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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Solar only increased a little bit, but imports went way up to push down natural gas.

California imported electricity is cleaner on average than internally generated electricity: lots of hydro and nuclear from neighbors, and the big one of the new SunZia massive wind farm. So directly displacing natural gas with imports is 100% win from a climate angle.

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Does "imported" in this context include places like Linden Ranch, Washington, which is home to a wind farm fully operated by Los Angeles Department of Water and Power?

Yes

CA only produces like 70% of the electricity it uses, they get power all the way from Canada not just WA

California often produces over 100% of the energy it uses, is sometimes a net exporter of power, and often curtails in-state solar and wind. For 2026 the import limit is 11 GW, so in-state production won't be less than about 81% at any given time.

Sure, but the net is that it imports like 30% of the electricity it uses.

The rapid addition of 16 GW worth of batteries play a significant role in reducing demand for natural gas, especially in summer. On a hot day with high A/C demand batteries can meet the demand around sunset, reducing the need to dispatch gas peaker plants.

Good point; it's hard to integrate that curve by eye but it does seem that batteries charged quite a bit more in 2026.

Reading off those hard to read graphs, it looks like both solar and imports are up about 3GW in 2025? Why do you say imports increased so much more than solar?

I could be misreading, but looking at the first graph, 2024-2025 had a fairly big jump in average GWh from solar. But 2025-2026 has a not very big jump? Very easy to misread, though.

Same with the very bottom set of three plots. Between 2025-2026, there's not much change in solar that I can see, but there's a huge change in night-time and morning imports, which depresses natural gas a ton.

Nighttime generation from SunZia would be a likely cause; at least in California night time wind is stronger than day time, usually, I wonder if New Mexico is the same.

The 2026 solar graph doesn't include summer. California produced solar power at about the same rate in January through May this year as it did January through December last year.

Summer is excluded from all years in the bottom and top graphs, the ones I was referring to.

Hybrid solar-battery setups that feed batteries directly when the price drops could be part of the answer.

I'd guess if the numbers for grid energy fed to batteries and the output from were compared it might be possible to discern if there was a source of energy that didn't go via the grid and so didn't show up on the stats.

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