Once again, California exceeds 100% of demand on its main grid with
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And coal from Utah. That's still huge at night.
Reading more, there are two high voltage DC lines into SoCal: one from a coal plant in Delta Utah (2.4 Gw, not just from that plant, but let’s say majority coal), the other from a hydro conversion station on the Columbia in Oregon/washington (3.1 Gw). Looking at the map above it looked like the latter one terminated in Las Vegas but I guess it actually goes into SoCal.
Quick search shows at least 80% of my power comes from nuclear and natural gas, so it's not like we're putting out rediculous emissions over here.
Just thought it was important to put into perspective the cost of this.
And if we all paid for externalities, the cost of fossil fuels would be much higher than they are.
The CPUC seems on course to a pricing change in CA which will see our price per kwh drop, but will introduce a new fixed fee just to be connected to the grid, under the claim that buildings which generally are powered by their own solar/batteries are not contributing to the cost of e.g. wildfire risk remediation and tree-trimming. But I haven't seen a clear analysis showing the breakdown of how much of costs go to proactive maintenance, vs generation, vs giant settlements for having burned whole towns, etc.
[1] https://www.lvenergy.com/energy-efficiency/learn-about-green...
But at 13c you are also not paying what your power costs. Someone else does (or will eventually have to).
(Not sure the headline makes sense without that?)
They even say so in the first paragraph.
> A voluntary alert advising Californians to conserve energy during a specific time frame was issued in mid-June 2021 to “help balance supply and demand” on the power grid during an extreme heatwave in the region. Unplugging electric vehicles during peak usage times was one recommended measure included in a list of power-saving strategies issued by the California System Operator.
Couldn't find a 2023 news article though
Kinda weird actually that the NYT spun that into an electric-car issue.
https://www.caiso.com/Documents/california-iso-extends-flex-...
As a society (natural monopoly), we pay to meet peak demand. In fact, most of the cost of electricity (in the US, in most markets...) is not the marginal cost of generation, but the amortization of fixed costs.
My reducing the peak demand, we reduce the need to build new infrastructure that is unnecessary for all but 8755 hours a year.
Again, progress is nice. But I'm still skeptical how well the state's grid can handle another major statewide heatwave, to say nothing about the transition to EVs.
This was always the future, it simply arrived earlier than expected.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... | https://archive.today/8Dy4D ("China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants")
[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/04/12/catl-unveils-first-ma... ("CATL unveils first mass-producible battery storage with zero degradation")
[3] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... ("Lithium-ion battery capacity to grow steadily to 2030")
[4] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202 ("U.S. battery storage capacity expected to nearly double in 2024")
That would be the "killer app" for these stellar renewable supply milestones.
https://www.mr-sustainability.com/stories/2021/overbuilding-...
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/14/overbuilding-solar-at...
It is much better to use today's money to build more renewables instead of wasting it on expensive storage. Some storage makes sense to reduce the evening peak. But we will have a better idea of what storage we need, and what storage is cheapest to build in a decade when there are a lot more renewables.
As an energy storage solution, pumping water up into a tower and then letting it drop during high demand is simple. Its earth friendly because then at peaks it can take some of the load off the generation, which could be less environmentally friendly. Renewables are better than fossil fuels, and not spending the energy to build solar panels is better than the process to create solar panels.
As long as it's not a toxic battery, then it should be a pretty good interim.
This is a PGE problem. They have jacked up our rates to fix their lack of maintenance and planning... I reman suspect that they will do anything of benefit for the state or their customers. Meanwhile we have a mandate from the state to make stoves, heaters and cars electric real soon!
As a Bay Area resident im going to say this out loud: between the states mandates and PGE's prices it looks a hell of a lot like we just redlined a big chunk of the bay.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
Cool, but still a long ways to go.
Bad news for companies that make their profit by burning dead dinosaurs.
>The US has posted its largest annual volume of new capacity in 20 years [with most of the growth coming from renewables] per @BloombergNEF using @EIAgov data
https://twitter.com/ShanuMathew93/status/1779902695719006648
> Solar and battery storage to make up 81% of new U.S. electric-generating capacity in 2024
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424#:~:tex....
Are you talking worldwide? Or in the US? Because in the US and many other advanced economies total energy consumption is still increasing, but the total amount from fossil fuels is shrinking.
At a certain point it is going to no longer make economic sense to continue to build new fossil fuel based energy production (it already doesn't if externalities are accounted for).
It is a big hill to climb, but as the saying goes, "people vote with their wallets". Economic forces are pretty hard to resist.
In the US primary energy from fossil fuel consumption was higher in 2007 than it was in 2022: 85.78 quads in 2007, 79.102 quads in 2022.
Production is unfortunately still rising because fuel exports provide an outlet for production that isn't consumed domestically.
This presents a handful of challenges:
* Generators make a lot of their money when they run. WWS can displace thermal units, reduce their runtime/profitability and make them less economically viable. (Even though they currently provide essential services that cannot be replicated with wind or solar)
* Solar falling off at night (or during an eclipse) requires thermal generation to step in to make up the loss. Just as an example, the eclipse cost TX something like 14,000MW of generation over four hours. That's ~25% of grid load around the time. They had to turn on 14,000MW of generation over two hours, turn it back off over the next two, and then ramp it all back up as night fell. This is not easy to do.
* Wind and Solar are typically both distributed and remote. Power needs to be moved over long distances from many places. This adds both cost and complexity, but also the need for reactive support for voltage stability, etc.
I tend to support wind/solar, but you shouldn't lose sight of the fact it's very complex to get it right.
Also, I don't want a nuclear power plant in my backyard.
I know that's the problem :)
I understand there are issues, however...
The problem with nuclear is the same one that it's always been: it's too expensive. Nobody wants to go bankrupt.
Meanwhile we have cheap batteries and super super cheap solar and wind to charge them.
EIA said developers expect to add 30GW in 2024 here:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202
Note the 7GW of batteries already in California, 3GW in Texas. Texas will move much more quickly than California now because it's a profit based market with few barriers to entry.
There were other estimates in 2024 were for 14.1 GW for this year, but IMHO 30 GW is much more likely:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424
We are at the start of an exponential growth curve. As prices fall, more demand appears. There are plans for massive amounts of battery production capacity. BNEF has tracked 7.9TWh/year of planned factory capacity by the end of 2025 (probably only 50%-70% of that will get developed):
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-...
However, this is exactly on track with the estimates I heard, 3 years ago now, of 10x growth in production capacity every 5 years. By 2031 we should see 20-30TWH/year of production.
Plus, they're really not that toxic. Not as bad as fly ash from burning coal, or fracking fluid from natural gas, for example.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2023/11/02/redwood-...
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/
(Redwood Materials was founded by Tesla's CTO co-founder JB Straubel)
However, as it is, coal plants already cost more than solar or wind. Almost all of that cost is in the turbines.
Unfortunately, nuclear plants use similar turbines, and the coal industry has already cost-optimized the death out of them. It is unlikely there are significant improvements coming.
So, even if the rest of the nuclear plant was free, it would still be uncompetitive on a raw $/kwh basis.
Cost of mining and transporting the coal?
(“Turbine” also includes stuff like the boiler, generator, etc, etc. I should have written “cost of the plant, minus the coal furnace and the fuel”)
"The licensing process – something that can take more than a decade to complete – consists of a series of approvals by the NRC, including issuance of design certification, early site permits, limited work authorizations, construction permits, operating licenses and combined licenses for new nuclear power facilities."
The problem with nuclear isn't that it's at-cost, the problem is that construction projects balloon into financial disasters that are too risky. Check out what happened to France's Areva due to constructing the Olkiluoto. It is literally owned by the French government to bail it out from their financial disaster. Or what happened to Westinghouse and parent company Toshiba due to trying to construct AP1000s.
We have better alternatives that are cheaper and are not such massive single points of failure. Right now the US government is throwing money hand over fist at nuclear, and if the industry can make a go of it and manage to construct some more, great, I have no problem with that.
But nuclear is fundamentally inefficient, expensive, and bad source of power compared to the alternatives. It's always always overpromised and underdelivered. Seemingly nobody in the industry has every made an honest construction estimate. I mean, of course there were a few successful construction projects, but on average it's been a disaster. Throw another $100B at it, see if somebody finally figures it out after 70 years, but it seems pretty doubtful. Nobody left in the industry seems to be capable or smart enough to deliver.
It's a weird thing. American transit advocates will cry themselves hoarse that public transit should be free or run at a loss but almost every system in the world that's good (TfL, HK Metro, JR East) makes money. But every American system loses money hand over fist and sucks.
This makes it quite clear to me. It's very easy to be shitty losing money. It's very hard to be shitty and make money.
So the problem isn't that my model isn't capturing a variable, it's that your test isn't capturing a variable and is taking in erroneous data points due to diverging definitions of your metric.
How do you define your "back yard"? I mean, perhaps very few people are willing to literally abut a nuclear power plant, but how far are most people OK with it? Looks like I'm about 150 miles from the nearest one, and about 180 miles from the second-nearest[0].
There's a lot of empty land in the US. Sites suitable for a nuclear plant are definitely more likely to be occupied (due to plants needing to be near bodies of water for cooling), but still, we can probably build a lot more.
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/images/US_nuclea...
Why would you not want a nuclear power plant near you? I would love to live by one.
We got a subsidy for living within 10 miles. I don't know the details, but basically a "hey sorry if things go wrong" check.
The one thing with nuclear that many people seem to either not be aware of under play is the thermal pollution. The heat generated and pumped into the rivers does some gnarly stuff, including affecting the o2 and ph of the water, drastically changing the ecosystem in the area.
I spent the first 25 years of my life (and my parents spent almost their entire lives) living about 15 miles from a nuclear power plant without any issues.
> this won't work when conditions aren't right... like on a cloudy day
30 of the last 38 days had 100% renewables covering demand. There was no power outages during the other 8 days.
How is this interpreted in any other way than California renewables provide significant coverage of power demand, and California has the infrastructure for the other moments in time.
For between 15 mins and 6 hours.
Last I checked there are 24 hours in the day.
(Edit to add: I love solar. I have solar panels installed on my house. I sell more solar than I use from the grid. I also have to rely on grid power for 14-18 hours each day.)