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Comment by wbsss4412 | Hacker News Reader

The peaker plant/base load choice is based on aggregate load though, the power provider has little to no knowledge of what appliances households are using. An electric stove, and realistically anything else that uses electricity, is therefore using one or the other based on the usage pattern of the whole customer base at that time.

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> at that time.

Time is the more important thing here.

If you turn on your electric stove at 3pm, when the grid is stressed from the afternoon sun, your electricity is almost certainly coming from a peaker plant (unless you're in California, at which point the peaker-plants are coming on at 6pm or so).

If you turn on your electric stove at 2am in the middle of the night, the grid is almost not being used at all, and cheaper nuclear power / baseload plants are probably what powers your stove.

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Its not so much "The Grid has 30% renewable energy on the average". Its "At 2pm, the grid is mostly non-renewable due to the number of peaker plants" and "at 2am the grid is mostly renewable nuclear"

As solar panels get deployed, the times will change, but the concept won't change. Peaker plants are the only plants that can respond to consumers. Anyone using electricity at times outside of what renewable energies can provide will effectively be using natural gas.

>If you turn on your electric stove at 3pm, when the grid is stressed from the afternoon sun, your electricity is almost certainly coming from a peaker plant (unless you're in California, at which point the peaker-plants are coming on at 6pm or so).

For California, you can check the actual generation mix:

https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

For today:

                | MW @ 2AM | MW @ 3PM
    ------------+----------+---------
    Renewables  |   5337   | 17228
    Natural Gas |  10339   |  9568
    Hydro       |   1529   |  1178
    Imports     |   6216   |   778
    Batteries   |    -23   |   183
    Nuclear     |   2241   |  2240
    Coal        |      7   |     2

...so at 3PM ~31% of your electricity was produced by natural gas, and at 2AM ~40% of your power was produced by natural gas.

>> (unless you're in California, at which point the peaker-plants are coming on at 6pm or so).

California has a lot of solar panels.

The natural gas peakers come on at 6pm as the sun sets, but the day is still hot so AC is on.

At 6pm (1800) today, its reporting:

* 8983 Renewables

* 11933 Nat Gas

* 3403 Hydro

* 5948 Imports

* 1351 Batteries

* 2235 Nuclear

* 1 Coal

Won't grid-scale batteries replace natural gas peaker plants in the long term?

That appears to be the plan/long term sustainable grid scale storage of some sort.

There’s also the potential for demand smoothing.

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