California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days
electrek.co
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It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery.
I made a website to track this: https://energy.antizone.online
During the day, a huge chunk of the produced energy is sold to other countries, that's why I claim that 70% of its electricity is from renewables, even though the production share only accounts for 66%.
IN PARTS of the country. In other regions (Catalunya, Andalucia) there is an ongoing drought which is severely impacting everyone and yeah, hydro-electrical companies had done some, let say questionable decisions regarding their water reservoirs.
It's easier to drink water than electrons.
Figures. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.
...I'll show myself out.
Nuclear costs the same thing whether you use it or not. If you meet the peak energy demand with nuclear you might as well save the construction of intermittent renewables.
Let's overbuild a mix of renewables and nuclear, then use the excess power to do things like green hydrogen.
Or maybe we will find other uses when electricity becomes too cheap to meter.
Unfortunately they aren't the people who drive energy policy in practice or who fund new generation (most of the time, at least).
From capitalist point of view, it's always easier to turn profit by market speculation[1], with providing gas turbine backup second.
[1] I work for considerably big wind power company building off shore wind turbines. Our main revenue source is market speculation :<
That's 10 years to build alternatives assuming no further extensions or new nuclear.
Why not? Japan was building nuclear plants in 4-5 years (sort by "Begin building"):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
Standardize on one design and you can churn them out like widgets: France built 56 reactors in 15 years.
Want reliable power 24/7 without fossil fuels? Will it: make a policy decision and follow through.
https://www.energate-messenger.com/news/239393/germany-becom...
Additional article highlighting the role of electricity exporter of France: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-07/france-is...
There are good potential industrial loads for that intermittent extra energy (nuclear or solar): desalination, CO2->methane, air->ammonia, etc.
However, battery is improving the capacity factor of renewables; especially solar by allowing two things:
- when there's too much of it, you can charge batteries with energy that would otherwise be curtailed/wasted. - when there's not enough solar, you can discharge batteries.
Both effects help dampen peaks and dips in renewable energy supply and demand. I.e. it helps flatten the curve similar to what you point out is the case with nuclear. The first effect is often over looked: we are actively curtailing renewable energy that we don't know what to do with. People talk about shortages but not about surpluses. And that's actually a lot of energy. It also leads to the fallacy in believing that having lots of EVs increases energy demand when actually it also allows for better utilization of surpluses. Which dampens the impact this has.
Grids are bottle-necked on a lack of cable capacity. We have overproduction of energy in one region and shortages in another. Northern and southern Germany are a good example where on a windy day in the north, the wind energy can't get to the industries in the south that need it. So, they fire up coal plants. The same is the case in the UK where getting wind energy from Scotland south is a problem.
Cables and batteries help improve utilization of renewables. The main thing that drives these things is cost. Nuclear is costly and very slow to deploy. Realistically, any nuclear we don't have right now, won't be there for at least a decade or two. And that's if we would be really diligent about getting to that right now, which of course we aren't.
In the time until then, we'll be deploying solar by the TW/year. Same with batteries. And wind is also growing rapidly. And of course laying some more cables is a lot less controversial than building new nuclear plants. There has been quite a bit of talk of upgrading existing cables with better ones to effectively double capacity. This is even less controversial since the permitting is a lot easier and faster. In short, we'll deploy orders of magnitude more of all this than nuclear, and a lot earlier too. So much that nuclear might turn out to be a rounding error.
20% is more than enough to modulate side by side with renewables.
The French Grid does that all the time intraday.
https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/18/french-gove...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-14/france-an...
EDF as hugely profitable and brought back billions to its main stock holder (the French state) for multiple decades.
The recent debt crisis has mainly two causes:
- The state has used EDF to shield consumers against the 2022-2023 energy price increases. EDF has taken the losses directly for the state.
- The results of terrible energy policies the last decades (attempt to reduce nuclear at 50% and mainly the infamous ARENH).
What happened is pretty typical of when you have a state is directly managing a private actor: Incompetent politicians swiping their foots on the company to satisfy their own demagogy.
The reason the French can get away with it is because they have to. If you have this much nuclear on your grid, you can't get around it, the reactors need to follow demand. The good news is that because they have so many reactors, they can have them take turns poisoning their fuel and still have enough time to slowly come back up again. So each night a different reactor ramps down and gets poisoned.
Also, French reactors can take the financial hit of decreasing output much better than American reactors. Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like that. They need to run at 100% all year, or lose billions.
They do it intra-day. You can currently follow that through their monitoring [^1]
> Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like tha
Nuclear reactors tends to be hugely profitable considering their lifetime (80y in USA) but requires an enormous CAPEX.
Like most infrastructure, any attempt to try to fund them entirely privately with investor seeking a 9% quick ROI is doomed to fail.
Hinkley Point is a very good example of that. It is estimated that the price per MWH would be more than halved if the project would have a funding by public bond instead of the current private investor deathtrap.
[^1]: https://energygraph.info/d/gr_6-QW4z/unit-availability?orgId...
A lot of times connectivity impacts site selection of projects. A wind farm needs to have good wind, reasonable neighbors, and access to loads. There's articles about not being able to build more wind in northern england because there's not enough transmission infra to get the power where it needs to be.
How do you mean?
Nuclear power plants can scale with demand. They're primarily steam generators and those feed turbines. You have many mechanisms you can use to control total power output in these systems.
In the sense that you're wasting fuel lifetime, to a certain extent, but I imagine that also varies with the level of reactivity currently allowed in the vessel by the control rods.
Nuclear makes for square supply curves which are kind of hard to handle, especially if you have a large percentage of your supply from a few reactors like they do in Finland.
https://www.ehpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Additional-s...
You seem to have no idea whatsoever, what is currently going on in Germany, because literally the opposite is true. Germany is trying to practice austerity and keeping its so called "debt brake" (German states have to have a balanced budget, federal state can take up to 0,35% of GDP in new loans) by cutting subsidies, which is why farmers have been protesting in Berlin etc.
This isn't true — prices are the same throughout a zone, but Germany and Sweden are not in the same zone. Sweden has several zones. The total possibly export from Sweden to neighbouring countries is not unlimited, which is the reason for the boundaries.
https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/the-power-market/Bidding-ar...
So even if it was a second order effect I had to pay much more than ever before due to increased spot prices in other zones.
Except sweden isn't self sufficient at all with electricity… Can I really say that I'm 100% renewable if I have a tiny solar panel at home, and for the rest I use power from somewhere else?
Sweden exported electricity almost every hour for 2023 (import 40 hours of 8760 = 0.5%). Most of the hours when importing electricity was due to low and negative prices when operators could use water reservoirs as batteries. Currently, there is an obvious overcapacity with an export of almost 20% of production.
https://www.iea.org/countries/sweden
Renewables: 66.9% share of power generation, 2022
Sweden's wind is projected to grow: https://balticwind.eu/swedens-wind-power-surge-a-positive-ou...
but Sweden's grid demand is also projected to rise: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/swedish-power-demand...
I'm not sure Sweden's at the 90+% mark yet ... and besides, that's not counting energy demand in the transport sector and non power generation applications.
The headline on the original article seems unhelpful and perhaps deliberately misleading, but unless I’m reading the graphs wrong (quite possible!) this also doesn’t seem, like, a 15 minute window at 2 a.m. where unexpectedly strong winds created a temporary blip of excess production.
I don't think parent actually clicked around in the link he provided.
We are way way past that at this point. The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day. Because of solar PV, the cheapest generation now, the daytime electricity supply is actually more than we need in California. Solar farms (and also wind farms)get curtailed here due to supplying more than the grid can take at times; this is usually for several hours.
Source; reporter covering solar news through interviews with grid operators, solar developers and policymakers since 2008
It's fine to say that California is producing more than it needs on net, but adding up total production over 24h and subtracting total consumption over 24h and seeing a positive value isn't meaningful if you're actually dependent on conventional sources for 12 hours a day.
But sure, it's more than a few minutes.
The article says renewable supply exceeded demand for “0.25-6 h per day”. This is great, but its not most of the day.
The big driver of renewables in California is solar - check the graph for the whole of yesterday, and you'll see how different the picture is during the day.
Yes, there's still a gap overnight which over time will come to be filled by more wind and battery storage. But California's really lucky with solar - it's already so cheap and easy that it makes battery storage financially viable even using today's tech. It's now just a matter of continuing to scale it out...
You can see that last summer, with so much more "powerful" sun, the net demand never went below 2300 MW. Last year went down to 2227 MW. Today, we are down to 366 MW. We manage to produce so much more solar in the last year that the net demand minus renewables went down by ~1800 MW. That means a few more years of improvements like that and we will have excess power generation of solar/wind at least during the day for most days. So if we start storing that excess generated power, we will start making a dent on other times of max power (since we can discharge batteries when max demand is needed).
That's the plan on how to keep lowering the net demand more and more.
Don't know him personally, but here's a tangent for the interested: In the first year of my PhD, I read several of his papers from the 90's on the GATOR family of climate models. At the time, I was interested in a potential intersection with my field. One thing that struck me was the absolutely exquisite attention to detail in one of his papers made to model the perspiration of water vapor from leaf stomata in forests (don't have the paper handy but can find if anyone's interested). It was really quite impressive.
Anyway, just thought I'd share the anecdote :)
"The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day ..."
So it's not actually that California's electricity demands were met by renewables 100% of the time as one might think, given the headline.
As far as I can tell, it's not even that, disregarding the intermittency problem, total energy demand was met, on average.
It's just that sometime during the day 100% was hit.
But the falling costs, the simplicity and the very low maintenance costs will trump variability. The grid will be built around that, it's kind of obvious at this point. One of the fastest growing solar areas in the world is Texas which has very loose rules on what you can deploy to the grid. So if you leave it to the market, it will only deploy renewables and storage. Everything else is dead until we reach a point where renewables meet their limitation. But again, this hasn't happened yet in 30 years of poor predictions on what those limitations are.
Remarkable, especially considering California’s population is 39 million people.
All else being equal, it is easier to accomplish, the larger the population, as the statistics will be somewhat in your advantage.
simple example: if you want to be on 100% renewables on your self, your energy production needs to meet your energy consumption 100% of the time. The moment you pool with a neighbor, that no longer is true; if you need more than you produce, but your neighbor needs less than they produce, the pair of you still can be 100% on renewables.
Now, energy production and energy demand between neighbors are highly correlated, so the effect isn’t very high for n=2 (but even then, it’s easier to buy a mix of solar and wind once you pool with a group than when doing it alone), but with millions of people spread out over hundreds of kilometers, that changes.
If it exceeded 100% energy demand, why were they still using methane?
California met its ELECTRICITY demand by renewables. They still imported boatloads of oil, petrol and nat gas as energy too.
This is still a great milestone! So not trying to downplay it, but we need to be realistic about our total energy use.
Anyway, I am just silly old person. So let's march towards bright future. We need solar powered battle tanks and solar powered fighter jets!
As for distributed energy, it is not "production" but "storage". Even desert people with Toyotas can do it.
Somehow 100% renewable but the most expensive electric I've ever paid for. How much does 2000kWh cost again?
Also, the most prone to fire-hazard because of above-ground electric. Remember when PG&E caused the most destructive wildfire in California history?
Weird rub-it-out article IMO most likely paid for by some PAC. With all the money pumped into California power projects, it never equaled lower power prices, reliability, or safety...
That leaves me to my original question. How much 2000kWh cost in California again?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40043155 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40045252
Some more discussion:
That's nice and all, but 15 minutes is a much lesser achievement than the headline implies.
I know, the amount of net electricity per added total energy might end up no worse than in a fusion power best case scenario, but still... When you add the climate effect of re rocket launches required I don't think it could ever become worthwhile.
“a specially designed photovoltaic cell could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter under ideal conditions at night, about a quarter of what a conventional solar panel can generate in daytime”
The idea is to capture the energy that escapes into space when solar panels cool down during the night.
Next is 12 hours, after that a day and then finally months and years.
Incredible progress is being made.
Well, here it would be: between 2% and 25% of the time, it works every time
https://www.caiso.com/Documents/SummerMarketPerformanceRepor... page 22
December, on the other hand, is a bit of a problem
In 20yr nigeria alone will have a larger population than the whole of europe, and is industrializing.
Total carbon consumption by westerns is always rising due to shifting it to imports; and in any case, we're only 1bn people.
Actually stopping carbon consumption by westerns rising is a "war footing" economic programme; and actually stopping climate change requires changing the industrialization trajectories of many non-western countries.
We do export a ridiculous amount of food and green technologies.
> and actually stopping climate change requires changing the industrialization trajectories of many non-western countries.
So.. colonialism by a new name. I had really hoped we grew out of this by now.
There's zero economic, social or political cost to western policies at the moment and they arent reducing CO2 emissions. It's very much "green theatre".
The goal is to stop the actual levels of Co2 ppm from rising. This is all fairly meaningless; it does nothing to change the actual outcome.
That said, opening solar farms to shut down coal plants is a net good regardless.
At all? There's no acceptable ceiling here? We're just going to slam the door on the entirety of Africa yet again?
The rate of Co2 emissions is itself increasing y-o-y. We're still accelerating.
If we're truly that concerned about it, then we need to get to work on carbon capture and conversion, and do our part to be carbon negative so that non industrialized areas of the world have an opportunity to catch up.
And this isn't just about industrialization, it's about quality of life, it's about longevity, it's about wealth. Pretending that CO2 is the only concern leaves everything else on the floor. And without any diplomacy, this is the kind of policy that starts wars.
Up to you if you actually want to solve the problem in the long term or not. So, again, what's an acceptable upper limit?
in otherwords, our own deindustrialization is irrelevant
I mean if people want to believe all this matters, so be it; but it doesnt. The goal isnt to replace coal power stations with solar ones, it's to stop co2 levels from rising. They're rising 20ppm/decade, iirc, and none of this does anything to change that. maybe it stops them from rising faster than they would have done.