Except between 2021 and 2022 california lost 3GW of generation capacity. They're building new plants at the same time they're taking other ones offline and the totals aren't increasing.
This is probably why California continues to warn that rolling blackouts may become a thing. They raised that specter last year, and they're preparing to do it again this year.
Total system capacity is not improving at a rate commensurate with the forced adoption of EVs in the state.
That is a pretty misleading presentation, because of the cherry-picked dates and conflating (apparently) capacity-related outages with public safety shutoffs, and for not weighting by population impact.
California has not had any capacity-related problems in the past 2 years, mostly due to the fact that they now have 5.5GW of battery backup capacity that covers the critical period at dusk, when solar generation is headed for zero, during late summer where the days are getting shorter but it is still hot.
> A quick search says in 2018 CA's electrical generation capacity was 80GW (which I assume has only gone up). So this 97% is a bit misleading, no? It doesn't represent 97% of total CA electricity usage... it's less than 30%?
Their full installed generation capacity is 80GW, but there's huge variability in actual load. As I write this, current load is around 21GW, on a range of between 18.7GW and 27GW over the day. It gets into the 40's in the summer.
As a Californian who has been watching the CalISO web page since the 90s, what I find most interesting is that the peak usage and total generation now is pretty much the same as it was in the 90s (~50MW).
Based on the energy mix, it looks like lost coal capacity has been replaced with solar and other green energy, and demand has gone down relative to population because of efficiency initiatives and rooftop solar for the largest home consumers (rich people).
I'll bet demand falls even faster as home energy storage gets cheaper and more prevalent.
If you look at CED high demand, CA today already has almost 10% excess of the projected 2026 peak demand (projected is between 65-70, lets say 69MW, per the LA times capacity is 75MW). High demand makes it's own set of assumptions about the efficacy of self generation and economic growth, and I'd be interested to see if they redid this in 2016 (based off how much they overestimated in 2014 and lowered their expectations in 2015).
I did not fully digest this document but based off a brief skim I don't think this document disagrees strongly with the LA times article. Clearly there are more plants coming online, but that today we have 10% excess of the high end of a 10yr projected forecast, I think is part of the articles point (although I think the main point of the article is about how regulated utilities are benefiting from this, at the cost of consumers and non-regulated utilities).
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.
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.
Capacity has been flat for the last decade and California has had a reputation for an unreliable power grid as long as I've followed US news. You're dreaming, mate.
The grid operator cited is the California Independent System Operator. How much of CA's electricity consumption is fed by that operator?
In the article they mention 23GW from wind and solar. A quick search says in 2018 CA's electrical generation capacity was 80GW (which I assume has only gone up). So this 97% is a bit misleading, no? It doesn't represent 97% of total CA electricity usage... it's less than 30%?
>> It looks like California is at least two generations of technology ahead of other states. Let’s hope the rest of us catch up, so that we have a grid that can make an asset out of every building, every battery, and every solar system.
> +1. Are there any other states with similar grid data available for optimization; or any plans to require or voluntarily offer such a useful capability?
How do these competitions and the live actual data from California-only (so far; AFAIU) compare?
Are there standards for this grid data yet?
Without standards, how generalizable are the competition solutions to real-world data?
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 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.
The California grid operator has a really cool website that shows realtime-ish graphs of supply and demand[1] and even daily battery reports[2]. One big takeaway is that the total battery capacity is kinda wimpy when you compare it to how much fossil fuel the state burns over the day.
The way net metering worked in the past is that people with solar could offload their access generation to power companies and make storage or resale the utility's responsibility. Then 2.0 was a sorta-time of use implementation, and now we're up to Net Metering 3.0 and I haven't bothered to look into how that works. However people I know who have looked into Tesla powerwalls haven't found them to be economical for individual homeowners.
So all new solar etc coming on line is barely replacing capacity lost. And California has been growing.
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