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.
What state doesn't produce electricity using fossil fuels? At midnight last night, which wasn't atypical, California was 50% natural gas and the total CO2 emitting is even greater due to imports and CO2 emitting renewables.
Solar and wind add up to 25.5% of generation, as compared to over 40% natural gas. Add hydro and geothermal and renewables rise to 43%, still far from the 100:70 renewable to gas ratio you claimed. But hydroelectric and geothermal are geographically limited, the plan is still to build more solar and wind, with gas plants for use when demand exceeds the renewables' production.
So... Seeing as how my power came 100% from natural gas, and I'm in CA, what does this statement actually mean? Were they storing the extra energy generated by renewables? Was it just being wasted? Sold to neighboring states?
FYI, in the year 2020 renewables produced 33% and fossil fuels fulfilled 40% of California's total energy budget in 2020, and this 97% figure – while impressive – is not representative of typical energy production [0].
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.
California doesn’t get much if it’s energy from coal anyways, utility generation is fairly clean. Not as clean as Washington, which has a lot more hydro, but close.
California, at least its CAISO grid [1], is more like "renewables supplemented by combined cycle gas plants." The change is fairly recent.
Annual real power [2] generated by gas plants in CAISO reached its all time high in 2014 at 11707 MW. In 2014 generation from renewables was only 5418 MW. Renewables have increased and gas has declined every year since. The crossover first happened in 2017 when gas power dipped to 7396 MW and renewables rose to 9671 MW. For 2019, gas is down to 6835 MW (to date) and renewables are up to 10507 MW (also to date).
Sorry that I don't have a quick citation for these numbers, but the raw data is here:
[2] Annual real power meaning number of megawatt hours generated in the year divided by number of hours in the year; this implicitly accounts for differing capacity factors.
Natural gas was the largest source of electricity generation in California in 2021, accounting for nearly half of the power generated in the U.S. state.
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