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Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped

nytimes.com

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Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped

#221

Post by chiefalchemist »

WWLink wrote: post #108
meroes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a technician for xfinity in the bay area and NIMBYism a huge part too I would say. Huge portions of Mill Valley especially on and around Mt Tam had such bad poles and vegetation. Only the last 3 fire years did anything. But literally nothing gets approved besides exact replacement. Nothing gets put underground, or rerouted because (as I understand it) mostly NIMBY groups. And I believe ATT ultimately owns most o…

Man, I can't imagine anyone NIMBYing new power poles lol. Old poles get scary, especially when they start leaning over. And then when AT&T was mounting giant ass DSL VRADs on poles too lol. I'd be out there cheering on the linemen for replacing the old junk. :D

I don't think the poles are the issue. They're a proxy. The issue is: what happens when you upgrade such infrastructure? The area become more desirable, there's more development, and more "outsiders" move in.

Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped

#222

Post by icedistilled »

fredliu wrote: post #167

I start to see tweets attributing the CA power outages to increased degree of renewable energies that are "inherently unreliable"(solar, wind), on the supply side of the equation. And of course the tweets are very politically charged, making it hard to judge how true those claims are. Anybody has more insights on these claims?

I read a Forbes article that made a ton of claims like that.

The article was a bunch of statements along the lines of "the renewable push is the reason PGE has neglected maintenance!", without even attempting to explain the connections for any of their claims.

Another claim was that Jerry Brown shut San Onofre Nuclear power station, SONGS, and they wrote that if Brown hadn't shut it then we would have avoided the latest brown outs.

No explanation as to how they believe he'd managed to sabotage Mitsubishi Heavy Industries causing the problems at SONGS that led to billions of dollars and many years of NRC licensing hurdles and required repairs had they decided to do keep it up and running. And not only that, Jerry brown apparently also caused natural gas to be super price efficient, making it impossible for SCE to justify repairing and returning SONGS to full power. Nope, not a peep about those things or how they felt Jerry Brown caused them.

Of course the agenda pusher writing for Forbes didn't explain how Jerry Brown did any of those things, they could just state that Jerry Brown closed it and most people would have to take it at face value. Why care about facts when you can push an agenda!

Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped

#223

Post by floatrock »

YarickR2 wrote: post #41

I wonder what would Tesla owners do during fire-induced blackouts. With wrong combination of returning from long drive to homes without power, and fire hazard warnings, people owning only electrical cars could become trapped really bad. Unfortunately, Teslas are a part of a problem for now, being power hogs .

The pump and payment processing at your local gas station runs on electricity too, btw.

Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped

#224

Post by icedistilled »

WalterBright wrote: post #178

One way to deal with this is to have variable electric rates - cheaper rates when plenty of power is available, and more expensive when less. This incentivizes consumers to time shift their usage. For example, evening A/C use can be time shifted to the day, by cooling the house more during the day, so less is needed in the evening. The thermal mass of a house has a lot of inertia (and can be increased by adding, say,…

SCE is trying to shift people to time of use rates.

The problem is the time of use rates are terrible, and will be more expensive to anyone who normally stays within tier one rates of the old plan.

I'd end up paying about 30% more for power under any of their time of use rate plans even assuming I only use power in off peak times, despite owning a plug in hybrid. If you stay within their tier one rates on the old plan, the new time-of-use-plans just aren't priced acceptably.

Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped

#225

Post by davisr »

noodlesUK wrote: post #204
davisr wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I didn't know about this article. I'm not heavily one way or the other, but I think it's important to put all the information out there.

This particular feeling, of having a compulsion to share scary information without a strong knowledge base, and then retreating to this sort of position “I think it’s important to put all the information out there” is well described, specifically on this topic, by a recent post by Troy hunt. https://www.troyhunt.com/lets-stop-the-5g-hysteria-understan...

Well, from me it wasn't a strong compulsion. However, for many reasons (especially about privacy) we ought not to implement 5G. And this wasn't an article about some conspiracy--it was from an expert who is advising we tread cautiously about what we do not know, and that is very good advice.

I don't think anyone can confirm or deny that 5G carries health risks. But, we do have evidence there are health risks with other cellular communication technologies, and we ought to use that as a basis for decision making.

Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped

#226

Post by Animats »

Too much solar to handle evening A/C load?

Rarely does northern California have heavy A/C loads in the evening. Solar power output and heat load usually match well. But not this week. Usually, peak loads are around 2 PM, at air conditioning peak. This power restriction is for 3 PM to 10 PM, which presumably comes from evening A/C loads while buildings cool down.

Wind is all over the place, up and down by a factor of 4, unrelated to time of day.

Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped

#227

Post by Gibbon1 »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #102
notJim wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying 19 full days of energy storage? Why do we need 19 days? Isn't it more like N hours per day, which can be recharged overnight and the following day? This seems like a very disingenuous presentation of this information.

I remember seeing academics analysis of various storage methods that showed how none of them could be scaled up to store 7 days worth of energy. And thus solar and wind were infeasible. There were two problems. One he was using 7 days worth of storage. It's true that in the fossil fuel industry 7 days of storage is standard. But that's because coal/oil/gas have supply chain issues to deal with. So he was intentionall…

I see I pissed someone off. Whatever, you are who you are.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/05/22/borehole-thermal-ener...

Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped

#228

Post by azernik »

pc86 wrote: post #20
nimbius wrote: post #3

as someone who apprenticed as a lineman briefly, this isnt at all unexpected. Just because you have generating capacity, does not always mean you have capacity in the duty cycle for your transmission infrastructure. Many substations are older, and were never designed to handle high duty and load during climate-change driven weather events. These substations suffer from underreporting as they often dont have remote mo…

> Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level. Serious question, why is the answer to this not a slightly-but-not-much-more-polite version of "That's ridiculous, be quiet." and moving forward?

Because the people involved have political and legal power.

Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped

#229

Post by refurb »

dekhn wrote: post #132
lisper wrote: post #47

Every year you hear about horrible heat waves and fires in California but I'm here to tell you from my first-hand experience that This Time It's Different. I've lived on the SF peninsula for 10 years. We bought a brand new spec house. It was built without air conditioning. The developer said we wouldn't need it. We installed it anyway because we came from LA and a house in California without A/C did not fit into our…

This is not consistent with my experience; I've lived in the same peninsula home for 10 years and can recall multiple summers with waves this bad or worse.

Same here. Same place in SF for 10 years. It was pretty predictable to have anywhere from 7 days to 21 days of temperatures in 85-95F range. Some years it's less, others more.

This heatwave doesn't seem out of the norm.

Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped

#230

Post by azernik »

WalterBright wrote: post #178

One way to deal with this is to have variable electric rates - cheaper rates when plenty of power is available, and more expensive when less. This incentivizes consumers to time shift their usage. For example, evening A/C use can be time shifted to the day, by cooling the house more during the day, so less is needed in the evening. The thermal mass of a house has a lot of inertia (and can be increased by adding, say,…

It exists, but because changing rates for existing customers is political toxic you have to opt in.
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