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Looked like no blackouts were needed yet.[0] > California ISO power grid peak demand hit 52,061 MW, a new all-time record. Still holding in EEA3 - no load shed. Conservation is making a difference. ow.ly/brMu50KBKHT 0. https://twitter.com/California_ISO/status/156733473761784627...
Anecdata: I personally know 2 people in South Bay that lost power 2 hours ago.
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We had rolling outages in the Bay Area in Alameda at least. They did two circuits at a time instead of one too. https://twitter.com/alamedamunipwr/status/156732197303394304...
Unless the official CalISO twitter account is lying, this could be a local issue for specific substations etc. With the weather there could be transformers overheating and failing, for example. In a large state, power goes out _somewhere_ quite often. The bag of tricks CalISO has to lower demand at peak is fascinating - for example, there are large consumers with significant generation resources (like emergency gener…
https://twitter.com/nukebarbarian/status/1567358316174622720
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Sorted: I charged my car this afternoon (the amber alert signs have been warning about this all day), while we were (as a state) overproducing electricity, and set the thermostat on the house up 4 degrees 30 minutes ago. Now, the solar I overbuilt to charge the car is dumping electricity on to the grid. It'd be completely sorted, except that I can't tell the house battery (which I bought as a backup and to time-shift…
Nice of you to be able to afford solar panels and be home and have job flexibility to charge when you want. Not everyone is so privileged, so it still needs to be sorted
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I'll note that 40kW is only about 53HP, not a very large engine for a car. It's approximately the power of two commercial lawn mowers.
40KW is a shitload considering a typical central AC system uses around 5KW. Imagine running 8 in parallel.
I'm sure they'll have this sorted before their forced swotxh to EV goes in to effect.
Sorted: I charged my car this afternoon (the amber alert signs have been warning about this all day), while we were (as a state) overproducing electricity, and set the thermostat on the house up 4 degrees 30 minutes ago. Now, the solar I overbuilt to charge the car is dumping electricity on to the grid. It'd be completely sorted, except that I can't tell the house battery (which I bought as a backup and to time-shift…
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40KW is a shitload considering a typical central AC system uses around 5KW. Imagine running 8 in parallel.
5kw is the normal running consumption. Startup currents are higher than normal operation and so you need to have a beefier generator. But yes, 40kVA is a lot, big houses should do fine even with high transient loads with a 22kVA generator. But let’s not forget this is HN, maybe OPs house is humongous
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I'll note that 40kW is only about 53HP, not a very large engine for a car. It's approximately the power of two commercial lawn mowers.
Yes but you can't really buy generators with more than 22kw and even that is plenty to run the AC for a 5500 sq ft home with plenty of breathing room to run the electric washer/dryer
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Sorted: I charged my car this afternoon (the amber alert signs have been warning about this all day), while we were (as a state) overproducing electricity, and set the thermostat on the house up 4 degrees 30 minutes ago. Now, the solar I overbuilt to charge the car is dumping electricity on to the grid. It'd be completely sorted, except that I can't tell the house battery (which I bought as a backup and to time-shift…
Nice of you to be able to afford solar panels and be home and have job flexibility to charge when you want. Not everyone is so privileged, so it still needs to be sorted
Work has solar panels and chargers. Even if they didn't, there are plenty of commercial chargers across the street.
Anyway, the car lets us shift about one house of normal demand into peak hours.
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Nice of you to be able to afford solar panels and be home and have job flexibility to charge when you want. Not everyone is so privileged, so it still needs to be sorted
Solar panels also cannot support apartment buildings, since the ratio of roof to living space is far too low. Batteries would also be impractical to install in apartments, where space is at a premium. One of the tradeoffs to building dense is that it makes it harder to decentralize the grid.
The apartment dwellers just buy some percentage of a solar farm, then the power company pretends that percentage of the farm's production came from the apartment's roof.
Denser housing uses much less energy, so it takes much less solar per person to offset the apartment's power usage.
Similarly, room can be made for batteries elsewhere, and they can be packed extremely tightly wherever they are installed. (This only works for time shifting, not individual home backup.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorted: I charged my car this afternoon (the amber alert signs have been warning about this all day), while we were (as a state) overproducing electricity, and set the thermostat on the house up 4 degrees 30 minutes ago. Now, the solar I overbuilt to charge the car is dumping electricity on to the grid. It'd be completely sorted, except that I can't tell the house battery (which I bought as a backup and to time-shift…
Nice of you to be able to afford solar panels and be home and have job flexibility to charge when you want. Not everyone is so privileged, so it still needs to be sorted