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

electrek.co

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

#151

Post by adrianN »

cm2187 wrote: post #121
raphaelj wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always forget that a mostly nuclear grid also require a some kind of storage or demand scalability.

Why? All modern nuclear reactors do load following. I believe it’s even an EU requirement. And certainly the practice in France. Nuclear costs the same thing whether you use it or not. If you meet the peak energy demand with nuclear you might as well save the construction of intermittent renewables.

Yeah nuclear costs the same, that’s the point. If you overbuild by two or three x to meet peak demand then per kWh you pay two to three times as much.

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

#152

Post by akira2501 »

mjburgess wrote: post #141
akira2501 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Up to you, do you care about global Co2 levels or not? The rate of Co2 emissions is itself increasing y-o-y. We're still accelerating.

I care to know what a reasonable upper limit is. It is the height of western arrogance to say "it's currently 400ppm, we already got ours, and so it cannot go /any/ higher, which means everyone else has to pay for out past extravagance."

If we're truly that concerned about it, then we need to get to work on carbon capture and conversion, and do our part to be carbon negative so that non industrialized areas of the world have an opportunity to catch up.

And this isn't just about industrialization, it's about quality of life, it's about longevity, it's about wealth. Pretending that CO2 is the only concern leaves everything else on the floor. And without any diplomacy, this is the kind of policy that starts wars.

Up to you if you actually want to solve the problem in the long term or not. So, again, what's an acceptable upper limit?

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

#153

Post by mjburgess »

akira2501 wrote: post #152
mjburgess wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up to you, do you care about global Co2 levels or not? The rate of Co2 emissions is itself increasing y-o-y. We're still accelerating.

I care to know what a reasonable upper limit is. It is the height of western arrogance to say "it's currently 400ppm, we already got ours, and so it cannot go /any/ higher, which means everyone else has to pay for out past extravagance." If we're truly that concerned about it, then we need to get to work on carbon capture and conversion, and do our part to be carbon negative so that non industrialized areas of the wo…

I dont know. i dont care very much. the question is just the one you have proposed, in your colonialist defence of the colonies.. yes, indeed, it lies with what we believe of them

in otherwords, our own deindustrialization is irrelevant

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

#154

Post by toomuchtodo »

adrianN wrote: post #148
rasz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain and Portugal did something incredibly smart - both went against EU and won right to cap gas price for power production. That way MWh price is 1Euro in Spain right now while 56 in Germany 74 Italy. This one simple trick fixed their grid. Gas turbines no longer generate 24/7 while charging premium and skewing whole market. https://euenergy.live

Gas turbines only run when no cheaper alternative can satisfy demand.

They also run to provide grid inertia when there aren’t enough utility scale batteries or grid forming inverters to do so.

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

#155

Post by lakis »

callalex wrote: 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.…

Take a look at https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html Scroll down to "Net demand trend" which is "System demand minus wind and solar" and compare yesterday vs last summer and a year ago Yesterday (4/15) lowest net demand was 366 MW Last summer, July 4th , lowest net demand was 2350 MW Last year (4/15/23) lowest net demand was 2227 MW

You can see that last summer, with so much more "powerful" sun, the net demand never went below 2300 MW. Last year went down to 2227 MW. Today, we are down to 366 MW. We manage to produce so much more solar in the last year that the net demand minus renewables went down by ~1800 MW. That means a few more years of improvements like that and we will have excess power generation of solar/wind at least during the day for most days. So if we start storing that excess generated power, we will start making a dent on other times of max power (since we can discharge batteries when max demand is needed).

That's the plan on how to keep lowering the net demand more and more.

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

#156

Post by lakis »

lakis wrote: post #155
callalex wrote: 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.…

Take a look at https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html Scroll down to "Net demand trend" which is "System demand minus wind and solar" and compare yesterday vs last summer and a year ago Yesterday (4/15) lowest net demand was 366 MW Last summer, July 4th , lowest net demand was 2350 MW Last year (4/15/23) lowest net demand was 2227 MW You can see that last summer, with so much more "powerful" sun, the ne…

See also https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html and scroll down to "Batteries trend" and compare today vs a year ago. A year ago, batteries were discharging max 3MW and were drained by 10-11 pm. Yesterday batteries were discarging at max 5.3MW and were fully drained around 11:30. So batteries handled twice as much power for longer period of time.

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

#157

Post by adev_ »

mschuster91 wrote: post #94
adev_ wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's only "economical" because the French taxpayers subsidize EDF with billions of euros both in direct subsidies [1] and in the form of price caps [2]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/18/french-gove... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-14/france-an...

That is deeply incorrect.

EDF as hugely profitable and brought back billions to its main stock holder (the French state) for multiple decades.

The recent debt crisis has mainly two causes:

- The state has used EDF to shield consumers against the 2022-2023 energy price increases. EDF has taken the losses directly for the state.

- The results of terrible energy policies the last decades (attempt to reduce nuclear at 50% and mainly the infamous ARENH).

What happened is pretty typical of when you have a state is directly managing a private actor: Incompetent politicians swiping their foots on the company to satisfy their own demagogy.

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

#158

Post by adev_ »

pbmonster wrote: post #132
adev_ wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So each night a different reactor ramps down and gets poisoned.

They do it intra-day. You can currently follow that through their monitoring [^1]

> 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 tha

Nuclear reactors tends to be hugely profitable considering their lifetime (80y in USA) but requires an enormous CAPEX.

Like most infrastructure, any attempt to try to fund them entirely privately with investor seeking a 9% quick ROI is doomed to fail.

Hinkley Point is a very good example of that. It is estimated that the price per MWH would be more than halved if the project would have a funding by public bond instead of the current private investor deathtrap.

[^1]: https://energygraph.info/d/gr_6-QW4z/unit-availability?orgId...

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

#159

Post by p_l »

adrianN wrote: post #151
cm2187 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? All modern nuclear reactors do load following. I believe it’s even an EU requirement. And certainly the practice in France. Nuclear costs the same thing whether you use it or not. If you meet the peak energy demand with nuclear you might as well save the construction of intermittent renewables.

Yeah nuclear costs the same, that’s the point. If you overbuild by two or three x to meet peak demand then per kWh you pay two to three times as much.

Honestly a big issue in my view is that we don't have more dynamic sinks.

Let's overbuild a mix of renewables and nuclear, then use the excess power to do things like green hydrogen.

Or maybe we will find other uses when electricity becomes too cheap to meter.

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

#160

Post by adrianN »

p_l wrote: post #159
adrianN wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah nuclear costs the same, that’s the point. If you overbuild by two or three x to meet peak demand then per kWh you pay two to three times as much.

Honestly a big issue in my view is that we don't have more dynamic sinks . Let's overbuild a mix of renewables and nuclear, then use the excess power to do things like green hydrogen. Or maybe we will find other uses when electricity becomes too cheap to meter.

Doing that is part of the plan for the switch to renewables, and people are actively working on it. A friend of mine at Siemens energy for example is involved in such projects.
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