the past we would have call "early stage prototype" as a finished product.
Given actual prices no real revolution can happen in technical terms.
I am not claiming you are wrong but this sounds like something I would expect to read as a scenario in an upper middle class southwest african nation. Not something in one of the world's largest economies.
It does work if you actually listen to the engineers that know what they're talking about. Renewable deployments need significant overcapacity, and have to be paired with grid expansion to average over regional variability, and energy storage to average over temporal variability.
Overbuilding should be no big deal because renewables are super cheap right now and that's something that can be done immediately. Grid expansion and storage were just not getting the attention they needed, but at least I see indications that storage is getting some investment now.
Physics doesn't give a crap about your feelings.
> Just a few years ago, the notion that battery storage would play a key role in California’s energy future was seen by many as a quixotic dream for an emerging technology not yet reliable or cost-effective enough to be counted on.
> But in the past year alone, as California accelerates its transition to a carbon-free electric grid by 2045, there is a growing appreciation that battery storage has arrived in a big way, that it is performing well and playing an increasingly greater role in the state’s energy future.
> Mainzer called the influx of battery storage capacity on the grid over the past year “an incredible growth curve, an incredible success story,” adding that “We’ve entered a golden age of energy storage here in California.” The ISO now has more than 3,160 MW of battery storage connected to the grid and is expected to add another 700 MW by the end of June.
progress but still a drop in the bucket.
There is a lot of battery storage planned for California.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/03/14/californias-solar-mar...
The grid wasn't built in a day, and it won't be changed in a day.
What evidence do you have for this? It seems to me that the intentions of most California politicians are motivated by what causes people to vote for them. But their voters are a mostly captive audience, since they have such little choice in the matter - what are they gonna do, elect a “semi-fascist MAGA Republican?” Of course not!
So California politicians can do whatever they want, because their base will vote for them to beat any Republican. That means they just need to beat opponents from their own party in primaries, where they take positions on issues that are generally far outside of mainstream preferences. They’re optimizing for pleasing the extremists in their party, not for implementing whatever “good intentions” they might claim to have.
For example the recent special election for California State Assembly 17th district seat (San Francisco) was between Matt Haney and David Campos.
Campos is very much in the progressive camp, and doesn't believe in things like "supply and demand".
Haney used to be in the progressive camp, but he's the kind of politician that adapts his views to what he thinks will get him elected. So over the past few years he's shifted more towards the moderate camp, and ran on a much more moderate platform.
So, what you end up having is a far left group, and then more of a center left.
Then at the local level you have stuff like Shasta county almost getting taken over by far right groups: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-12/shasta-c...
On homelessness, for example, that is largely a problem of California's own making. At every step the state has decided to make homes more expensive and turn homeowners into a landed gentry. As part of this, the loudest NIMBYs basically dictate what can and can't be built in the state. I would not be surprised if those NIMBYs have also been hard at work stymying necessary grid infrastructure in the same way they stymied affordable housing and high-speed rail.
Nuclear energy's downfall is a complicated subject with factors outside of California's control. Even if California wanted nuclear today, they would have to get past a whole host of regulatory and financial barriers they don't meaningfully control. It's the sort of thing the federal government needs to decide to start paying R&D on again.
Isn't Californias times of peak electricity almost always in the daytime and in summer? And largely due to the need for air conditioning in many places during those times?
Why wouldn't widespread rooftop solar be able to deal with that?
In other words, nuclear fission power plants are not the solution, they even make the situation during a heat wave worse. I wish there was a silver bullet, but I fear this is not it.
For high temperature reactors (e.g. helium or molten salt), air cooling is trivial.
I recall our state being able to go to 55,000 MW before having to curtail consumption. Now we are declaring an emergency at 43,000 MW (yesterday’s peak, source CAISO website).
What we are dealing with here is failed public policy. I agree electrification is a good and noble goal. But it is quite obvious our leaders have declared certain changes necessary without creating a transition strategy. That or their unstated transition plan is a legislatively-induced crisis.
If half of the energy spend demonizing nuclear was spent on modernizing it, SMRs would be a long solved problem.
It's the ultimate "stop hitting yourself" :p
But no, everyone has their one true source of planet saving energy (that they have a financial interest in) and every cent that goes to any other is destroying humanity or treason that should be punished by death.
The grid of the future will have a bit of everything, and between now and then it will have a range of temporary forms to ease the transition.
For that matter, unless environmental groups are putting saboteurs inside construction projects around the world from France to China to the US, then environmental groups can't really be blamed for the failures of the past 20 years, either.
Personally, attempting to construct new nuclear, after the lessons of 1980s construction, is a big "stop hitting yourself" move as wel.
"The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, the second best time is now."
New nuclear power plants take around 20 years and $40B to build, each.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
In March 2022, CPUC approved a plan to add 18.8 GW solar, 6.7 GW wind, and 14.7 GW batteries by 2032 at 18c/kWh, reaching 73% renewables.[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_California
43,000 GWh/y = 15m cars * .24 KWh/m * 12,000 annual miles
.24 KWh/m is for the latest Tesla 3 cars.
5GWh/y is from https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/how-...
>The main driver deterring PG&E from seeking a 20-year operating licence extension is the 2015 renewable portfolio standard (RPS) of producing 50% of its electricity from qualified renewable energy sources by 2030. PG&E’s model for the future cost of operating Diablo Canyon indicated that the cost per kilowatt hour was going to almost double, since the company would be forced to lower the amount of power it could produce from the plant in order to meet the state’s requirement. Dropping the capacity factor from the current 92% to say 50% would virtually double the price per kilowatt hour since costs are largely fixed.
>The state law which effectively dictates that by 2030 Diablo Canyon should operate at lower capacity each year and buy in power from intermittent renewables has apparently sealed the fate of the plant.
Nuclear needs a ton of water for cooling which might also be a problem in the desert. AFAIK that's one of the reasons why France's nuclear plants are struggling currently.
https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/los-angeles-100-percent-renewa...
Note the reason nuclear isn't being considered is mostly that you'll get more GWH per billion spent on solar/wind/storage than you will per billion spent on any new nuclear facility (which would take at least ten years to build anyway, by most estimates).
Laws and borders are ephemera; California did not create this contemporary reality; the species did.
It’s easier to deflect than accept one’s role. I expect better of so-called adults; why buy the arguments of people contributing to the problem deriding others as the source?
Do less. Stop chasing incentives and buying into the nation state propaganda yourself then. Otherwise shut up with externalizing the blame; you’re part of the problem.
Don’t forget nuclear isn’t compatible with our reality either: it’s politically infeasible to implement nuclear because everybody is scared of it. It’s also extremely expensive upfront.
https://www.dw.com/en/french-nuclear-plants-break-a-sweat-ov...
Just because the measures are suspended doesn't invalidate the reason for them in the first place. To endanger the rivers ecosystems isn't really helpful
CA is very far down a good-intention-paved road, and not all of it is related to nuclear per se.
* Water
* Maintenance
* Security issues
Electrical Energy in Germany 2022-08-30
Coal 38,0%
Wind 14,9%
Gas 14,2%
Solar 11,4%
Biomass 7,9%
Nuclear Fission 6,9%
Others 6,8% (should be water and other resources)
Gas is intended only to fill short gaps. The plan is to increase wind-energy and solar-energy by a lot. While not controllable they are reliable. Nobody can cut off wind or gas. Another challenge is storing enough energy in hydrogen. Which is considered to be a good thing since some shift in recent years. We will need even more electrical energy for battery cars and for creating SAF/EFUEL for planes and the industry. The tricky part is doing the right thing, for the right reason, at the right time. Looking back that would've been done easy thirty years back ignoring short minded economic needs driven by capitalism. I still hope for progress regarding nuclear fusion because it could be so much better than fission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis...
https://www.srf.ch/news/international/energiepolitik-frankre...
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/energiepreise-aktuell... # updated daily
This is not a factual statement, it's a religious statement.
"Green energy" has nothing to do with what is going on with this grid emergency.
Edit: a typo
France 69.0%
Ukraine 55.0%
Slovakia 52.3%
Belgium 50.8%
Hungary 46.8%
The one nuclear plant in California makes 10% of the entire states electricity. And last night the state assembly voted 31/1 to not prematurely shut it down as planned.
And we don't fear russia bombing Ukraine's WECs
Oh and nuclear fission used in breeder reactors is just as renewable as the fusion fuel in the sun that powers wind/solar/hydro/bio. We can make 100% of the world's primary energy for 4 billion years with nuclear before running out of fuel.
It was interesting to see (thanks, Europe) how nuclear power plants are still somewhat susceptible to global climate change, since they require vast amounts of water below a certain temperature to run.
Nuclear plants can also be cooled with nearly zero water usage, using dry cooling (dump heat straight to air basically with air radiators). This is more expensive, but may make sense as climate change kicks in. It's perfectly doable and safe.
Today creating hydrogen from solar and burning it in a turbine is competitive with new built nuclear. Not that anyone suggests it for anything else than emergencies, since the round trip efficiency cost would be ludicrous.
Yet everyone just says "ok nuclear is the most expensive and always will be no matter what"
Add in a carbon fee and a low-carbon capacity market and all of a sudden nuclear would be the cheapest.
Markets are human constructs that are currently woefully messed up and leading us in dangerous directions.
Transmission lines are not but comparing how many HVDC lines you can get for the difference between renewables and a single nuclear reactor is laughable. This is not even mentioning the cost that has gone into building the current grid in a hub and spoke model around big centralized producers.
Not that we need to throw it away, but it is worth mentioning when talking nuclear. Especially new builds.
Power 2 X makes storage solved at costs lower or in line to nuclear. Not that anyone would accept those costs.
The real interesting research which is currently happening is around grid forming inverts. Being able create a country wide grid without any synchronous producers or coupling.
The way people argue about it, no it absolutely not. CAISO generates about 25,000 MWd in a day. If you just use LCOE you would say, ok let's take the LCOE in $/MWh, convert to $/MWd and multiply them for each energy source. Wow look how cheap 100% wind and solar are!
But oops they totally missed the fact that oops in Winter they have to build at least 4x capacity to fill up the shockingly large amount of chemical batteries (hundreds of skyscrapers full) and wires during the windy/sunny periods, and then rebuild all of this stuff every 25 years. Now it looks very expensive and crazy.
The 92% capacity factor nuclear plant running for 80 years is looking good.
Wind and solar alone are the cheapest forms of energy as tents are the cheapest form of housing.
Many studies suggest that a good mixture of hydro, nuclear, wind, and solar are the ideal. Let's not rule out nuclear due to current market quirks.
That is 24 giga watt hours from a kg or uranium. The article says California is set to "top 48 gigawatts" on some days. If it stayed at peak usage all year 48 * 24 * 365 / 24 = 17,520 kg of uranium for constant peak California consumption.
That seems like a lot until you think about how much oil it saves
That same capacity would require 26 Diablo canyon equivalent stations or only 30.5 sq.mi. [2]
Of course, Greater Los Angeles area itself is 33,954 sq.mi, so if we assume 10% of that are roofs, parking lots and other structures that can be covered with a solar panel setup somehow (big assumption, but this is a thought experiment after all), we’d have close to 1/2 of the total already covered. Add other populated areas in CA and things don’t look so outlandish with some combination of Nuclear/storage/solar.
The big question is whether we have the social cohesion to pull this off or not. The train from LA to SF mess has me worried here…
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mo... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
You also have to consider what you need to get that 1kg of U-235 and building your huge power plant. This is called doing a life-cycle analysis. In that it has been shown the wind power is by far the cheapest in terms of material use, and solar and nuclear is about equal.
> The TMR (total material requirement) of nuclear power generation is significantly lower than that of thermal power generation and is similar to that of renewables. On the basis of the low greenhouse gas emissions associated with nuclear power generation, like renewables, it can be considered favorable not only from the global warming perspective but also from a resource use perspective.
"Life cycle resource use of nuclear power generation considering total material requirement"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...
That might be true with stockpiles of already-mined uranium, but we can definitely mine more uranium.
As for nuclear, it is disappointing that people can't see through PG&E's little tin cup scam. If we give them at least $1.4 billion, we will get at most 10 more years of Diablo. If we spend the same amount on wind, we'll get the same energy in the 10 years, and then we'll get 30 more years. It's a no-brainer and they should just kick PG&E in the teeth instead.
From a reliability perspective, all recurring load is beneficial, as it increases the overall capacity of the grid, insulating it from demand shocks, such as cooling during heatwaves.
But increased base load that can be easily time-shifted is _massively_ beneficial to the grid.
https://twitter.com/DolanGeraldine/status/156439235330088960...
Their choices are to start building reactors now, suck it up and remove sanctions against Russian energy or massive de-industrialization and back to the dark ages.
The only way to survive is massive wind, solar, storage, and transmission.
France could have led the way, but when they started building Flamanville last decade, they discovered that they nuclear doesn't really fit modern economies that well.
And with half their reactors offline for extended repairs right now, France has been a big part of Europe's energy crunch.
Macron has only proposed up to 14 new reactors, and there's no way they will come online before 2040.
Nuclear is a solution from the past, we need to build for the future.
https://balkangreenenergynews.com/hungary-to-build-paks-ii-n...
Ironically, Russian reactors would reduce dependence on Russian gas. That kindof hurts my brain.
That leaves China and South Korea as the only groups left with know how. And China is probably out for similar reasons. South Korea has had a few corruption issues but maybe they have fixed those.
I still have questions about whether advanced economies should be generating power from giant, complex construction projects when their manufacturing productivity is so massively dominant over construction prductivity. But I would love to be proven wrong about advanced economies' ability to build nuclear economically.
South Korea just singed a deal with Russia. They are going to build nuclear plant for Egypt: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220828-russia-south-kore...
Saying green energy just doesn't work is bullocks. Solar works great, can run your AC basically for free during daytime. It's not a complete solution, but it definitely will create less stress on the grid.
a) renewables provide the most power when power is used the most (during the day when the sun is shining to run a/c)
b) charging EVs at night will balance the grid
I don't think you can do B with A, right?
Of course having something useful is better than not having it.
The issue is, that a lot of people seem to be interested in replacing more-useful things (nuclear which provides power during the day for a/c and power at night for EVs) with less-useful things (solar which only provides power during the day).
A: Climate change will kill us all. Let's dismantle our socioeconomic system to prevent it!
B: How about nuclear power?
A: I don't want nuclear power!
A: I want to dismantle our socioeconomic system!
We are simply in the awful transitionary phase right now. It's not like starting up another Virgil C. Summer or Vogtle would have made a difference today.
> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
What are you talking about?