CA grid: real-time status
caiso.com
caiso.com
Also with these flex alerts, PG&E was willing to pay us $2 a kwh below normal usage between 4-9pm
https://energyupgradeca.org/flex-alert?utm_source=aw&utm_med...
They need a rate that is proportional to marginal carbon emissions. Then, I could set my battery to that. It could look at the forecast for tomorrow, and make a killing by doing the obvious thing.
Grr. The legislation around here is decades behind the technology.
Basically, I want net metering to be proportional to carbon (and therefore peaker plant use). It's less about the amount of money I get back.
In related news, my batteries aggressively charge themselves during the morning CO2 peak because power is cheap then. They should sell solar production into the grid during those hours and start charging at ~ 10 am.
Some jurisdictions give you a much better deal than they ought to, some much worse.
It probably won’t stabilize into something more reasonable until people who both use and produce power are much more common.
The problem with peaker plants is it’s expensive keeping them around when they only operate for a short time, and bigger peaks mean more capacity needed.
Maybe I don't understand.
Then you would receive very little compensation for the useless solar you send to the grid at mid day and pay very high prices for any power you use from the grid at night.
Plus, they should pay more for peak usage hours (4-9pm and 6-10am) than they charge over night (the overnight power produces less than 70% as much carbon as peak power in the morning and evening), so I'd still end up selling back at a profit vs. storing electricity for my own use. Also, the cost minimizer in the battery would then charge the battery at noon, when electricity is worthless (unlike what it does now).
I want to set the battery to "minimize atmospheric CO2". The details of my power bill are rounding errors vs. the ongoing damages I am already incurring from climate change.
If you can't, and I don't think you can, why do you claim his solar is useless?
I'd guess a early-spring/ late-fall weekend might be the best place to find such a day.
(Weirdly, just checking this myself and his complaint that the battery charges at 9am seems to actually be the best time for a battery to charge as net demand is lowest then)
There's been lots of headlines over the last few years about negative prices and too much solar, but any time I checked, they generally still have fossil generation running.
Here's some modelling suggesting 120 Billion saving from distributed solar and batteries:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f4637895cfc8d77860d0...
Why would you take the number before grid wind, grid solar, and home solar?
I think the relevant number is is demand minus grid solar, grid wind, grid nuclear, and probably hydro. My point is that it is inefficient.
It makes no sense to idle a commercial solar or wind farm with a purchase contract so that the electric company can also purchase residential solar.
It would be entirely different if the electric company had massive storage, but they don't. The residential solar generators do. It makes most sense for the electric company to buy residential solar only when it has been time shifted to when grid farms are not producing.
Once they deploy 5G or so more you might start to hit this problem, but it's never been a problem till now.
Value of solar tariffs that work this out in detail get pushback from grid operators for being too high, same as net metering. It's almost as if they don't like paying a fair rate for energy and their excuses are exactly that.
I have no idea how it is determined.
I'm complaining because they set the incentives wrong, and the incentives control the (closed source) battery software's policy. Therefore, the equipment I bought is offsetting way less carbon than it could.
Now, multiply that waste by the number of home batteries in California.
If setup correctly you could possibly deliver 200 amps to the grid whilst also consuming 200 amps yourself.
10kW at 240V is 41 amps. Our connection to the grid is hundreds of amps.
There are two reasons I can't do it: This is a Tesla pilot, and it is not a Tesla system.
More fundamentally, this is a weird emergency response program. They should just set the rate structure so that people always have a financial incentive to minimize CO2 and also stabilize the grid.
The rate structure does neither of those things, so we end up with lots of idling home batteries during peak demand events like the current one. On normal days, the batteries idle while peaker plants uselessly spew CO2.
(Have to be in PGE territory I believe unfortunately)
Yahoo claims the last record was set in 2017.
That 2006 peak is hours earlier than the others too for the same reason.
So all new solar etc coming on line is barely replacing capacity lost. And California has been growing.
That's a good thing. Cheaper energy, less death and disease.
Unfortunately, OASIS is a really crazy legacy-application, so linking to it is difficult. If you launch OASIS from the "outlook" page, you can click on "System Operating Messages" to get a realtime feed of different messages from the system, for example.
The heat is widespread, and there isn't enough capacity.
Maybe in parts of the state, but all over northern CA there are places forecasting a few degrees warmer. Plus the overnight will be high enough that buildings won’t lose as much retained heat, and will start out slightly warmer.
I underestimated the heat in northern California extending past the initial wave.
Anyway, we clearly need to make grid improvements.
But there were big problems in OK and KS because the weather doesn't end at the grid boundary and the grid doesn't have an infinite carrying capacity. Just because there might be extra generation available somewhere doesn't mean that the lines between generation and consumption have the capacity to carry it.
As far as everybody else, I think the calls for updating the grid for everyone have been around for a while and that's why Congress set aside a bunch of money for it? Because it was needed and everybody agrees? No need to make this partisan. I think everybody favors a more robust grid, even folks who voted against the legislation for other reasons.
We also had a shortage a few months ago when solar farms were not producing enough because of cloud coverage in west Texas, along with wind turbines not being propelled enough - and brutally high temperatures. That other time a “help” from other grids would come in handy and there was not much TX could have prepared on its own.
All of which is to say, being on a larger grid only helps if everyone else isn't peaking at the same time you are.
Check out [1], and look at the DC Ties numbers at the bottom.
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[1] https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_cond...
https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/identify_p...
https://up.codes/viewer/california/ca-energy-code-2019/chapt...
I know the ones I’ve seen had have little or no insulation to speak of, and I don’t recall a double pane window.
Per the wiki article (since I'm too lazy to go to the library), California was first in the nation with energy efficiency standards in 1974 and currently has the lowest energy consumption per capita in the United States. However lax things were in the early 80s in California, things were/are more lax in Texas.
[0] https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_cond...
[1] https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2022/07/20/ERCOT%20Monthly%...
Both grids have challenges in extreme weather. In 2020 in California I lost power for about 4 hours due to too much load. I got to see the stars. In 2021 32 people died and $195B in damage was done when power went out in Texas. Extreme weather events are hard, and maybe they are more common than we think?
[1] https://www.caiso.com/documents/californiaisopeakloadhistory...
* Residential use: 13%
* Commercial use: 12%
* Industrial: 54%
* Transport: 24% (incl. commercial)
Hard to compare with CA though because their data is probably even more skewed by 2020 special factors.
Filtering the LLNL Sankey diagrams to Texas (last available seems to be 2019) at [1] sadly doesn't break down the Industrial use, but I'd guess it was for oil wells and such (and I'm disappointed I didn't think about that earlier). The summary at [2] includes the simple quote:
> Texas leads the nation in energy consumption across all sectors and is the largest energy-consuming state in the nation. The industrial sector, including the state's refineries and petrochemical plants, accounts for more than half of the state's energy consumption and for 23% of the nation's total industrial sector energy use.
But both the Sankey diagram and that wording suggest direct use of the energy (e.g., onsite burning of petroleum) and not anything related to the grid. I'm more confused than we began this :).
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/texas-grid-operator-warns-p...
I definitely suggest Practical Engineering's power grid series for a better explanation about how this stuff works, but grid balancing is certainly nontrivial.
Edit: You can actually see realtime transmission outage data via OASIS (http://oasis.caiso.com/mrioasis/logon.do), under the Transmission -> Transmission Outages tab. There are other tabs in OASIS that show related grid factors too.
The authors do not seem to realize that transition to EVs will require to at least double the available electrical capacity.
If a power plant takes ten years from beginning to first megawatt, you need to be approving plants ten years before the one they’ll replace goes offline.
They also don’t cite any credible sources for their claims that CA is headed to a power glut.
But I also knew about it because of tracking info.
Should be possible to get a flight from Ontario, CA to Ontario, CA.
CAISO encompasses a wider region than just California -- this reflects the state of everything managed by the Western Energy Imbalance Market.
The reasons for this are varied: in order to be able to adequately supply load you need physical lines connecting the grid together. One single line isn't enough to actually carry all of the electricity from A to B, because they're physical wires that have load limits (e.g., due to thermals). So while the western half of the US is widely connected, there are spots where more lines could be built to fix the imbalance. CAISO lately has been trying to onboard as many providers as are willing to, because it's a win-win (they get paid ridiculously high prices during events like this and the grid gets more stable).
And by the time the demand in CA is high, the sun has set on many neighbors.
And why pretend not to know why CA favors electric cars? I'm pretty sure you're aware of the debate over climate change causing extreme weather events -- including events that cause strain on the grid. One can argue California is moving too quickly, I think. They in fact may end up pushing back their deadlines--I think that's likely. But to suggest electric cars are an unmanageable problem?
And car charging is a great sort of grid demand, because it's easily shiftable to other time periods. Most cars are parked nearly all the time.
And as car companies become more enlightened and allow vehicle to grid, scenarios like this will vanish. It wouldn't take a large fraction of cars in a V2G program to eliminate the problems here, especially since cars are so close to the load, which also helps with transmission and distribution. 1 million cars would be 5-10GW, completely eliminating any worries for this week.
And this is without the many GW of grid storage that is due to go online, but temporarily delayed because of COVID pandemic related parts delays.
Also, the state is literally burning down due to climate change. If you want to talk about standards of living for lower classes, look at what our PM 2.5 levels do during fire season. (On those days, the middle class and up buys HEPA filters close ther windows and crank up the AC.)