Some exciting news from sunny California… The power of the sun has now been harnessed.
Renewable electricity met just shy of 100% of California’s demand for the first time on Saturday, officials said, much of it from large amounts of solar power produced along Interstate 10, an hour east of the Coachella Valley.
While partygoers celebrated in the blazing sunshine at the Stagecoach music festival, “at 2:50 (p.m.), we reached 99.87 % of load served by all renewables, which broke the previous record,” said Anna Gonzales, spokeswoman for California Independent System Operator, a nonprofit that oversees the state’s bulk electric power system and transmission lines. Solar power provided two-thirds of the amount needed.
It is an achievement. However, Canary Media points out that there’s a bit more to the story…
Understanding the full picture requires first unpacking how CAISO calculated the 97% figure. California’s in-state renewable energy production was calculated as a percentage of energy demand after accounting for transmission losses. This demand figure omits demand met by rooftop solar, which generates power for more than 1 million California customers. Because large hydropower does not qualify for the state’s renewable portfolio standard, it is also not included in this figure.
Another important caveat: The figure does not account for all demand in California, even leaving aside demand met by rooftop solar. CAISO’s system does not include the areas served by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, two publicly owned utilities that together make up roughly 10 percent of electricity sales in the state.
April 3 was a big wind and solar day for California, coupled with relatively low demand due to mild spring weather. Across the whole day, wind contributed 24% toward meeting demand and solar contributed 22%, followed by large hydro at 8% and geothermal at 4%. Add in minor contributions from biomass, biogas and small hydro projects, and the total renewable percentage for the day was 61%.
But even on this banner day for renewables, 39% of CAISO’s demand was met by non-renewable sources. And even at the 3:35–3:40 p.m. interval when CAISO hit 97% non-hydro renewables, other power plants in the state were running, including gas, nuclear and hydro facilities.
That means California still burned enough gas to meet about 15% of demand at the same moment that it had enough non-hydro renewable production to meet 97% of demand; again, the excess was exported to other states.
Adding large hydro and nuclear into the CAISO mix during the renewables peak yields a maximum of 107% carbon-free power that day, as shown in the chart below. During the three hours when clean electricity was being produced in excess of demand, California was exporting its carbon-free energy to neighboring states, almost certainly offsetting fossil power.
3 hours of creative accounting sure make libturds go batty and does not constitute a trend. But hey, another reason to take time off work and smoke some weed.
This is the nastiest thing I can see about these things; when “the environment” is at stake, the truth seems to be a secondary consideration. Reliability estimates for CFL light bulbs were often an order of magnitude optimistic, for example. Electric cars, despite deriving most of their power from coal, are marketed as “zero emissions”, as if burning coal has none.
I would dare say that it would be a huge environmental improvement if our metric was “cost”, since that actually corresponds to the effort, energy, and pollution involved in an activity. But the left doesn’t want to hear that our best option is actually standard power plants, of course.
Big deal. All of my electricity comes from the sun, too.
Well, not directly. Long, long ago the sun shone on plants, which eventually died and turned to compost, which hardened into coal, which was mined from the ground and shipped by rail to a power plant where the coal was burned to boil water which turned to steam to spin a turbine connected to a shaft wrapped in coils of copper wire spinning inside a field of magnets, which generated electricity to flow over huge power lines along the freeway to substations in my neighborhood, then to a transformer on the pole outside, and eventually into my residence circuit breaker box, and thence to the electrical outlet where I plugged in the cord for this computer.
Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. All the same to me.
Years ago, for a physics class, I wrote a paper on fuel cells. That got me into a lot of DOE info on electrical power generation by amount and source.
Green energy ain’t going to happen. Electrical power use scales pretty closely with GDP growth. The law of diminishing returns means that the easy pickings are already gone. World wide electrical power demand and US electrical power demand is expected to double in the next thirty years.
Solar doesn’t scale well (law of diminishing returns, again). Neither does wind or hydropower. You know what types of electrical production scale well?
Fossil fuel and nuclear.
One of the reasons wind, solar, and hydropower don’t scale well is because they are highly location dependent, and they aren’t making any more good places to build wind, solar, and hydro power facilities. Also these places tend to be far from the place where the energy is needed.
The only reason we are talking about solar and wind at all is the IMMENSE government subsidies they receive. They are not a market solution, meaning that they are not efficient producers of electrical power.
Nobody wants to go to Probate Court. Over the decades, I’ve seen lots of probate avoidance schemes: life estates, trusts, family limited partnerships, transfer on death deeds. Each of them can work for a select set of circumstances; none of them works for every set of circumstances. Trying to make everything one-size-fits-all only creates more problems.
Solar energy seems the same. I can power my cell phone from a solar panel but I can’t power a factory or a semi-truck that way.
Advances in technology (LED light bulbs) help reduce local demand for electricity. But somebody has to make the new tech in a factory and transport it to me on a semi-truck. We haven’t reduced total demand, we’ve just shifted it from Here to Over There. Out of Sight Out of Mind is not a sustainable long-term strategy.
Impressive, but 1 day does not a reliable source make. Still, I appreciate the reprobates in Cali for saving the Freedom Juice ™ for me.
World wide electrical power demand and US electrical power demand is expected to double in the next thirty years.
Just think of the additional load we’ll see from all those electric tortilla makers.
MP, I think you’re being too hard on it. Green energy is the energy of the future–and always will be.
bike, why don’t you go check with the ghost of kiev on that green energy thing. I am sure he is of the same mindset as you – all propaganda all the time. Unless you forgot to close the sarcasm tag, which I doubt.
JPA, when I say that “Green energy always will be the energy of the future”, what I’m saying is that there will likely never be a time when it’s the energy of the present. Got it?
Maybe use a smiley, Bikebubba? I don’t know that JPA is a native English speaker.
Somebody needs to expose the disaster that is green energy. For instance;
1. The windmill motors require a very toxic process to make, they don’t currently last long and are considered toxic waste. As far as I’ve been able to find, they aren’t being recycled. The massive blades, are also not being recycled and are being buried in landfills.
2. Solar panels are also toxic and have short life spans. According to a couple of my California dwelling friends, the massive additional heat being generated by those massive solar farms, are most likely contributing to the drought and global warming.
3. The mining for and disposal of lithium batteries, are also considered toxic events.
4. At this point electric cars, overall, cause as much pollution as fossil fuel powered vehicles.
3
like I said, with all the propaganda you had been drinking from the hose and regurgitating here, it is really hard to know when you have your sarcasm tag on or off. Please be more precise next time, and yes, I like the formulation once you pointed it out.
boss, them are “hidden” costs so move along sheople… end justifies the means, yada yada yada, it’s all about virtue signaling, EVERYTHING!
If you simply look at production capacity and future demand it is blindingly obvious that the future in the US is LNG fired power plants. Not coal. Maybe sell our coal to China?
There is no way a normal, unbiased human being would look at the data and say “our energy future is renewables” unless you want to make people poor.
Read their own propaganda. You cannot have a “green” economy with families living in stand alone 3BR/2bath houses in the suburbs.
Instead you’ll get a 2BR/1bath, 800 sq ft house on a small lot with no garage and a single electric car, maybe shared with neighbors, and that is if you are lucky. No more Florida or Mexico or Hawaii escapes in the midst of the Midwestern winter. And your thermostat will be set by the state at 62 deg. You got three kids? One, maybe, will go to college.
That is the promise of the future “green” economy, and the elites know it.
Coal is heavy and needs to be physically transported from the place where it is mined to where it is burned to provide energy. LNG can be injected into a pipeline and is instantly available at the end of the pipeline.
Make suckers of the Chinese. Sell them our coal.
MP, but pipelines are the devil regardless whether they carry gas, crude or other commodities. Just look at the word, it just ooooozes evil… So be off to your 100sqft tenement flat with bath/shower down the hall and to the left, and a meter for electricity in case you wanted to warm up water in a kettle for your gruel. Homes will be reserved for the ruling class, you silly peeon!
Interestingly, the formulation “is the ….. of the future, and always will be”, is a phrase I learned from someone who grew up in Poland. She was saying that Poland was the nation of the future, and always would be. Hence I was pretty sure the joke would translate well, because it did for me.
Regarding “drinking propaganda from the hose”, nope. I start with basic questions like “who is on whose land?”, “what kind of targets are they hitting?”, “what kind of progress is the invasion making?”, and the like, and then I compare what I see there with what kind of public pronouncements are being made.
By and large, what I’ve seen is that just about everything coming out of Moscow is pure, unadulterated BS, with a smattering of “news hyped far beyond its actual significance.”
hmmm….bike… you were the one singing praises to ghost and mourning the passing of the snake island patriots, as well as celebrating video game kills and being outraged of the bombing of the same building(s) taken from different angles, and consternating over images of survivors taken from 4 years ago in a different country/conflict. Spare me your rightousness. I repeat, there is NO TRUTH in reporting on EITHER side. You do know what EITHER means? Do I have to translate it for you?
Um, no, I wasn’t. Search, if you like. You will not find me praising the “Ghost of Kyiv”, mourning the Snake Island garrison, or being outraged at multiple pictures of the same building being hit.
(and even if I had, hey, there is something called the “fog of war”…people get things wrong in these cases)
I am, yes, unapologetically on Ukraine’s side here, because they’re the ones being invaded, and the invading army is choosing to disproportionately target civilian targets instead of military ones in the same way that was done in the Blitz of London, the Rape of Nanking, and the like.
(and even if I had, hey, there is something called the “fog of war”…people get things wrong in these cases)
Got it! “fog of war” when it is “OUR” propaganda, and “propaganda and all lies all the time” (even when they are not) is when it is “THEIR” propaganda. I understand your bias, but reserve the right to point out your hypocrisy every time you get a drink from the firehose.
Blitz of London, the Rape of Nanking, and the like. I would like to add Bombing if Dresden, Tokyo and of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki. See how that works?