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California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days

electrek.co

81–90 of 162 posts

Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days

#81
post #77
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to thanks the German government's policies for the past decades for making me pay absurd electricity prices since the Russian invasion started, even though I live in Sweden with 90+% of renewable electricity generation I'm forced to pay the highest spot price in the EU (aka, gas in Germany) because of Germany's decision to burn coal and gas all the way into 2022... The inertia on modernising Germany is start…

Sweden's doing pretty well, for sure .. but your assessment seems to be ahead of the IEA's ... https://www.iea.org/countries/sweden Renewables: 66.9% share of power generation, 2022 Sweden's wind is projected to grow: https://balticwind.eu/swedens-wind-power-surge-a-positive-ou... but Sweden's grid demand is also projected to rise: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/swedish-power-demand... I'm not sure Sweden's…

I'm counting nuclear in the 90+% of electricity (not energy in general where oil will count), not renewable though I agree, more like non-CO2 emitting.

Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days

#82
post #67
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear helps to reliably produce electricity when there is a peak demand or renewable has a problem producing (no sun, draught)

There is no need for backup fossil power to account for more than a few percent of electricity production in the medium term. https://www.volts.wtf/p/what-the-sun-isnt-always-shining

Nuclear is different to fossil fuel power. It comes from a renewable source. It is bad only because it produced waste, but we're working towards solving this issue.

Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days

#83
post #5

For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like we’re almost there and can stop caring. Just look at the excellent, accurate, and up-to-the-hour charts put out by the electricity market itself and you will see where and when the challenges we face still are. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.…

Nice link. At this specific moment in time, natural gas is 19.9%, nuclear is 5.6%, and here's the great lie imports are 38.5%. There's no telling what the source of that imported energy is.

Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days

#84
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most striking thing is how incredibly flat the line for nuclear is.

Nuclear makes for great base generating capacity because it has an incredibly stable output, but that also means the line needs to be kept flat or tons of energy will be wasted.

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Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days

#85
post #61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a concern if already over 66% of energy is made of renewable sources?

Nuclear helps to reliably produce electricity when there is a peak demand or renewable has a problem producing (no sun, draught)

So you need nuclear to be scaled to the maximum demand?

Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear makes for great base generating capacity because it has an incredibly stable output, but that also means the line needs to be kept flat or tons of energy will be wasted.

Nuclear is indeed very inflexible. You can't really turn it off easily or cheaply. The only time it goes down is for maintenance. Typically for extended periods of time when that happens. However, battery is improving the capacity factor of renewables; especially solar by allowing two things: - when there's too much of it, you can charge batteries with energy that would otherwise be curtailed/wasted. - when there's n…

Nuclear can scale up and down. It can do so from 20% to 100%, Reducing under 20% is problematic because it implies a reactor shutdown and restart.

20% is more than enough to modulate side by side with renewables.

The French Grid does that all the time intraday.

https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...

Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> makes most of this irrelevant. We do export a ridiculous amount of food and green technologies. > and actually stopping climate change requires changing the industrialization trajectories of many non-western countries. So.. colonialism by a new name. I had really hoped we grew out of this by now.

Industrial emission of CO2 is the main factor; there's not much deindustrializing economies can do beyond deindustrailizing. And, of course, pat themselves on the back as they do so. There's zero economic, social or political cost to western policies at the moment and they arent reducing CO2 emissions. It's very much "green theatre". The goal is to stop the actual levels of Co2 ppm from rising. This is all fairly mea…

> The goal is to stop the actual levels of Co2 ppm from rising

At all? There's no acceptable ceiling here? We're just going to slam the door on the entirety of Africa yet again?

Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days

#88
> And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January …), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight.

If it exceeded 100% energy demand, why were they still using methane?

Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days

#89
post #81
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden's doing pretty well, for sure .. but your assessment seems to be ahead of the IEA's ... https://www.iea.org/countries/sweden Renewables: 66.9% share of power generation, 2022 Sweden's wind is projected to grow: https://balticwind.eu/swedens-wind-power-surge-a-positive-ou... but Sweden's grid demand is also projected to rise: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/swedish-power-demand... I'm not sure Sweden's…

I'm counting nuclear in the 90+% of electricity (not energy in general where oil will count), not renewable though I agree, more like non-CO2 emitting.

Fair enough - thanks for the clarification.

Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days

#90
post #9

Spain as a whole 45 million country with diverse geography and scattered population is producing 75 percent of its electricity from renewables and gas and carbon have been down to almost technical zero. It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery. I made a website to track this: https://energy.antizone.online During the day, a huge chunk of the produced energy is sold to other cou…

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