California is awash in renewable energy -- except when it's most needed - WAPO

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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...