Spain as a whole 45 million country with diverse geography and scattered population is producing 75 percent of its electricity from renewables and gas and carbon have been down to almost technical zero.
It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery.
During the day, a huge chunk of the produced energy is sold to other countries, that's why I claim that 70% of its electricity is from renewables, even though the production share only accounts for 66%.
> It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery.
IN PARTS of the country. In other regions (Catalunya, Andalucia) there is an ongoing drought which is severely impacting everyone and yeah, hydro-electrical companies had done some, let say questionable decisions regarding their water reservoirs.
Spain and Portugal did something incredibly smart - both went against EU and won right to cap gas price for power production. That way MWh price is 1Euro in Spain right now while 56 in Germany 74 Italy. This one simple trick fixed their grid. Gas turbines no longer generate 24/7 while charging premium and skewing whole market.
For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like we’re almost there and can stop caring. Just look at the excellent, accurate, and up-to-the-hour charts put out by the electricity market itself and you will see where and when the challenges we face still are.
We are way way past that at this point. The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day. Because of solar PV, the cheapest generation now, the daytime electricity supply is actually more than we need in California. Solar farms (and also wind farms)get curtailed here due to supplying more than the grid can take at times; this is usually for several hours.
Source; reporter covering solar news through interviews with grid operators, solar developers and policymakers since 2008
Are you sure it’s only a few minutes at low demand times? I checked a few days in April at your link, and if I’m reading the graphs right, it looks like renewable production exceeded demand for at least several hours in the afternoon for each of the days I checked.
The headline on the original article seems unhelpful and perhaps deliberately misleading, but unless I’m reading the graphs wrong (quite possible!) this also doesn’t seem, like, a 15 minute window at 2 a.m. where unexpectedly strong winds created a temporary blip of excess production.
Take a look at
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html
Scroll down to "Net demand trend" which is "System demand minus wind and solar" and compare yesterday vs last summer and a year ago
Yesterday (4/15) lowest net demand was 366 MW
Last summer, July 4th , lowest net demand was 2350 MW
Last year (4/15/23) lowest net demand was 2227 MW
You can see that last summer, with so much more "powerful" sun, the net demand never went below 2300 MW. Last year went down to 2227 MW. Today, we are down to 366 MW.
We manage to produce so much more solar in the last year that the net demand minus renewables went down by ~1800 MW. That means a few more years of improvements like that and we will have excess power generation of solar/wind at least during the day for most days. So if we start storing that excess generated power, we will start making a dent on other times of max power (since we can discharge batteries when max demand is needed).
That's the plan on how to keep lowering the net demand more and more.
Mark Z. Jacobson! Haven't heard that name in a few years.
Don't know him personally, but here's a tangent for the interested: In the first year of my PhD, I read several of his papers from the 90's on the GATOR family of climate models. At the time, I was interested in a potential intersection with my field. One thing that struck me was the absolutely exquisite attention to detail in one of his papers made to model the perspiration of water vapor from leaf stomata in forests (don't have the paper handy but can find if anyone's interested). It was really quite impressive.
I know a lot of people are disparaging the 100% number but I think the article is more about indicating that this is the inflection point as renewables and batteries are still getting cheaper and more installations are happening.
Yes, exactly. Renewables keep achieving new milestones, keep not only growing but also accelerating, and we haven't seen any indication they have a weak point except the obvious variability of production.
But the falling costs, the simplicity and the very low maintenance costs will trump variability. The grid will be built around that, it's kind of obvious at this point. One of the fastest growing solar areas in the world is Texas which has very loose rules on what you can deploy to the grid. So if you leave it to the market, it will only deploy renewables and storage. Everything else is dead until we reach a point where renewables meet their limitation. But again, this hasn't happened yet in 30 years of poor predictions on what those limitations are.
” California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035.
California passed a law that commits to achieving 100% net zero electricity by 2045. Will it beat that goal by a decade? We hope so. It’s going to be exciting to watch.”
Remarkable, especially considering California’s population is 39 million people.
> Remarkable, especially considering California’s population is 39 million people.
All else being equal, it is easier to accomplish, the larger the population, as the statistics will be somewhat in your advantage.
simple example: if you want to be on 100% renewables on your self, your energy production needs to meet your energy consumption 100% of the time. The moment you pool with a neighbor, that no longer is true; if you need more than you produce, but your neighbor needs less than they produce, the pair of you still can be 100% on renewables.
Now, energy production and energy demand between neighbors are highly correlated, so the effect isn’t very high for n=2 (but even then, it’s easier to buy a mix of solar and wind once you pool with a group than when doing it alone), but with millions of people spread out over hundreds of kilometers, that changes.
> And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January …), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight.
If it exceeded 100% energy demand, why were they still using methane?
The title is a little misleading. Solar energy production is very variable. So I assume over 100% portion is referring to the peak production hours only. At those times, the power grid usually sells the excess energy to other states.
Met its electricity demand for a short period of each day. I don't think the chin-scratching over why the public isn't agog at this milestone is sincere. Keep going and give us a call when it hits 50% of the total demand.
"Energy demand" is a huge stretch. It is just electricity. It does not cover energy used in transportation (car, ships, flight) and energy used to produce imported goods. It also does not cover recycling and renewal. Even food gets like 60% of energy from fertiliser, that is not included here!
Anyway, I am just silly old person. So let's march towards bright future. We need solar powered battle tanks and solar powered fighter jets!
Somehow 100% renewable but the most expensive electric I've ever paid for. How much does 2000kWh cost again?
Also, the most prone to fire-hazard because of above-ground electric. Remember when PG&E caused the most destructive wildfire in California history?
Weird rub-it-out article IMO most likely paid for by some PAC. With all the money pumped into California power projects, it never equaled lower power prices, reliability, or safety...
If you want to see a power grid truly without good pricing, reliability, or safety, look at Texas. Summer brings constant outages and market prices dozens of times higher than the norm. People were getting bills for thousands of dollars for a single family home in recent summers.
Same thought. It’s a bit of a bait and switch as the title implied to me a major milestone. But it’s not and the real milestone of renewables providing power continuously day and night remains.
So they could build a battery big enough to serve 15 minutes of the nighttime trough and declare mission accomplished with only enough solar to fill the battery on a rainy winter solstice day? Some goalposts just beg for getting moved. (I assume that this is unrelated to the 2045 goal, so it's not really bad, just bad headlining)
[+] [-] ktzar|1 year ago|reply
It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery.
I made a website to track this: https://energy.antizone.online
During the day, a huge chunk of the produced energy is sold to other countries, that's why I claim that 70% of its electricity is from renewables, even though the production share only accounts for 66%.
[+] [-] darkwater|1 year ago|reply
IN PARTS of the country. In other regions (Catalunya, Andalucia) there is an ongoing drought which is severely impacting everyone and yeah, hydro-electrical companies had done some, let say questionable decisions regarding their water reservoirs.
[+] [-] rasz|1 year ago|reply
https://euenergy.live
[+] [-] cranberryturkey|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] PunchTornado|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Proven|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] schnitzelstoat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] callalex|1 year ago|reply
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
[+] [-] baseline-shift|1 year ago|reply
We are way way past that at this point. The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day. Because of solar PV, the cheapest generation now, the daytime electricity supply is actually more than we need in California. Solar farms (and also wind farms)get curtailed here due to supplying more than the grid can take at times; this is usually for several hours.
Source; reporter covering solar news through interviews with grid operators, solar developers and policymakers since 2008
[+] [-] mgraczyk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nocoiner|1 year ago|reply
The headline on the original article seems unhelpful and perhaps deliberately misleading, but unless I’m reading the graphs wrong (quite possible!) this also doesn’t seem, like, a 15 minute window at 2 a.m. where unexpectedly strong winds created a temporary blip of excess production.
[+] [-] lakis|1 year ago|reply
You can see that last summer, with so much more "powerful" sun, the net demand never went below 2300 MW. Last year went down to 2227 MW. Today, we are down to 366 MW. We manage to produce so much more solar in the last year that the net demand minus renewables went down by ~1800 MW. That means a few more years of improvements like that and we will have excess power generation of solar/wind at least during the day for most days. So if we start storing that excess generated power, we will start making a dent on other times of max power (since we can discharge batteries when max demand is needed).
That's the plan on how to keep lowering the net demand more and more.
[+] [-] bnjemian|1 year ago|reply
Don't know him personally, but here's a tangent for the interested: In the first year of my PhD, I read several of his papers from the 90's on the GATOR family of climate models. At the time, I was interested in a potential intersection with my field. One thing that struck me was the absolutely exquisite attention to detail in one of his papers made to model the perspiration of water vapor from leaf stomata in forests (don't have the paper handy but can find if anyone's interested). It was really quite impressive.
Anyway, just thought I'd share the anecdote :)
[+] [-] mpweiher|1 year ago|reply
"The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day ..."
So it's not actually that California's electricity demands were met by renewables 100% of the time as one might think, given the headline.
As far as I can tell, it's not even that, disregarding the intermittency problem, total energy demand was met, on average.
It's just that sometime during the day 100% was hit.
[+] [-] xbmcuser|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] locallost|1 year ago|reply
But the falling costs, the simplicity and the very low maintenance costs will trump variability. The grid will be built around that, it's kind of obvious at this point. One of the fastest growing solar areas in the world is Texas which has very loose rules on what you can deploy to the grid. So if you leave it to the market, it will only deploy renewables and storage. Everything else is dead until we reach a point where renewables meet their limitation. But again, this hasn't happened yet in 30 years of poor predictions on what those limitations are.
[+] [-] andsoitis|1 year ago|reply
Remarkable, especially considering California’s population is 39 million people.
[+] [-] Someone|1 year ago|reply
All else being equal, it is easier to accomplish, the larger the population, as the statistics will be somewhat in your advantage.
simple example: if you want to be on 100% renewables on your self, your energy production needs to meet your energy consumption 100% of the time. The moment you pool with a neighbor, that no longer is true; if you need more than you produce, but your neighbor needs less than they produce, the pair of you still can be 100% on renewables.
Now, energy production and energy demand between neighbors are highly correlated, so the effect isn’t very high for n=2 (but even then, it’s easier to buy a mix of solar and wind once you pool with a group than when doing it alone), but with millions of people spread out over hundreds of kilometers, that changes.
[+] [-] dmitri1981|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] squaredot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] krasin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] SeanLuke|1 year ago|reply
If it exceeded 100% energy demand, why were they still using methane?
[+] [-] itopaloglu83|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] apexalpha|1 year ago|reply
California met its ELECTRICITY demand by renewables. They still imported boatloads of oil, petrol and nat gas as energy too.
This is still a great milestone! So not trying to downplay it, but we need to be realistic about our total energy use.
[+] [-] ghostly_s|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Throe848rn|1 year ago|reply
Anyway, I am just silly old person. So let's march towards bright future. We need solar powered battle tanks and solar powered fighter jets!
[+] [-] wffurr|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] w0z_|1 year ago|reply
Somehow 100% renewable but the most expensive electric I've ever paid for. How much does 2000kWh cost again?
Also, the most prone to fire-hazard because of above-ground electric. Remember when PG&E caused the most destructive wildfire in California history?
Weird rub-it-out article IMO most likely paid for by some PAC. With all the money pumped into California power projects, it never equaled lower power prices, reliability, or safety...
[+] [-] mjamesaustin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] w0z_|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gnabgib|1 year ago|reply
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40043155 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40045252
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|1 year ago|reply
Some more discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40045252
[+] [-] jkw|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fragmede|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] huytersd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] YugyDugan|1 year ago|reply
That's nice and all, but 15 minutes is a much lesser achievement than the headline implies.
[+] [-] elcritch|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ViewTrick1002|1 year ago|reply
Next is 12 hours, after that a day and then finally months and years.
Incredible progress is being made.
[+] [-] usrusr|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sethammons|1 year ago|reply
Well, here it would be: between 2% and 25% of the time, it works every time
[+] [-] PunchTornado|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 7734128|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] CodeWriter23|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fragmede|1 year ago|reply
https://www.caiso.com/Documents/SummerMarketPerformanceRepor... page 22
December, on the other hand, is a bit of a problem