California is awash in renewable energy -- except when it's most needed - WAPO
Arrays of photovoltaic solar panels are seen at the Tenaska Imperial Solar Energy Center South. Photo taken over El Centro, California, May 29, 2020 by drone. REUTERS/Bing Guan
California is awash in renewable energy -- except when it's most needed
Washington Post | Erica Werner | September 21, 2022
LOS ANGELES — As California suffered through an epic heat wave this month, state officials pleaded with residents to conserve electricity. Almost simultaneously, power grid operators were rejecting thousands of megawatts of solar and wind energy that could have provided a cushion to get through the crisis.
The explanation illustrates one of the paradoxes confronting California as it rushes to transition to a clean-energy economy: The state has built up so much renewable energy production in recent years that it can rarely use it all during peak production hours. But it also doesn’t have enough storage capacity to hang onto it for when it might be needed.
The result is that officials are frequently forced to jettison solar power production while the sun is shining, just hours before customer demand peaks in the late afternoon and evening. The same thing happens to a lesser extent with wind energy — and the issue is surfacing in multiple other states as well.
“It all comes down to this problem of: It’s not how much energy we have, it’s the when and the where the energy is being produced,” said James Bushnell, an economics professor at the University of California at Davis. “Particularly the solar resources — it’s just in the wrong places and at the wrong times.”...more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/09/21/california-is-awash-renewable-energy-except-when-its-most-needed/
RELATED:
California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it
LA TIMES | JUNE 22, 2017
On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power.
Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren’t using to avoid overloading its own power lines.
It happened on eight days in January and nine in February as well. All told, those transactions helped save Arizona electricity customers millions of dollars this year, though grid operators declined to say exactly how much. And California also has paid other states to take power...more
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/
In the future, will there be MORE Excess renewable energy or LESS Excess renewable energy???
If only there was some way to store it...
= new reply since forum marked as read
A Kilogram of Hydrogen properly stored is the exact same weight after 10,000 or 100,000 years.
A battery that is not charging is DIScharging.
They also catch fire. And they are NOT environmentally friendly - to manufacture or dispose of.
Fire at PG&’s Tesla battery in California is now under control
PV Magazine | SEPTEMBER 22, 2022
A Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at PG&E’s Elkhorn large-scale battery storage facility in Monterey County, California, in the early hours of September 21. The fire was brought fully under control by the late afternoon, and its cause is under investigation...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/09/22/fire-at-pges-tesla-battery-in-california-is-now-under-control/
Investigation confirms cause of fire at Tesla’s Victorian Big Battery in Australia
Energy Storage | May 11, 2022
A liquid coolant leak caused thermal runaway in battery cells, which started a fire at the 300MW/450MWh Victorian Big Battery in Australia last July.
A technical report into findings of specialist investigators has been released to the public, written by experts at Fisher Engineering and the Energy Safety Response Group (ESRG). The fire happened as the system was under construction and destroyed two of the 212 Tesla Megapack battery energy storage system (BESS) units being installed... more
https://www.energy-storage.news/investigation-confirms-cause-of-fire-at-teslas-victorian-big-battery-in-australia/
Any idea how much one of these Tesla "Megapacks" costs and the capacity?
...appreciation of scale.
Seventy thousand "powerwalls" owned by bourgeois assholes who are willing to fund the racist asshole Elon Musk, a modern day cobalt slaver would have done zero to run air conditioners for the bulk of Californians during the extreme heatwave that resulted from the fact that 50 years of bullshit anti-nuke rhetoric about solar and wind did nothing, zero, to address climate change, and was, in fact, the cause of extreme heat all over the burning planet.
Another thing that characterizes anti-nukes is their inability to distinguish the units of power and energy, their contempt for physics and all sciences being as obvious as their contempt for anyone who isn't wealthy and living behind the walls of gated communities.
The demand during that event often reached over 50,000 MW, all of it in the late afternoon and early evening hours. I'm not a handwaving asshole. During these extreme heatwaves I monitored the CAISO website, because I give more of a shit about the environment than I do about worshipping the Trumpian pig Elon Musk.
Anyone who did give a shit could have done the same in lieu of chanting nonsense.
Here are the supply and demand curves of September 6, 2022 for the State of California, including the supply of so called "renewable energy" which is the subject of so much pernicious worship in California and elsewhere.
Total demand:
Total supply, including the reliable Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant, which operates on a footprint of less than 12 acres, including the parking lot, in contrast to all the wind turbine shit that covers over 1500 square miles of ruined wilderness and will be landfill within 20 years.
And here's the output of all the so called "renewable energy" in the State on that awful day.
For most of the day, under extreme heat conditions, 1500 square miles of wind turbine laced destroyed wilderness wasn't producing as much power as the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant was producing on a 12 acre footprint.
What is even worse, more obscene, which should disgust any decent human being with even a trace of scientific insight, is that California was burning dangerous natural gas, huge quantities of it, using some of it to charge batteries, thus increasing the carbon cost of this odious form of energy.
Since the second law of thermodynamics - the law that anti-nukes refuse to learn - requires that charging a battery and discharging a battery wastes energy as heat, this is obscene.
Of course, people who don't give a shit about the poor - let's face it most of the people killed by the extreme heat, and surely there were many such people were poor - and would rather worship at the altar of the African slaver Elon Musk, couldn't care less.
I, however, do care. All the stupid and weak efforts at wit made by anti-nukes only convinces me how indifferent, ignorant and awful they are. They are, unsurprisingly, willing to display as much at the drop of a hat.
