[lakis]

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.

[lakis]

See also https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html and scroll down to "Batteries trend" and compare today vs a year ago. A year ago, batteries were discharging max 3MW and were drained by 10-11 pm. Yesterday batteries were discarging at max 5.3MW and were fully drained around 11:30. So batteries handled twice as much power for longer period of time.