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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

#111

Post by viraptor »

strainer wrote: post #66
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

April 3rd was a sunday, and probably a very sunny one, with temperatures in ranges where a lot of people don't really need AC nor electrical heating. What do you do when it's not sunny, very cold/hot, no wind, and businesses and factories are open? Somehow we talk a lot about solar, and not enough about nuclear.

You need forms of storage for that. The conundrum can be turned on its head - "What do you do when you have nuclear and the businesses and factories are closed ?" You either simply waste nuclear capacity that you've paid and waited years for to be built - or you need forms of storage to make use of it. Both Nuclear and Renewables really want storage, they will compete for it. If you can only make use of 60% of a nucl…

It may be still better to run nuclear plants then. We'll need data from modern nuclear designs, (especially the small ones) but renewables are not exactly free to run. Storage degrades, solar degrades, lithium needs to be mined, turbines mean lots of mechanical parts, etc. We may learn that running just the renewables common today is even more uneconomic.

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

#112

Post by csours »

ajross wrote: post #49
samkater wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding, to put it in AWS EC2 pricing terms, is that we do not pay the market "spot" rate for electricity (variable, often less than what you might pay elsewhere, but could spike up) - which is what Texas allowed. Typically we pay the "on demand" rate which is fixed. Large energy users probably negotiate "reserved" pricing. My point being, we pay the market rate, those massive hikes are just built-in over a…

That only works if the demand curve (the price the market will bear at given levels of shortage) and the cost curve (the actual price to produce the energy) match up. In fact they never do, especially in this market. Texas producers weren't spending 100x (or whatever) more to produce that electricity, that spike just reflected the amount that customers who "had to keep the lights on" were willing to bear. In fact tot…

The Texas spike was not what customers were willing to bear, the Texas spike was set to the max price by the regulator because they thought the pricing system wasn't working.

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

#113

Post by sagarm »

bryan0 wrote: post #91
bcrosby95 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of why they're doing it because they're guaranteed a certain percentage return on investments. There's ways to fix this problem without a $25bil investment, but you won't make nearly as much profit on that.

what's a better, cheaper way to fix the wildfire problem?

People who choose to live in the Wildlands urban interface should bear the cost for undergrounding the wires they rely on IMO.

Probably politically infeasible, unfortunately.

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

#114

Post by sagarm »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #99
ceeplusplus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's honestly insane how PG&E is going bankrupt despite charging 35 cents/kWh. Where is all the money going??

$0.35 would be a bargain. It's more like $0.40 / kWh, it's complicated depending on which rate plan you have and what time of day / year you're using power. https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra... Meanwhile my neighbors 30 miles away are paying half that rate to SMUD. https://www.smud.org/en/Rate-Information/Compare-rates As a bonus, SMUD doesn't generally kill people and burn down cities.

Presumably the Sacramento utility district doesn't serve high risk fire areas, so their customers don't have to subsidize people that choose to live on the wildlands-urban interface.

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

#115

Post by outworlder »

incomethax wrote: post #81
Retric wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory moving electricity 1,000 miles can have minimal transmission losses. Unfortunately California’s grid lacks the infrastructure to support significant long distance transmission.

Sort-of. Transmission for HTHV lines (745kV single circuit cost $2.5-4M/mile with ~1% line loss; 345kV single circuit will cost ~$1.5-2M/mile with 5% line loss). For 1MW solar capacity you typically need about 4 acres. 100GW of solar would require 400k acres of land - and come at a cost of about $3 billion for the panels, not to mention the price of land or entitlements. Add in cost of substations and transmission yo…

If I were a billionaire, I could spend 10 billion project with a massive reduction in fossil fuel emissions.

Or I could spend over 4 times as much to buy a social media site.

Decisions, decisions.

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

#116

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

aatharuv wrote: post #21

What I wonder is the breakdown of sources. Solar? Hydro electric? (I wonder if roof top solar is included here). Also, note this was over a very short period of time. And there's still night time, when solar doesn't operate, except for whatever got stored into batteries.

> Also, note this was over a very short period of time.

That's usually how setting a "record" (i.e. a high water mark) works. It doesn't mean the trend line isn't moving in the right direction.

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

#117

Post by qndreoi »

aatharuv wrote: post #21

What I wonder is the breakdown of sources. Solar? Hydro electric? (I wonder if roof top solar is included here). Also, note this was over a very short period of time. And there's still night time, when solar doesn't operate, except for whatever got stored into batteries.

There's a website for that: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#sectio...

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

#118

Post by outworlder »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #3
pmalynin wrote: post #2

Then why is it so damn expensive. Honestly one of the reasons I can’t wait to own a house is to purchase enough solar panels and batteries to give a huge middle finger to PG&E and go off-grid

It's honestly insane how PG&E is going bankrupt despite charging 35 cents/kWh. Where is all the money going??

It's incredible. Even more so if we consider that Silicon Valley Power (serving Santa Clara) charges a fraction of that and is more reliable.

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

#119

Post by outworlder »

tomohawk wrote: post #97
mschaef wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the minimum capacity that renewables are guaranteed to provide? Zero... same as any other technology. ie: Texas lost around 25GW of needed NatGas capacity in Feb 2021, not to mention the failed coal, wind, and nuclear that also occurred during that event. (Texas had similar shortages in 2011 and 1989.) > That's the number that matters. You need to take a portfolio view when thinking about energy supply issu…

So we can't make engineering calculations because black swan events throw all that out the window? That doesn't seem like a winning strategy. Power grids require serious engineering, not magical thinking, if they are to be economical and reliable. If windmills do not provide base load power, then what will? Something will, and that something will need to be built, and that something will cost money, and that somethin…

> It is not peak capacity that is important in engineering these things, and it isn't average capacity either. Engineering based on those will give you a very unreliable power grid, kind of like what California has now.

Not all of California is served by PG&E. My power is cheap, reliable, and carbon free.

https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-community/about-s...

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