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California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

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Re: California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

#221

Post by pjc50 »

WalterBright wrote: post #192
tomp wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If electricity is cheaper to generate when the sun is shining, the retail price of electricity should reflect that. This would be amazing. It would quickly turn the population off further investment in solar and other unreliable, unpredictable sources of energy and prove that nuclear is the only viable green power.

We pay variable prices for gasoline every day, mainly due to unpredictable supply. Society hasn't collapsed.

The French "gilets jaune" riots demanded, among other things, reductions in the prices of diesel. Plenty of countries subsidise fuel or electricity in order to maintain society. While the US tolerates small price fluctuations, I guarantee you that if people in the US woke up to $10/USgal gasoline there would be armed mobs heading to the statehouse.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/09/business/food-fuel-prices...

Re: California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

#222

Post by Sankozi »

dap wrote: post #157
FPGAhacker wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the return is not compounding makes a very large difference here. $16,500 returning 10% of the original principle per year isn’t a great investment. 25 years you have $41,000 + 25 yr old solar panels. $16,500 returning 10% compounding over 25 years gets you $162,000 + the $16,500 principle. Considering opportunity cost spread evenly over 25 years, those panels cost over $5000 per year. There are plenty…

This is a good point!

No it is not. It assumes you store money gained under the bed and do not reinvest it in any way.

Re: California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

#223

Post by mschuster91 »

WalterBright wrote: post #205
midasuni wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it’s dark people turn on the lights. When it’s cold they turn on the heating. Those are the drivers of demand. Industrial demand (aluminium smelters etc) are more price sensitive, but they tend to be billed by the minute anyway. some “residential” people will be happy to turn off their Bitcoin or weed growing equipment when the price rises but that shouldnt be residential. The wealthy will have their own storage…

Every house has many energy-hungry devices that can time shift their use. 1. electric car battery recharging 2. hot water heater - heat it to the max of the range when electricity is cheap 3. A/C - cool it to the coldest end of the range when electricity is cheap and so on. 1,2,3 are just the start of what can be done, cheaply, to shape demand to the price. > devestating People adjust their use of gasoline based on t…

> People adjust their use of gasoline based on the constantly shifting prices. This is how demand is shaped to match supply.

Yeah, but unlike electricity gas can be stored efficiently and long term - your typical 5-series BMW has ~60l of tank volume, a Ford F150 has ~90-100l, not to mention jerry cans. That means when gas is expensive, a consumer usually can choose to simply fill up the tank at another date.

Re: California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

#224

Post by rmbyrro »

rtkwe wrote: post #152
offmycloud wrote: post #148

Their math seems off. I really don't see how you get to 97% renewable when the state was burning natural gas to generate 2.8 GW of non-renewable power and had about 1.1 GW of nuclear at the time. There might be some funny math here where they assign all of the "dirty" power generated in the state to exports and can claim that that California is running on renewable power. Source: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/P…

The energy is pretty perfectly fungible so it makes about as much sense credited to the state as it does to the wider grid. If you just look at CA it generated 97% of its energy needs in state from renewable energy at that time. That it was connected to a larger grid so it was generating excess power dirtily doesn't really change that math.

We're they keeping the dirty generation at surplus level for safety precautions, due to renewable sources unreliability?

If yes, I think the math is misleading.

It doesn't matter if you generate 97% from renewables if you can't trust it and still need to keep dirty sources, even during renewable peak...

Re: California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

#225

Post by Buraksr »

offmycloud wrote: post #148

Their math seems off. I really don't see how you get to 97% renewable when the state was burning natural gas to generate 2.8 GW of non-renewable power and had about 1.1 GW of nuclear at the time. There might be some funny math here where they assign all of the "dirty" power generated in the state to exports and can claim that that California is running on renewable power. Source: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/P…

I believe that what is happening is that the rated capacity of a power plant is its maximum output times its capacity factor. Say we have a solar plant that produces a maximum of 1 GW in optimal conditions with a .15 capacity factor. This plant is not a 1GW plant but a 150MW one.

In general fossil fuels have capacity factors around .55, nuclear about .9, hydro about .4, and solar is between .1-.3

So you can imagine a scenario where we have 200MW of natural gas and 200MW of solar, and a grid load of 300MW. The natural gas could produce 400MW, powering the grid alone. Similarly, we could have up to 1 GW of solar, more than enough. But the averages are what is important, and what we use in ratings.

These stories are mostly “feel good” and without meaning imo. We will hit 100% energy from renewables for x minutes, long before we have enough power for the grid. If we were trying to make all the renewables come online at once, you don’t actually need that much capacity to hit 100%. The capacity factor says we only need 1/5 of the grid as solar to hit “100%” renewables. The reason we haven’t is intentional, we want more consistent power from these typically inconsistent renewable sources.

Re: California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

#226

Post by himinlomax »

ben_w wrote: post #218
Ekaros wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh how I wait for the days of using solar to heat my home during blizzard night... People posting these headlines make it seem like utopia.

I don’t know where you live, but the Californian power grid is part of the Western Interconnection that goes from the Mexican-American border to half way through Canada[0]. Are blizzards in the USA ever that big? As for “at night”, it is possible to get batteries of household scale. Plus insulation is getting better and cheaper, so the power required to maintain any given temperature isn’t as high as it used to be. […

> Are blizzards in the USA ever that big?

At times of the year when there are blizzards, I seriously doubt the rest of solar installations in the US are going to be running anywhere near capacity.

Re: California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

#227

Post by duckmysick »

pjc50 wrote: post #221
WalterBright wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We pay variable prices for gasoline every day, mainly due to unpredictable supply. Society hasn't collapsed.

The French "gilets jaune" riots demanded, among other things, reductions in the prices of diesel. Plenty of countries subsidise fuel or electricity in order to maintain society. While the US tolerates small price fluctuations, I guarantee you that if people in the US woke up to $10/USgal gasoline there would be armed mobs heading to the statehouse. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/09/business/food-fuel-prices...

Isn't the price of diesel in France higher now than at the time of the protests in late 2018? At one point this year it even passed 2 euros per liter. How come they aren't rioting now?

Re: California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

#228

Post by pjc50 »

duckmysick wrote: post #227
pjc50 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The French "gilets jaune" riots demanded, among other things, reductions in the prices of diesel. Plenty of countries subsidise fuel or electricity in order to maintain society. While the US tolerates small price fluctuations, I guarantee you that if people in the US woke up to $10/USgal gasoline there would be armed mobs heading to the statehouse. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/09/business/food-fuel-prices...

Isn't the price of diesel in France higher now than at the time of the protests in late 2018? At one point this year it even passed 2 euros per liter. How come they aren't rioting now?

Rioting is tiring and there's an election happening right now through which they can express their preferences? Also these things tend to be "edge triggered rather than level triggered" - by a rise, rather than any absolute level.

Re: California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

#229

Post by mschuster91 »

analyte123 wrote: post #96

This is a cool milestone, but it belies the current state of CA renewables, shown here at a very fine grain (data not current, need to go back a week): http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html 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…

The interesting thing to know is what amount of the base load is used for which purposes. A tax on all non-renewable power could be used to incentivize a reduction of carbon-emitting base load on the grid - either by shutting down stuff like street lights, advertising and other wasteful usage, or by providing on-site battery storage. In any case, reducing light pollution would be a worthy goal on its own.

The income from said tax could then be used to build out the transnational capacity of the grid, to subsidize transformations that save energy or to build out grid-scale battery storage.

Re: California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

#230

Post by yazaddaruvala »

WalterBright wrote: post #177

If electricity is cheaper to generate when the sun is shining, the retail price of electricity should reflect that. In fact, the retail price should fluctuate minute by minute, so that demand can be shaped to match supply. Trying to match variable supply to a fixed retail electric rate is certain to cause energy gluts and shortages. For example, I'd be happy to charge my electric car during price minima, heat the ele…

This would definitely work, but would require a big infra adjustment.

I don’t know but I wonder if (and it seems likely that) the time arbitrage of electrons is better/simpler (and cheaper?) solved by batteries now or in a few years time.

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