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…
nice website, would be cool to see at EU level.
California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days
131–140 of 162 posts
Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
The French can only do that because they have so many reactors. If you ramp down a reactor, it poisons it's own fuel with radioisotopes and you can't safely ramp it back up - at least not quickly. You need to wait for the neutron poison to decay naturally, which takes days or even weeks, depending on how much you turned down the reactor.
The reason the French can get away with it is because they have to. If you have this much nuclear on your grid, you can't get around it, the reactors need to follow demand. The good news is that because they have so many reactors, they can have them take turns poisoning their fuel and still have enough time to slowly come back up again. So each night a different reactor ramps down and gets poisoned.
Also, French reactors can take the financial hit of decreasing output much better than American reactors. Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like that. They need to run at 100% all year, or lose billions.
Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days
#133Earlier 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…
> I'm forced to pay the highest spot price in the EU This isn't true — prices are the same throughout a zone, but Germany and Sweden are not in the same zone. Sweden has several zones. The total possibly export from Sweden to neighbouring countries is not unlimited, which is the reason for the boundaries. https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/the-power-market/Bidding-ar...
I have a layman understanding of the pricing structure so it's probably not entirely true "paying the highest spot price in the EU" directly but given I was paying 5-10x more for electricity in December 2022 than ever before my best guess is that when Germany was paying a lot more for electricity due to an increase in the price of gas-generated electricity we were affected by the dominoes falling: electricity would be sold for a higher bid if exported to Germany (or to a zone neighbouring Germany which would be selling to Germany) which caused a shortfall in my zone (SE3) increasing the bid price.
So even if it was a second order effect I had to pay much more than ever before due to increased spot prices in other zones.
Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
People always forget that a mostly nuclear grid also require a some kind of storage or demand scalability.
With nuclear you have the option of running the reactors at 50% peak and produce energy at approximately twice the cost per kWh.
That's it. If you need to have nuclear capacity for a grid for say 30GW, despite average usage being just 10GW, your price is now $300/MWh rather than $100/MWh if you can run them 24/7
Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery. IN PARTS of the country. In other regions (Catalunya, Andalucia) there is an ongoing drought which is severely impacting everyone and yeah, hydro-electrical companies had done some, let say questionable decisions regarding their water reservoirs.
it's easier to move power than water :-) So as long as it's rained a lot somewhere, that can be used as a battery. Most hydro power plants are not in Catalonia or Andalusia ( https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1jVN1LmOoTTqg3e... )
> it's easier to move power than water :-)
It's easier to drink water than electrons.
Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not until 2035 at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Spain That's 10 years to build alternatives assuming no further extensions or new nuclear.
If they approved a replacement nuclear project today it wouldn't be live in 10 years though.
> If they approved a replacement nuclear project today it wouldn't be live in 10 years though.
Why not? Japan was building nuclear plants in 4-5 years (sort by "Begin building"):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
Standardize on one design and you can churn them out like widgets: France built 56 reactors in 15 years.
Want reliable power 24/7 without fossil fuels? Will it: make a policy decision and follow through.
Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear helps to reliably produce electricity when there is a peak demand or renewable has a problem producing (no sun, draught)
Nuclear doesn't scale quickly. It already adapts from 4GW to 7GW in Spain, but it does it slowly and ahead of weather conditions. What is needed is more co-located battery storage, and more gravity (solid or water) storage.
Maybe I don’t understand the requirement, but can’t a constant-rate supply provide stored power for peak demand and support baseline consumption off-peak?
Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is incorrect. It is not for a few minutes! We are way way past that at this point. The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day. Because of solar PV, the cheapest generation now, the daytime electricity supply is actually more than we need in California. Solar farms (and also wind farms)get curtailed here due to supplying more than the grid can take at times; this is usually for seve…
Those graphs clearly say that the state is pulling from non-renewable sources (primarily natural gas and "imports") between the hours of 7PM and 7AM. As I look at the page, right now (3:30AM local time), California is producing less than it needs, and the deficit is about 15,000MW. It isn't even close. It's fine to say that California is producing more than it needs on net , but adding up total production over 24h an…
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Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
running solar at night would be a real achievement!
I think it’s still research stage and it’s debatable whether to call this ‘solar’, but https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/anti-solar-cells-phot... : “a specially designed photovoltaic cell could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter under ideal conditions at night, about a quarter of what a conventional solar panel can generate in daytime” The idea is to capture the energy that escapes into space when…
If you want to debate names, I like "fusion collectors" instead of solar.
Re: California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I live in Sweden with 90+% of renewable electricity generation Except sweden isn't self sufficient at all with electricity… Can I really say that I'm 100% renewable if I have a tiny solar panel at home, and for the rest I use power from somewhere else?
How do you figure that? Sweden exported electricity almost every hour for 2023 (import 40 hours of 8760 = 0.5%). Most of the hours when importing electricity was due to low and negative prices when operators could use water reservoirs as batteries. Currently, there is an obvious overcapacity with an export of almost 20% of production.