[trunnell]

They mention California. https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply is a dashboard showing electricity demand and supply, real-time and historical.

Yesterday evening's peak demand was between 7-8pm at 30.7 gigawatts. Supply breakdown around 8pm:

  Batteries: 8.4 GW
  Natural gas: 6.0 GW
  Renewables: 5.4 GW
  Large hydro: 4.4 GW
  Imports: 4.1 GW 
  Nuclear: 2.3 GW

This is a remarkable development. All of the peak demand supplied from batteries used to be supplied by natural gas just a couple years ago.

[bluefirebrand]

Yeah

Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance

It's the same kind of thing we see with self driving cars. They can navigate sunny California streets so "self driving" must be so close! But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily

California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff

[trunnell]

Respectfully disagree -- solar isn't the big story here.

One could argue that batteries will have a bigger impact than solar. Batteries obviously let you decouple power generation and consumption, shifting anytime production to peak-time demand.

Less obvious is that local demand can fluctuate 2x. It usually dips mid-day and peaks 5-9pm (see the charts at www.caiso.com) when people come home and turn on their lights, oven, appliances, etc. This pattern happens throughout the year.

So forget solar for a moment; the ability to shift energy that was produced mid-day (even by a natural gas plant) to the evening would allow you to build fewer power plants. Nuclear + batteries might also be a good combination. Batteries get you closer to being able to solve for "average demand" rather than "peak demand."

This has nothing to do w/ California. California is just on the leading edge of battery installation. Solar just exacerbates the issue of the peak-to-trough ratio (evening vs. mid-day demand) due to mid-day solar "overproduction" causing it to be uneconomical to run gas plants mid-day. But solving for "peak demand" is still a problem in the absence of solar.

Still: most of the complaints about solar are answered when paired with large battery systems.

[colechristensen]

Germany is famous for being cloudy and is much further north, much of it is north of the primary US-Canada border. It is one of the leading solar adopters.

Not being ideal for solar just means you need to install more area, and there's plenty available space. Solar is already the cheapest (if not it's competitive with the cheapest wind power) power source. Also having to, say, double the panel area in lower solar irradiance requires less than double the non-panel costs (you don't need double the inverters or power transmission).

California is leading because the politics/economy/irradiance are the best combination, you would expect a place like that to lead first. It does not follow that other places are unsuitable for solar, it will just cost marginally more.

It's a strange but persistent pattern where success in ideal conditions will draw out a litany of reasons why that success is actually a sign of failure when instead the early success is just a sign of ideal conditions. Why wouldn't something promising succeed first in the place with the best conditions for success?

[sealeck]

> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance

We can also build power lines! Between different places! Such as the places with lots of sun, and the places without lots of sun!!!

[JimDabell]

The white paper they are discussing [0] includes multiple cities around the world:

> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply and Muscat in Oman – 99%, using 6 GW solar panels and 17 GWh battery. Even cloudier cities like Birmingham [UK] can get 62% of the way to a constant supply every hour of every day across the year.

[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

[Aurornis]

> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance

There are many place that get a lot of sun. As solar panels come down in price, it becomes even easier to compensate for deficits with additional panels.

It’s common practice to install more solar panel capacity than inverter capacity because panels are rarely operating at peak output anyway. If you’re installing 100kW of inverters, you might install 120kW of panels. The panel array wouldn’t exceed 100kW most of the time anyway.

In a location with suboptimal sun, you might install an even higher ratio of panels to inverter and battery capacity.

Some people get bothered by this because they feel like some of the solar power is wasted at peak capacity, but you have to consider that the inverter and battery capacity is also wasted when you’re not sending enough from the panel array. It’s a balancing act.

You also have to consider that the same sunlight that makes California good for solar also creates additional demand for air conditioning. A location with less sun would have less solar heat gain, which is easier to serve for many reasons.

[supplied_demand]

==California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff==

It also represents 12% of the country's population, which makes it a better benchmark than just being 1 of 50 states.

[cptskippy]

> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark.

California is representative of more than 25% of the United States in terms of solar intensity.

People really need to get away from the idea that if a solution doesn't work for 100% of use cases then it's nonviable.

[bryanlarsen]

> fog, or even just grey skies

So San Francisco?

[icelancer]

Western Washington is a great contrast. We get a decent amount of sun (despite the reputation), however, our electricity prices are insanely low due to close-proximity hydroelectric power.

As a result, solar is rarely cost effective even with subsidies, and basically never without them.

Doesn't mean people don't install it for various other reasons, but it serves as a good contrast to California despite similar political landscapes.

[destitude]

> But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily I have winter basically 5 months of the year where I am and have no issues being fully off grid with only solar and batteries as energy sources. You do have to compensate for winter by having more panels and more batteries but easily doable.

[pinkmuffinere]

I think it has been a good benchmark during early development, but you’re right that it becomes less useful now that Solar is further along. Maybe some Midwestern place would be a good benchmark now? Or like England?

[PicassoCTs]

But those conditions are not globally unique- why not convert solar to a transportable media (ammonia) and ship it around the globe?

[pshirshov]

I have negative energy bills and high net export with my moderate system in Ireland which is definitely not considered a good solar country.

[hopelite]

Not to mention that combining batteries, i.e., storage, with generation is not exactly accurate or even honest. It is merely an offsetting and also a compensation for the deficiencies of “renewable” energy, which are always mitigated by that type of intentional muddling of classifications.

[Nicholas_C]

That is much higher than I would have expected. Good news. What are they using to charge the batteries though? I wonder if it's offpeak renewables or mostly natural gas?

[mjamesaustin]

Daytime solar, in the summer especially. Power demand yesterday was negative from 11:30 to 3:30, for instance, meaning batteries can charge for free to absorb excess solar generation during those hours.

[gpm]

If you scroll to the "Supply trend" graph you can see when the batteries were charging and how electricity was being generated at that time.

It's the renewables during the day while the sun is shining.

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

[asdefghyk]

RE "...All of the peak demand supplied from batteries...." This is a very good start.

My question is how do the batteries go , if there is 1 - N days of cloudy weather? Can the batteries supply the peak for more than one day? Is there ( or where would they go ) transmission lines to bring in the needed peak supply from other storage (battery / pumped hydro ) areas?

Another step would be to include days of peak electricity demand, which in my country occurs in cold weather ( heaters) and very hot weather ( air conditioner's ) OR is there demand limits like in Spain demand limit for some houses is around 3KW (YUKS)

[reactordev]

It's the imports that get you. The energy marketplace is all over the place in regards to price because of the demand for energy.

[UltraSane]

That is impressive but California electricity is pretty expensive compared to most of the rest of the US.

[woodpanel]

Aww, that old „pick a specific timeframe on a specific day, preferably summer, to get an convenient picture“ trick. incompleteness by design.

Supply itself is an inadequate metric. Yet convenient to obstruct the view upon CA that beacon of the future, suddenly being littered with third world brown and blackouts.