To summarize, CA has to burn a lot of natural gas and import a lot of (mostly non-renewable) electricity from other states at night, and even more in the shoulder periods at morning and evening. Only untold billions in new batteries at the expense of ratepayers, and (barring storage breakthroughs) new nuclear or geothermal generation will fundamentally change this situation.
A cool thing is that you can see grid demand drop hard during the days when behind-the-meter rooftop solar is on.
It looks like you're referring to the "In-State Electricity Source Percentages" table. According to that table, natural gas reached its maximum share in 2014 at 61.3%, when solar was only 5.3%. In 2017 natural gas was down to 43.4% and solar was up to 11.8%. California is making progress at a good pace.
I was being sarcastic. California gets 17% of their electricity from solar and 8% wind, but their current issues are during a sunny heat wave so solar should be going like gangbusters.
Solar generation in CA was peaking at ~12GW yesterday [1] (Control-F "Origin of electricity in the last 24 hours"), with natural gas peaking a bit more than that at ~16GW-20GW. The state can replace ~75% of natural gas fired generation if it covers its canals with solar [2] [3]. Yes, there is a supply shortage; California simply isn't creating robust enough incentives/reducing paperwork to increase deployment velocity (there is roughly 100GW of renewable generation in CAISOs interconnect queue [4]). Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico/Baja are also next door, and that solar potential is significant [5]. The sun is shining when AC loads are at their max.
TLDR Build more renewables, transmission, and battery storage; shift flexible loads to when renewable power is generating.
California is sort of a mess. I think it's all regulatory capture.
Most places, you use more of a resource and you get a volume discount. In california it goes up from .25 to .31 to .39 cents per kwh.
meanwhile the wholesale price of power is no different from anywhere else, maybe .03c/kwh.
One "bright side" is that it makes it practical for people to install solar and at some point their cost drops to zero. So there's a viable market for solar.
Just because there is a lot of green energy doesn't mean that everything is peachy. California also does a fair amount of importing as well during parts of the day with low solar. Also, just because you have solar doesn't mean everything is ok. The grid dispatcher in California (CAISO) has to make sure reliable power is available 24/7 for consumers and industry. This can be very challenging due to solar which is behind the meter (makes it difficult to forecast load) and can disappear quickly leaving you in a lurch. Vox has a pretty good video on YouTube on the infamous "duck curve" that you should watch. Essentially, you have a ton of behind the meter solar during the midday that suddenly disappears during the end of the day. It is difficult to forecast for this. You have to have other non-renewable baseload (gas, nuclear, coal, or maybe renewable like hydro)online to take the place of solar when it goes away....you're essentially paying for reliability in that case. Battery storage would work too in place of fossil fuels, but you would need a LOT of it, and we're not quite there.
The economic dispatch that CAISO runs optimizes for the cheapest dispatch to meet load and reserves like the other north American grid operators like ERCOT, PJM...etc. That is essentially the market driving things along with CPUC decisions. If you're unhappy with how California is treating renewables know that California is on the bleeding edge in this area where more has changed in the past 10 years than the previous 80.
This is very exciting, California might be the first to pull it off at scale in the future.
However it's still 9% of the current MW capacity. We'll see how it ages and it costs in the long run. Most of the pilotable energy sources in the state remain nuke, hydro & fossil fuels.
California runs on 100% renewables for 4.8 months each year in a sense too.
It has 40% renewables last time I checked I think in 2019.
If you assign that to what percent of the annual use, that is the equivalent of everything from Jan 1st-April 24ish California is runing on 100% renewables.
California is a bit unique but its not rare for the state to be getting up to 40% of its power from solar at midday.
We are moving in the right direction, but probably not fast enough.
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