Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Here in the United California Socialist Republic, we have an insane bunch of laws about electricity. Number one among them is a “Renewables Mandate” that requires the local utility, Pacific Gas and Electric (PGE) to purchase a huge amount of expensive, unreliable solar, wind, and other renewable energy. So of course, our electricity price increases have far outstripped those of our more sane neighboring states.
(As a side note, under California law large hydroelectric dams are NOT counted as “renewable” under the Mandate … why not? Because if they counted hydro we’d already have met the Mandate … but I digress …)
And what to we get for this investment in expensive generation schemes?
Unreliable energy. Yesterday at about 6:30 PM, they shut off the power to our entire neighborhood for three hours. Of course the public claim was that the hot weather just made it so the poor system couldn’t keep up, darn it, so we’re sorry but rolling blackouts are the new normal starting now … just kidding, they started before the announcement.
I assure you I was as surprised as our neighbors … started my little 2KVA Honda generator, strung out the extension cords, and got back to my life. Although I must confess, I did say some bad words, and I fear that I stated both clearly and loudly that the people in charge of this goatrope could go engage in anatomically improbable sexual congress with themselves and the horse they rode in on …
But this morning, I had a more sober thought, one I should have had the night before, one you might have already had, which was …
… if this pinche rolling blackout is because of the heat, why didn’t it start until after six PM, well past the heat of the day?
My next thought was, “It’s those cabrones with their abysmal renewable energy.” So I set out to see if it’s true.
In California, all of this is handled by something called “CAISO”, the California Independent Systems Operator. Here’s their graph of yesterday’s renewables generation, from the CAISO site:
Figure 1. Total generation by each type of renewables in California, August 14, 2020.
As you can see, the total of geothermal, biomass, biogas, small hydro, and wind is sweet Fanny Adams … and now, notice when the solar started to run out in the evening. Just about the time that our power went out.
But as we know, correlation is not causation. So here’s the other relevant CAISO chart, showing the net demand with and without renewables …
Figure 2. Net demand for electricity in California, split out by the type of generation of the electricity
Gotta laugh about the fine print where they brag about how they “maintain reliability while maximizing clean energy sources” …
Anyhow, there you have it. Here’s the bottom line.
If you add ten gigawatts of solar energy to your grid as shown in Figure 2 above, you perforce, must, need to, have to, add ten gigawatts of conventional fossil energy to cover times like yesterday when renewables simply don’t cut it …
And it is the ignoring of that fact above all that allows people to claim that renewables are ready for the market. They are absolutely not ready without huge ongoing subsidies and full fossil backup, and in the end, they are simply not up to the job.
ALL of this is the total and complete fault of the Democrats who have run this state since forever … too bad. When I was a kid it was a great place to live.
VOTE! The only solution to this nonsense is to throw them out on their ear. It’s not going to fix itself. Here’s today’s story.
Hot again today … not looking forward to the evening …
w.
PS—Again I ask, when you comment please quote the exact words you are discussing. This avoids all kinds of misunderstandings.
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Just wait to more EVs come, and people plug in those cars around 6pm when they get back from work, just when sun going down.
Then V2G will ensure that any remaining charge will be drawn down to support the grid. Cycle to work tomorrow.
Thanks for the info Willis, very helpful and timely! I’m just to the north of you in Vallejo. We were without power for about 3 hours as well. The grid layout is puzzling because some neighborhoods here were power down yet others stayed power up. The outage was so wide spread I’m having difficulty imagining how the electric grid is divided up. Any way, have a great evening! Cheers
The grid in your neighbourhood wasn’t down because of some sort of failure. It was down because somebody flicked a switch. South Australia has a roster of suburbs that will get the flick next. Obviously it doesn’t include any suburbs where important people (Labour & Greens MPs) live.
Not so.
Load shedding is on a rotation basis with feeders supporting major infrastructure such as Hospitals and shopping malls excluded. If you want to keep the power on make sure that you or on the same line as a hospital, sewage plant or major shopping centre.
The premier got the boot a few years ago and wasn’t happy. My guess is the list is going to get used in Autumn 2021 from too much PV where the problem is going rather than too little power during heat waves. Note the AEMO panic starting to set in.
At least small hydro, if the watershed has water, is base load spinning reserve 24/7 renewable electricity, as explained by California regulations limiting small hydro to 15 mW and less than 1 hour of water storage availability. The water season for run of river is probably winding down in this weather and summer season. I have been doing 100 Kw of small hydro with pumps as turbines for 30 years, running them backwards on induction motors. Fairly simple, until you have to deal with the Gov’t and/or Utility and then they put you out of business anyway. Pity that Kali doesn’t consider large hydro as renewable, since it really is, but then I would’t expect the People’s Republic of Kalifornia to be rational.
Industrial grid scale solar and wind are the problem here, not the other renewables. Even woody biomass, which gets tarred and feathered here is also 24/7 spinning reserve base load electricity. Grid scale solar and wind are the problem, as they are not only unreliable but unpredictable. You really can’t plan too far in advance when you don’t know when the wind might pick up, or the fog and clouds clear out. The other renewables you at least have some knowledge about your ‘fuel’ supply and can manage that to fit peak demands. I feel sorry for the ignorance of California. Used to be a nice place, but now I barely visit.
I got into an exchange on Slashdot, where I was trying the explain why it is a fraud for a grocery store to claim that they use “100% Renewable Power”, that is, unless they cut the power to their freezers when the wind stops blowing.
I offered the view that 30% renewable (we are largely talking wind and solar) was stretching grid reliability, so I said, let’s stipulate that in the absence of long-term grid-scale energy storage, we could get to 50%. I suggested that it was somewhat disingenuous for a grid-connected customer to claim that they 100% renewable power from that 50% share and that those polluters over there are getting all of their power from the 50% share of polar bear-killing power. We are all dipping into a common pool, and to say someone is getting 100% green power, even if they are paying some tithe to the power company to make that claim, is something for which a profit-making business should be scrutinized for the honesty of their advertising.
The response was a huffy, “You didn’t cite any reputable sources (I didn’t cite any sources). If you are going to stipulate 50% renewable power, I will stipulate 100%.”
How do you reason with such people? If we are talking the Slashdot “News for nerds, stuff that matters” crowd, I am kind of assuming one is not dealing with people with pink-colored hair who cast horoscopes and rely on crystal pendants for their personal well being?
The Green Marxists think a future of rationed electricity is just fine and dandy. Households will need their own battery storage or backup from diesel generators or whatnot. A propane gas tank for cooking will be useful. Hurricane lanterns at night are very romantic. Stock up on paraffin and wicks. If the sun shines and the wind blows, your utility will sell you some power. Green surcharges can be costly. Otherwise, you’re on your own. Candles and firewood are also useful. The future is looking a lot like the past. An iPhone can be charged by harnessing a dynamo to a treadmill or exercise bike… :).
You can also charge your iPhone or any cell phone from your telephone POTS land line. The DC voltage is 48 VDC, so need a resistor to step that down to 5 Vdc, and would be a good idea to have a diode in case the phone rings since it will go up to 90-100 VAC (20 hertz) on the ring if someone calls. You can get about 100 mA out of twisted pair 22 gauge phone one from the Telco (sometimes even on a disconnected line out of service etc) so will take some time to charge your cell phone, but then at least you have a working cell phone while out and about if the power is out for an extended period. A fairly simple hack, but hopefully everyone on the same block doesn’t do it at once. It’s only about a half watt, but in an emergency if that was all you had and were stranded on a desert island, would be nice to have that home made gadget. Might save your life. Could also charge up a L-Ion battery pack over a day or two, if you needed to power something else. It saved my life once and I carry this with me just in case as I am real remote but there is sometimes a land line around.
You can get about 100 mA out of twisted pair 22 gauge phone
You can’t. At about 20 mA (or maybe at your voltage, 10 mA) it will look to the TelCo like you’ve got your receiver off the hook.
That would be the correct answer from the TelCo, but of course it depends on your local telco set-up. And this is technically illegal, but all the lines are separated at the central office so you won’t do any damage to the TelCo equipment since some phone lines short circuit etc. A city central office will be manned daily, but a rural telco central offices usually are only visited once a week and they might physically disconnect your line if it appears there is a fault on it. Which is what taking 75 mA off the twisted pair would look like in an open circuit voltage situation. In rural areas with very long runs, the voltage will probably be a bit higher, which will give a tad more current which is why I can get up to 100 mA when my OCV is 57-58 VDC. Sometimes they even up the OCV to 80-90 VDC to ‘burn’ off any internal moisture after a long rainy stretch, which might destroy your voltage regulator, which is why I use a resistor and diode. Using the 7805 voltage regulator won’t last long, since it is designed for 35 VDC and lower, and also wastes a lot of the energy as heat dropping the voltage. Much better circuit designs. Having said all this, much better to have one of those wind-up radio or a flash light with a built in USB port to charge external devices.
There are other ways to skin this cat too, such as utilizing a small ultra capacitor, and pulse the capacitor in shorter bursts from the 22 gauge twisted pair. That is a much more complicated circuit, and delivers much less current but gets around the issue of appearing to be ‘off hook’ if that becomes an issue. If you left this hack on full time, then yes, the TelCo will physically disconnect your phone line at the central office. It is intended for emergency use only. And it does work.
https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Get-Emergency-Power-from-a-Phone-Line/
What they’ll also likely suggest is powering your house from the battery in your BEV.
I just bought a deluxe 2021 Toyota Rav4 Prime Plug-In Hybrid, waiting for delivery this fall. The deluxe model comes with a built in 1500 watt 120 VAC inverter. Will be great for for my RV and camper way off the grid where I spend up to 4-5 months of the year way out in the remote mountains with only solar and a diesel generator and everything satellite. But running a generator isn’t cheap anymore either, at about a buck a kW/hr or more. Now I have my battery problem solved. You can do a lot with 1.5 kW, but do require some load management, and propane heat/cooking etc.
“Way off the grid” in a rav 4?
Why not? It is an All Wheel Drive with almost as much as ground clearance as my Diesel Jeep Grand Cherokee, (which goes almost anywhere) a 2.5 L gas engine, and a 18.1 kW battery. Will go 42 miles on battery EV alone and recharge in stand alone mode from the gas engine. Plus as I said, the deluxe model already has a 1500 watt pure sine wave inverter, so now I don’t need to hack the battery. I will let you know how it all works out when I take delivery. The new 2021 Rav 4 Prime PHEV is just being released. Not that expensive actually at around $50K.
“ALL of this is the total and complete fault of the Democrats who have run this state since forever … too bad. When I was a kid it was a great place to live”
Pat Brown was a Democrat I believe and he was a pretty good governor and those days, Pat and then Ronald Reagan, were good old days for California. Too bad Pat’s son Jerry turned out to be such a loser. It’s the old equation about economic cycles … strong men create good times … good times create weak men … weak men create bad times … bad times create strong men … strong men create good times …
It’s been a long, long, long time since there’s been a Pat Brown or Ronald Reagan in charge in California.
One of the unalienable rights in the USA is “the pursuit of happiness”. A generator will keep the fridge running. The fridge keeps the beer/wine/ice cream cold. Therefore a functioning fridge allows the pursuit of happiness. Don’t let the founding fathers down. Be like Willis and get a generator.
“When I was a kid it was a great place to live.
I visited in 1963 and a few more times. Last in about 1980.
Last time I was there, it was SF in the late 1990s. I stopped into. McDonald’s for coffee one morning, and one fine gentleman was walking through the restaurant saying, “The next one who says no when I asked them for money is gonna get stabbed.” No one did or said anything.
I walked out of McDonald’s, wrapped up my business, and left the city. Never going back.
Wouldn’t the remedy to all this nonsense be to require providers of renewable energy to bid in their supply and to pay a hefty penalty for failure to perform? This would eliminate the de facto subsidization of renewables by rate payers in the form of higher costs / lower reliability. I realize this would probably not fly with state regulators but could be imposed by FERC in the interest of maintaining grid reliability.
Willis doesn’t know it, but I’m a close neighbor of his. To be more specific, there were over 40,000 folks out of power last night. Between power being turned off intentionally due to poorly maintained power grid during wildfire season, and this cr*p, we now live in a 3rd world state.
Yeah, we have to vote these bast**ds out of office. Good luck with that. The state is run by LA/San Diego and the Bay Area, largely populated by sheep who believe everything they are told on the evening news.
My solution? I’m vacating this disaster ASAP for parts Northeast. Somewhere they color the map red instead of blue.
Good luck with that. Except for occasional and now less frequent deviations in New Hampshire, you won’t find any states in the northeast where they color the election map red. Even when Republicans win, it tends to be some RINO opportunist.
Rich — I meant I’ll be heading in a Northeast direction … think Idaho or Wyoming.
Oh that makes more sense!
Lag time between solar energy and nighttime human usage was not taken into account.
https://imgur.com/a/Eq1H1JD
Doesn’t California mean “hot oven”?
Willis
Your comment – “If you add ten gigawatts of solar energy to your grid as shown in Figure 2 above, you perforce, must, need to, have to, add ten gigawatts of conventional fossil energy to cover times like yesterday when renewables simply don’t cut it” – isn’t actually true.
No properly designed grid is built on the basis of 100% over capacity, ever. You need to consider the concept of firmed power. Firming is necessary at different time scales and different geographic scales to cover the various risks to the power system. For instance with roof top PV there is by its nature a geographic dispersion which is significantly larger than the average cloud size. Therefore as one roof is covered by cloud another is uncovered and production smooths out to about the average insolation. Some roof top firming is also provided by correctly positioning panels so that some are east facing (morning) and some (the majority) are west facing (evening). On a larger scale, one needs a multiplicity of fuel sources and the larger the variation the stronger the network. For instance, Nuclear units may be vulnerable to political disruptions in fuel supply, Hydro to dry years, wind to low wind periods, gas to pipe line failures, coal to quality issues etc. etc.
In fact, solar and wind can make a great deal of sense if there is sufficient storage in the system e.g. large hydro as they act as a way of conserving high value water in the lakes during low value periods. I don’t know if California has sufficient lakes for this to be the case.
Only an idiot would try and run a modern power system using a single fuel source whether it be fossil fuels, nuclear or weather dependent installations as this would expose you to risks that cannot be diversified away.
For the doubters, there are plenty of applications where roof top PV makes a great deal of sense both from an engineering and an economics point of view. An example is a large indoor shopping centre (mall in the US?) with a large out door car park. In South Australia, smart owners are putting roofs over the car parks to provide shade and protection from the rain which makes the centre more attractive, and adding PV to the new roofs. They then sell the energy to the tenants at less than the retail price which is around $350 per MWh and more than the wholesale price (around $50 MWh) Note that the bulk of the load occurs during the day (lighting, HVAC, refrigeration etc.) which matches the local production. Large office parks are another obvious application.
UK power system Central Electricity Generating Board ran the countrys entire generation on coal for decades with 100%reliability.
Don’t mention the coal minors strike.
Electrical power stations built up their store of coal to survive a 12 months miners strike.
It is what any sensible business would do.
I think you mean coal”miners” but that aside, the miners strike during the Thatcher era caused no power outages at all because government ensured Power station stock piles, were maxed out prior to their confrontation with union anarchists. The early strikes in the 1970’s were less well planned by the authorities and did result in blackmail from the NUM.
That is why Thatcher won and Heath lost.
France used to be 70% Nuclear.
The advantage of Nuclear over Solar is thatyou can use it 24 7 anywhere. Solar may work well in the Mojave Desert, but it is not so good in winter in northern locations where there are a lot of cloudy days .
Many good points to engineering a good grid. In Australia I note the tearing down of coal fired plants, nukes unknown, Snowy Mountain pumped hydro and lots of PV, is leading to your own supply issues. It seems the country and its member states do not have a good balance of generation as you explain is a requirement, otherwise the massive outages Australians experience on a regular basis as your weather though sunny is frequently affected by massive weather systems that unbalance the renewable generation. Anything worthwhile being done to resolve grid instability?
The idea of PV covered parking lots is a good one but is as an engineer might say, site dependent. Where I live the summers are hot , humid and sunny reaching temperatures of 35+ with winters delivering minus 25 and easily 250 cms of snow and ice. Helluva of place to live, eh?
My power is a grid supplied mixture of off the wall expensive solar and wind, but thank goodness for hydro and the nukes. No rotating outages thankfully as with the temperatures we deal with, it can be very hot and cold.
While a sufficiently large distribution might be able to handle the odd cloud, it can’t handle a storm front, nor can it handle the sun going down.
Replacing reliable power with unreliable power is never a good idea, no matter how good your intentions might be.
The only places where roof top solar makes ANY sense, are those places where the mains don’t reach.
Solar, roof top or otherwise, only makes sense when subsidized. Otherwise you end up paying more for power than you would have had you stuck with fossil fuels.
Solar roof top doesn’t even make much sense even in an off grid situation, since the solar panels on a roof are fixed and usually don’t have the right orientation or azimuth. So the efficiency becomes so low, why bother? At one of my very rural off grid locations, I installed a 1.3 kW panel array on my old C Band 3″ steel post that is anchored to a cubic yard of cement below frost level, and can ‘manually’ turn it east to west with the remote control on the old sat receiver when I turn it on, with my thumb on the remote. I can also manually adjust the azimuth just loosening a few bolts a few times a season, and am fairly close if I want, although I usually just leave it a little bit west of due south to catch the sunnier afternoon. Solar gets about 30% more electricity if you can do 3D axis tracking of the Sun, as compared to just mounting fixed at due south and a fixed yearly azimuth such as the spring/fall equinox. The fact that most grid scale solar doesn’t even do 3D axis real time tracking and lose 30% is stunning. Although losing 30% of next to nothing is still nothing I suppose. It is all subsidy mining for the installed capacity and usually overall general efficiency is about 17% at an average location. What a waste of resources for the grid connected solar. Off grid makes some sense if done optimally and you are in a half decent solar location.
The problem with trying to tilt panels in a large array, is that as the panels tip up (either east/west or north/south) the panels start to shade each other, which pretty much wipes out the benefit of tipping. So you’ve got a lot of extra cost for no or next to no benefit.
Solar thermal-Molten Salt (bird fryers) all have mirrors that have to track the Sun 3D axis real time to focus the Sun on the tower. Without that exact focus on the tower of molten salt, it wouldn’t work at all. Should be able to do the same for solar PV. 30% of all that potential electricity for 7-8 hours a day just goes to waste, which would make the grid even more unstable. Irony.
It’s doable, just not practical.
The type of shading I’m talking about is not a problem for sun focusing type arrays. It is a problem for arrays that directly convert sunlight to electricity.
Please keep giving us daily updates Willis.
I’ll bet you, that should Republicans be elected to power in The People’s Republic, nothing will change.
You’ll have no sudden building of gas or nuclear power stations, you’ll have more “Renewables” & your hydro still not count & will continue to be poorly maintained.
Why? Because businesses will make more money from the system, building wind & solar & raking in the subsidies from them.
That would still leave a profitable market for producing power when actually needed.
A few small NG plants would spring up, and the Democads would immediately claim that the Republicans were enriching their friends in the oil and gas industry.
All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey. I’ve been walkin’ for a while on a winter’s day. I’d be safe and warm if I was in L.A. California dreamin’ on such a winter’s day.
I just made that up. Catchy, eh?
Mama Cass called, she wants her royalties.
She hasn’t got a ghost of a chance of collecting.
Willis,
Great Post. Thanks.
Your mention of your little 2KVA Honda generator takes me back to my perennial problem.
In Queensland, I installed 24 solar panels on my roof not because of any belief that the future is renewables but because –
(1) I foresaw the sort of South Australian chaos that dependency on wind and solar would bring ( not particularly insightful),to the National Grid if it was stuffed full of renewables.
(2) The State Government was providing a rebate of some 44 cents per Kw/Hr. for energy remitted to the grid.
This has been progressively reduced to some 8 cents per Kw/Hr. as the government (like Spain) realised that their initial largesse might lead to its penury. The government paid the installers an incentive at that time reducing my installation costs from more than A$ 9,000 to about A$ 5,000.
At the time I was considering a diesel powered generator considerably larger than your Honda to power my household. My engineer savvy brother-in-law tells me that a 7 or 8 KVA should do the trick.
I know that my roof solar is still part of the National Grid as another commentator here points out.
To be truly free of the Grid, I need a large Tesla wall battery, or similar, or I am back to installing a diesel generator.
At present I am vacillating hoping for the arrival of cheap batteries.
“hoping for the arrival of cheap batteries”
There won’t ever be any. How do I know? Because there are no unknown elements left in the periodic table. We can already calculate what the theoretically best possible batteries (lithium-air, aluminium-air) can, at best, provide, and it is not very good, not nearly as good as petroleum. And those battery types are far (meaning at least several years) from being deployed commercially.
There may some day be some completely new way to store electricity efficiently, but it won’t be batteries.
and The Requirement(s) for multi kilowatts of 24/7/365 electrikery are…
What precisely *is* wrong with switching it off for a few hours every day?
I would venture..
Its makes life interesting/different
Gives you time to think
Gives time to do ‘things..
…home maintenance – maybe even construct a stone floored room on the North side of your home and forget the air-con – with trees/& (long-ish) grass outside to shade/cool it (nice way of realising what junk the Green Gas Gas Effect actually is and how this world/climate works)
…talk/play with the wife/GF/BF/kids
…do the garden (dig old paper & card into the ground, esp around trees) Your TV will certainly follow soon after
…go litter picking
…tidy the grass verges along your lane/road
…plant some trees/flowers
…feed the wild birds
…go fishing/painting/walking/exploring
…build ‘eclectic’ things for your garden/yard/house. (Check Pinterest for initial ideas)
…watch ‘nature’ (the very best thing to do – after a while it will dawn what a Total Pile Of Shyte CAGW actually is)
…walk to the neighbours, chew the cud.
…Make friends with an autistic kid – build it a playground. Use it.
…go talk to any cows/horses there may be around. They’re always very good listeners. Explain the Green Gas House Effect to them. Realise in your own mind what shyte it is AND thus, how to explain such to any 2-legged animals you come upon
…The Real Life Saver = learn to eat food that doesn’t need cooking. Yes, I am talking about carbohydrate. (How did our ancestors manage without a microwave oven? Hmmm. How?
…Learn to listen to your own body, learn to dance. It really is the simplest thing to do, building a loud stereo system that’ll run off a car battery and a few solar panels
..Learn to enjoy your own company. i.e. Chill
That is THE biggest mistake that ‘activists of all colours make – they actually hate themselves and try to live with themselves by passing that hate on and elektrikery makes it soooooo easy to do so
Peta, you seem to think that life would be wonderful without electricity. I strongly recommend that you go to some third world country, where continuous electricity doesn’t exist. There, you can “enjoy your own company”, learn to eat raw food, and dance to a “loud stereo system that’ll run off a car battery and a few solar panels” … wait, what? That’s electricity! You have to dance to your own singing. Plus it takes electricity to make cars … and batteries … and all the rest.
Anyhow, go do that for a year or so, collect wood every day to boil water so you don’t die of dysentery, and then come back and report how much fun you had …
When I was a kid, electricity was rightly seen of the savior of the poor rancher or farmer, and the poor housewife. And it’s true. Electricity is what set women free from endless slavery.
Not sure when it became evil, but Peta, I suspect that after a year of living in some developing country and washing your own clothes by hand you might see the wisdom in using electricity …
I discuss such a country below …
w.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/17/firing-up-the-economy-literally/
Why the question? Turn off your power every day for a few hours – make it realistic and turn it off during peak usage the time of 3 pm until 6 pm.
After a year, get hack to us on how great it was.
Peta….our power was out in the dark. How am I going to do home remodeling, or just about anything in the dark? How am I going to run the 120/240VAC power tools?
>>>Insert another copy of Willis’ reply here<<<
In short, please take your green ideas and peddle them somewhere else.
Peta of Newark
Is that Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire?
And is it Peta as a phonetic spelling of Peter, or are we talking People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?
I’ve been curious for years. You’re a colorful character. Care to share?
Gives time to do ‘things..
…home maintenance
which requires light (which requires electricity when the power is out during the dark hours) and often powered tools (electricity again, even if battery powered, those batteries need electricity to charge)
building a loud stereo system that’ll run off a car battery and a few solar panels
the materials to build such a system as well as the manufacture of the car, battery and solar panels all required electricity (and a lot of it) to produce.
Really, Peta, as Willis said, try living life in one of the countries that doesn’t have electricity. Give it a year and then report back to us how great it was.
“They are absolutely not ready without huge ongoing subsidies and full fossil backup”.
And that subsidy can only come from a healthy oil and gas industry. Kill off the oil, coal and gas and bang goes the subsidies for renewables. Who’d of thought?
How many Virtual PPA’s do they have in the renewables mix?
Just asking for some friends….
Thanks for another great, clear analysis, Willis.
It is interesting that, from your first graph, it appears that the only “renewable” energy source which is reliably useful is geothermal, steadily producing about 1 GW (about 2% of total peak electricity demand for the state). I had not realized that the People’s Democratic Republic of California got any electricity from geothermal.
So I googled it, and found this page:
https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/renewables_data/geothermal/index_cms.php#:~:text=There%20are%20a%20total%20of,in%20photo%20on%20the%20right).
It reports that in 2019 the PDRC produced 10,943 GWh of electricity at geothermal plants, and imported another 700 GWh from Nevada, for an average of:
(10,943+700) / (365 * 24) = 1.33 GW total
10,943 / (365 * 24) = 1.25 GW (without the 700 GWh imported from NV)
It says:
1.25 / 2.730 = 45.8% capacity factor.
I’m surprised the CF is so low. That 46% compares to typical CFs of about 18% for wind, 10% for solar, and >90% for nuclear. (For fossil fuels, the CFs aren’t very meaningful, because output is determined by demand.)
Unfortunately, all of the PDRC’s geothermal electricity production is a long way from the Los Angeles demand center.
We have geothermal energy generated very near to where I live, at The Geysers. Usual problems, highly corrosive water that eats at heat exchangers and the like, but it does work. As you point out, it’s a long ways from the population centers.
w.
The Geysers geothermal resource is a rare and classic occurrence, in my opinion. Something an explorer dreams about! I am not a geothermal expert but you can easily research it yourself. Has been operating for a longg time.
The reason why Geysers has such a low capacity factor is twofold. First they have too many power stations for the size of the resource so there is not enough steam to run them all at full load. The second is that they can maximise their income by two shifting the plant, doing most of the generation while the demand is high.
Geysers is different to most other geothermal resources. Its wells produce dry steam, most other fields produce a mixture of steam and water. The latter take a lot longer to stabilise and don’t take kindly to load changes.
+100 Great article Willis.
If you go here you will find generator outages.
http://content.caiso.com/unitstatus/data/unitstatus202008150830.html
Things would have been worse if Diablo 2 had not come back online ealier in the month.
Once they shut down Diablo Canyon, they will be scrambling to find another 2200MW.
On Friday FMM prices at DLAP_SCE-APND HE19 were over $1000 per MWh.
(And you thought Solar at $100 MWh was expensive).
Don’t just blame the Democrats – Aaaahnuld was also a big supporter.
Wait till Kamala Harris gets in on the act.
Meanwhile, the Environ Mental Retards in LA can charge their Teslas using Coal Powered electriciy that the
LAPWD imports from the InterMountain Power Plant in Utah.
From the article: “As you can see”
I don’t know about others, but I can’t see those graph clearly enough to get any information from them without using my magnifying application.
It would be nice to have a link to the graphics, where they can be enlarged enough to read the text, or you could just post larger graphs.
Goto caiso.com or oasis.caiso.com
I linked to caiso.com in the article. All graphs are from there.
w.
Agreed, but this works, too:
1. Right-click the graph. (Or, on a Mac, “ctrl click”, or two-finger-tap.)
2. That should bring up a menu. On the menu, left-click “Open image in new tab” (most browsers), or “View image” (Firefox).
3. If necessary, click on the new tab, to view the graph by itself.
4. Use “ctrl +” or “ctrl =” to enlarge (“zoom in”), or “ctrl -” to shrink (“zoom out”). Or hold down the ctrl key while spinning the mouse wheel. (Or, on a Mac, you might need to use “⌘ +” or “⌘ -“.)
My relatives in the San Francisco bay area are convinced that wind and solar backed by utility scale batteries can replace nearly all of our nation’s legacy power generation resources; i.e. coal, nuclear, and natural gas.
From what I can observe myself, most Californians would probably agree with this opinion.
Not only that, my Bay Area relatives believe that the only long term solution for California’s high prices for electricity is to greatly accelerate the retirement of coal, nuclear, and natural gas in favor of the quick adoption of wind and solar.
Why should most Californians believe otherwise when PG&E’s own CEO, Anthony Early, claimed that California can easily achieve 70% wind and solar by 2030, and that California’s utilities can then charge less for electricity than they do today?
Here’s a good way to make your relatives in SF pitch a fit – ask them how all the “rare earth metals” and other materials necessary for all this bone-headed wind and solar will be mined…wind and solar fired bulldozers, excavators, and backhoes?! LMFAO.
All we need is a big “easement” to reach the ports, and then we can let the rest of Calizuela secede and stew in their own juices.
They, just like most Californians, are incapable of acknowledging these realities. And when blackouts occur and when prices for electricity rise sharply, they will blame it all on an Enron-like market manipulation conspiracy.
Ask them to try and calculate how many banks of batteries it would take to run San Francisco for just 15 minutes. Then ask them how many years it would take to build all those batteries.
MarkW: “Ask them to try and calculate how many banks of batteries it would take to run San Francisco for just 15 minutes. Then ask them how many years it would take to build all those batteries.”
In past years, I’ve raised similar questions with my Bay Area relatives concerning how much grid-scale battery storage will be needed by 2030 if California is to achieve 70% wind and solar by the end of this decade.
Their standard response has always been, “The cost of batteries is falling rapidly. We don’t need to worry about not having enough backup storage when the time comes that we will need it.”
California’s state government claims 70% renewables can be done by 2030; PG&E’s own CEO claims it can be done. My California relatives live in a dream world, of course, but no one in a position of authority in that state is telling them anything different.
Most Californian’s would fail 6th grade science class. I remember talking with a coworker who was certain that solar jet liners were just a few years away. Despite her being reasonably bright, I couldn’t get her to understand the solar irradiance of the sun versus the surface area and mass of an airliner. I just had to give up.
Willis, a tongue in cheek observation. If you add 10Gw of unreliable renewables, you DON’T “gotta, need to” add 10 GwH of fossil fuel backup. As your post shows, you can have 10GwH of rolling blackouts instead.
Even Professor Jacobson acknowledges that achieving 100% renewables in the United States requires that total demand for electricity be cut roughly in half. What he doesn’t acknowledge is that significantly higher prices for electricity plus extreme conservation measures such as rolling blackouts are the only practical means of achieving that necessary reduction in demand.
“VOTE! The only solution to this nonsense is to throw them out…”
A response from your neighbor down the road.
No way in hell will the residents of California throw these clowns out of office. We already have term limits for state government and we simply replace the old clowns with new. I’ve lived in California for 58 of 62 years and, just as with a warming planet, I can only mitigate the effects – I cannot change them! So here are my mitigation steps in no particular order:
1. A 10kW generator which was purchased for troubled winters but is now used more in the summer
2. Keep my income low while still living quite comfortably (so I am not enabling the craziness)
3. Own an electric vehicle to avoid, as much as possible, the ever increasing gas taxes
4. Solar panels to help offset the outrageous cost of electricity (especially from 11:00am to 6:00pm)
5. Lived in my home for 37 years to take full advantage of Prop 13 property taxes
6. Every time my blood comes to a boil, remember: The wisdom in understanding what I can control and what I can not.
Willis – When things get frustrating, enjoy the beauty of our community and live to fight another day, my friend!