California went a record 98 days with 10 hours of electricity from renewables | Hacker News Reader

California went a record 98 days with 10 hours of electricity from renewables

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My electric rates more than doubled. No doubt for different reasons, including previously shelved infrastructure improvements such as underground lines.

For whatever reason, it hurts like hell.

Yeah, also the article says "The California Public Utilities Commission, for instance, authorized its three largest utilities to collect $27 billion in wildfire prevention and insurance costs from ratepayers between 2019 and 2023."

Is the retail electric rate really almost $0.30? Here in Maryland, it’s half that, and charging my EV is like $0.11. At $0.30, having an EV wouldn’t be any cheaper than buying gas!

Eventually oil will run out and the only vehicles driving around will be electric. It’s not about cost, it’s about sustainability.

Oil will never run out. Civilization will collapse (due to CO2 emissions) before that happens, which will prevent extraction of the remaining (hard to get) oil.

If fossil fuels actually runs out then we'll just use pure plant oils anyways or synthetically create them.

I thought part of the argument though was that renewables are now cheaper.

So what are you going to make the rest of the car from. I think that when oil runs out we’re all screwed, back to XIX century.

Synthetic lubricants have been doable for a long time. It’s not about eliminating the usage, it’s about slowing down consumption.

Even at $0.10 per kWh and Washington state’s top 3 gas prices in the country and $7,500 federal income tax credit, an EV does not pencil out to be cheaper than a gas vehicle, due to higher tire costs and depreciation due to battery replacement costs.

It was break even though, and the EV driving/re-fueling experiencing is much nicer for local travel, so it still makes sense to go with EV.

I wish it was $0.30... My rate is about 0.46.

If you look at lazards LCOE report over the past decade, solar and wind are plummeting the whole time.

We should be seeing historically low rates, but suspiciously the rates have been going up.

I get grid adaptation is a nice expense, but LCOE is LCOE: the leveled cost of energy.

Therr are lots of questions why America's economy had done better (statistically at least) than the rest of the world since covid... To me it is the rise of shale oil. Cheaper energy makes for a better economy.

Oil is a good short term help, but what we really need in America is an alternative energy strategy... A path to less than 10 cent energy from Alt energy.

It's won't happen under the Cheeto, but we are in the long term making ourselves less competitive worldwide not pursuing alt energy aggressively with a boatload of subsides.

In CA, in 2025, if you have PG&E it’s approx 55 cents/kwh at peak, non-peak rates are lower but the average ands up being close 50 cents. It’s close to the highest in the country.

Once MD has a few 100k+ acre wildfires that the power utility is liable for, I’m sure your rate will go up too.

I drove a leased PHEV in California from 2021 to 2024. Driving on electricity was more expensive!

Typically charged at L2 chargers at a retail rate of $0.39/kWh (admittedly during dinner peak after work -- off-peak was lower). The 17 kWh battery gave 40 miles of highway driving, for 16.575 cents/mi.

Gas during the same period peaked at $6.749/gal, although I went out of my way to fill up at Costco Gas and saw prices as low as $3.999/gal - weighted average over that three year period was $4.896/gal. The 7 gallon tank gave another 300 miles of highway driving, getting 9.331 cents/mi to 15.748 cents/mi.

At the same gas prices, a comparable gas-only car getting 29.1 MPG would be 13.8-23.2 cents/mi in gas costs.

Every year, I run the numbers to see how many years it will take for going completely off grid (to avoid paying for prior and current corruption at PG&E) to pay for itself.

Every year, it decreases.

SDG&E is equally bad or worse. And people in this region don’t all have Silicon Valley jobs to pay that bill. Apartments that barely run AC or heat often look at $300 monthly electric bills now.

Yup similar rates to PG&E although most of PG&Es customers don’t live in Silicon Valley.

Only Municipal power companies like in Sacramento, LA, Palo Alto & Santa Clara to name a few have rates that are 1/3 to 1/2 of PG&E rates. They pay a small grid interconnection fee to the other utilities but beyond that their cost structure is much lower and they don’t have to return dividends to stock holders.

Gas rates have a similar cost structure between municipal and public companies although for some reason there are fewer municipal gas companies at least for smaller cities.

The taxpayer is covering PG&E's wildfire liabilities and deferred maintenance costs. You know, instead of the PG&E shareholders. Capitalism only applies to poors, as we all know.

Rates are high because we’re paying for all the wildfires the electric utilities have started.

No rates are high excluding the wildfires which has a separate surcharge to finance.

But PGE having to provide power to wilderness areas in genera costs all PG&E customers to bear the cost and it’s a cost that Municipal power companies in CA don’t have and their rates an 1/2 or even more than PG&Es.

The article kind of jumbles the paper it's reporting on, the paper's headline might be better (or linking the paper directly):

"No blackouts or cost increases due to 100 % clean, renewable electricity powering California for parts of 98 days"

> This paper uses data from the world's 5th-largest economy to show no blackouts occurred when wind-water-solar electricity supply exceeded 100 % of demand on California's main grid for a record 98 of 116 days from late winter to early summer, 2024, for an average of 4.84 (and maximum 10.1) hours/day

Why are the live statistics so different than the conclusions in the paper?

Here you can see that CA power is more than double the cost of PJM, Southwest, and Midcontinent power. Whenever I look at it, CA is still be burning a huge amount of natural gas, especially overnight.

https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso

The paper is about short periods of a day when renewables are meeting more than 100% of demand.

If that broke the grid then there would be little future in building out wind and solar beyond a small fraction of energy.

The paper demonstrates it's not a problem, so further progress to making all of the grid's energy clean can continue.

"As a result of the increase in WWS supply and decrease in demand from 2019 to 2024, the daily-average gap between WWS supply and demand decreased gradually during that period. This culminated March 7 to June 30, 2024, when the 24-h average WWS supply reached 61.3 % of demand, versus 56.1 % of demand during the same period in 2023."

Also "peaked at 83.2 % of daily demand on May 25."

Note that demand in 2023 was 533.6 Gwh/day and went down to 529.1.

"between June 2023 and June 2024, nameplate capacities of utility solar, wind, and batteries increased by ∼18%, ∼4%, and 73.3%, respectively"

Cost and details of those capacity increases isn't mentioned but it seems that the average 31.7% increase in capacity only yielded a 5.2pp increase (mostly from the batteries which appear to handle 4 hours of load).

The study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812...

electric bills for average residential customers in this PG&E area have increased five times in one year. The average residential bill has increased 56% in three years. This is after a state-backed replacement of senior management after the court losses.

source: local news reporter Kevin Truong

Electricity is expensive in California, more at 11.

> The state went a record 98 of 116 days providing up to 10 hours of electricity with renewables alone

Nice...but "up to 10" < 24, and 98 < 116, and "how easy was the first 1/4?" is generally a crap indicator of how easily a job can be finished.

Real subheadline says:

> The state went a record 98 of 116 days providing up to 10 hours

Does the study clarify? "Up to” could mean almost anything, and could be rewritten ”no more than"

Yeah, I don’t see how this is the record. California went many years without producing more than 10 hours of electricity from renewables.

I wonder what the study actually found.

That sounds incredibly efficient.

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