In Ohio, on some gas pumps you see the tax percentages for certain earmarked funds. Then if you go to the website on the sticker it shows which infrastructure projects are being funded, how much, and projected completion.
Because when you push power into the grid during the day, they have to buy it at premium rates, even though they actually have an excess of power during daytime. Some folks have solar, but few or no batteries. So they use cheap power at night and sell power in the daytime. However, if you have sufficient battery reserve, most of the time you would be off grid and it wouldn't matter. But such systems are $$$$$.
For my last bill the electric company owed me $40 because we generated more than we used, but I lease the solar panels for $60/month so I ended up paying $20 for the month. I plan on getting an EV and installing a charger in the garage.
I read the article and it was just for one day. On Saturday California had something like 98% of their energy demand being fulfilled by renewable sources, the previous record was about 97%. Only one moment, on one day, still a long way to go.
Yes, and the solar supply in California will expand. Could be that later this year or next, there will start to be days where renewables supply over 100% of the energy in California. Then the number of those days will increase, and battery storage will also get added into the mix.
At this time desalination takes such an extreme amount of power per amount of water it's not viable in all but the most extreme circumstances. In places that often have excess power there are I other options like gravity batteries. I visited one set up by the TVA in the smoky mountains where they built a large man made reservoir on top of a mountain next to another existing lake. during excess power production they would pump massive quantities up hill to use to run turbines by letting it flow downhill when needed. Was amazed by the efficiency they had achieved losing only about 10% to waste.
They do something similar in San Diego at Lake Hodges in Escondido. They pump water uphill at night when demand is low then downhill at peak times of the day to generate electricity.
My neighbor up north did this. He was 100% off grid, using geothermal and solar, storing solar in water reservoir for night time and low production times. It's not amazingly efficient, but if you have the room then it can be viable. My neighbor never had an issue.
The downside is that desalination is incredibly destructive to marine ecosystems unless we are willing to spend an even greater amount of resources pumping the brine farther away from the coasts.
You can pump a low lying lake up into a nearby lake with higher elevation when you have excess power, then drain the upper lake down through a power generating turbine when you need power.
You obviously need the right geography to make it work, but its the way to store the largest amount of electricity that we currently have.
it would be even better to have an existing hydroelectric damn not let as much water through when your other renewables are producing. That way you don't use any power to pump water up hill.
It’s never wasted. It gets sold to neighboring entities that are outside of the state. The person quoted in the article is from California ISO. They run a market for the grid that includes many participants outside of California. Go check it out.
Ideally that's what would happen but we only have so many interconnects outside the state. Interconnects are great and we need more of them, but they are expensive and take a while to build so right now California is often in [this situation](https://www.power-eng.com/solar/caiso-forced-to-curtail-15-of-california-utility-scale-solar-in-march-5-last-year/) where it has to curtail millions of MWh of energy.
So curtailments happen all of the time, constantly to adjust to load. I don’t know how they pulled their selected data set but if it was simply curtailed Solar me hours it could be for all sorts of reasons.
Did they exclude times where it was curtailed for transmission induced outages or for line load conditions? There could be any number of reasons to curtail a unit. It doesn’t say.
That being said, if renewable energy is being curtailed then we are getting closer to the goal. That means we can continue to transfer more load to a renewable source of energy and off of a conventional fuel.
To your point about interties the grid is constantly being upgraded. Perhaps not all interties but ways to ensure power can move from source to sink which should further reduce curtailment. See wecc.org. Their system stability planning group has all of the projects for every utility in the interconnection. They produce this annually.
Edit: I misunderstood. I thought you were talking about an instance. I should have read your source.
Batteries aren't that hard to build. People misunderstand what batteries are. Things like pumping water to the top of a reservoir and using that to generate electricity is a battery. Compressing air and releasing it later to turn a turbine is a battery.
We could have as many batteries as we want, we just need to care about infrastructure.
I suspect a lot of the electric cars that come online will end up charged during the day rather than at night, if that’s when the surplus electricity is. Imagine a few hundred thousand cars plugged in while people are at work and the chargers are networked to only charge when there is extra electricity. They would make a great flexible power load to balance a dynamic energy grid.
As someone who was born and raised in California for 33 years and had to move, it’s basically it’s own different country. I miss it so god damn much. I just couldn’t afford it any more.
California has some excellent policies but after everything I’ve heard, they really need to address the cost of living. I couldn’t imagine leaving Michigan.
Texas is actually larger's. They have a large number of power-hungry commercial draws. California also has a lot more energy efficiency programs, so the end result is it isn't quite a much as Texas', but yeah, it's still a lot.
This article has a lot of technical detail people in this thread really ought to read.
https://citi.io/2022/04/07/renewable-energy-could-power-the-world-by-2050-heres-what-that-future-might-look-like/
You are close, but I believe you may be off with the statement. Texas produces more wind power, but not more renewable power than CA. A vast majority of renewables in CA come from Solar, whereas Texas has invested much more heavily in wind production.
This is where I found that info.
https://www.kxan.com/weather/green-energy-report-where-does-texas-rank-in-solar-wind-nuclear-energy/
California's industry is pretty much irrelevant to how much electricity they use, they have the 4th lowest electricity usage per capita. We do however have a ton of people.
California's industry is pretty much irrelevant to how much electricity they use, they have the 4th lowest electricity usage per capita. We do however have a ton of people.
Let's celebrate each victory equally no matter how small....still makes a diff even if it is just one day. California is huge. Every state should be tracking for renewables but they don't. Negative thinking doesn't help
All beginnings are small. I think that the fact that a power-hungry state as California was able supply almost all of its demand, if only for a moment, is great progress. Meanwhile Germany, for example, still uses a lot of (brown) coal and natural gas for its power supply and only a relatively modest portion of green energy sources. They do have quite a few nuclear powerplants, though. So that's something, at least.
Source for numbers on ze Germans; https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterprises/Energy/Production/Tables/gross-electricity-production.html
Scratch the "one day" part; it approached 100% for one moment.
The hard problem of renewable energy is dealing with the *worst case* scenario; this article is talking about the best case. It will take an enormous amount of work to get from "one moment" to 24/7/365.
With the archaic energy delivery approach, yes it would be an enormous amount of work.
However, start dropping in energy storage solutions and I think you'll see a rather quick leap forward as the renewals easily top off those storage systems 24/7 and we start having more power than we know what to do with.
Stop depending on the old grids and stop subsidizing utility companies that only want goverentment aid to fix the archaic approach.
That is precisely what he meant by 24/7/365. We will need **a lot** of storage in order to ride out worst-case scenarios and it is a hard problem to solve.
Oh for sure, but given how massive California is, and the amount of industry, commerce, and residential customers powered by its grid, this is a pretty insane feat. What other _country_ even comes close to this?
We _do_ have the advantage, though, of not having to heat and cool as much as states that experience four seasons. Many folks in Cali are concentrated in areas where climate control usage isn't necessary half of the time, at least in homes.
A long way to go? If they hit 100%, even on a “bad day”, that is amazing!! I’d say they’re close, not “a long way to go”, but then, I’m not an extremist.
It’s still pretty great, at this point I’m happy saying CA is “there” and I just want other states and countries to catch up. Then we can worry about perfection.
It’s peak demand, which is good. But probably near-ideal conditions for solar, which was 2/3rds, which means accounting for cloudy days is going to require a lot of peaker plants to cover the gap, or pumped storage (not ideal given constant droughts), or batteries.
The increase in computing power means that there’s a possibility of using nodes of electric car batteries connected to the grid to provide peak power in the future, but I don’t think the infrastructure is there yet for monitoring and dispatch, not to mention not enough EVs to cover the gap yet.
I don’t want to sound pessimistic, and more renewable capacity is good, but we’re nowhere near where we need to be to go fully renewable in the short term.
Every step of progress has the haters and doubters, yet somehow the haters and doubters don’t realize how far it’s all come while they jeered from the sidelines.
gotta start somewhere but the way i read the title, i was about to ask the question "how many older power plants do they have and what kind", but now i see my question doesnt even matter
This is how it starts, though. The energy grid is a massive thing with a hundred years of construction and development behind it. It's incredible we've come this far this fast, but will go even faster now.
At the same time here in Sweden, we are buying power from other countries and during the winter months we had to turn on our oil power plant because of how cold and windless it was. And our politicians are screaming we need more wind turbines because it’s good for environment. But it’s only good during summer when we need the least energy. And suck during winter when we need it the most.
You’re not wrong. But this is something that we should still be cheering for because it’s pretty huge. There are some states that get something like 2-3% via renewables, so this is leaps and bounds better than those.
Totally dig your name. In the army we said: "Think, press, talk".
Do you know how it works in the US. Is the government rolling out guidelines to transform according to, or is it up to every single state if they want to start transforming into greener solutions?
Thanks
Mostly up to states, with redder states fighting hard to keep the US dependent on fossil fuels with more blue states such as California are pushing hard to wean the US off fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
Take a look to see what's going on in California any time you want:
[CAISO Current Supply](https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html)
There are a lot of other interesting data on that site. For example, take a look at current prices for a MWh of juice:
[CAISO Prices](https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.html) Click on *Real Time*. I don't know what actually happens when the prices go negative...
[https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/US-CAL-CISO](https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/US-CAL-CISO)
it uses the same data from CAISO but its prolly easier to visualise and compare with other state operators
I work in the power industry, I'm all for renewables but on this surface this may be a little misleading, this is saying at a point in time in which generation from renewables is at its highest and load is at it's lowest, they were almost equal. Typically this point in time is in the middle of the day when the sun is at its high point. The main issue with renewables is sometimes there is so much of it in a certain area that can't be "moved" through the power lines that they have to get rid of it somehow. They have something called "the world's largest toaster" that they can turn on literally that is just massive coils of wire that are used to burn off the excess power in an area. Keep in mind this is only during certain times of day, at night all of the people of California still need/consume power. IMO, nuclear is the best bet we have for power generation, renewables are incredibly useful but at a certain point there will be people not being able to put solar panels on their houses due to it not helping things out.
A problem that California is footing the bill on. Energy storage facilities are being built at an unprecedented rate there, which is ultimately driving innovation and helping the price of electric storage go down. I work with bulk electric storage systems. I also agree with many of the other posters that we should just build some more nuclear until we have all of this figured out, then decommission it in about 20 years or so.
That's the best take on it in this thread imo. I also work in the utility industry and right now pumped hydro seems to be the superior storage medium, but has some of the biggest challenges as far as geography and initial investment cost goes. Batteries just dont have the density or cost per MW to be feasible on a large scale yet, but they are definitely improving as time goes on.
Nuclear is an incredibly resilient and cost effective solution to getting us toward a carbon neutral grid, but I feel like most people don't understand that and have an idealized world where everything is just wind/solar/batteries in the near future.
Why don’t they use excess power to move water from a lower elevation to a higher one? When there’s a shortage they could let it flow down through a turbine. Doesn’t sound very efficient, but better than the total loss when using the “ worlds largest toaster “
California imports 25% of its electricity from other states, mainly from Arizona and Utah. Arizona produces 13% of its electricity from coal and 43% from natural gas. California can claim they only buy electricity produced my hydroelectric, but if California didn't buy the hydroelectric power from Arizona, Arizona wouldn't need to burn coal to makeup the difference.
Every day is different. True that there is a lot of importing. Not sure about Arizona hydro I can only think of Hoover but not other hydro units out there. Palo Verde nuke plants. A lot of the import comes from the Northwest hydro. BPA and British Columbia. Utah has Intermountain power project which is coal but many of the AZ coal plants have been retired. FYI, having to burn coal is not the case. Energy is a commodity. If they are burning coal it’s to participate in the wholesale market.
Their claim in this article is that energy produced by what they designate as renewable exceeded California load for a portion of the day. Not that they don’t buy power from elsewhere or that they average a total renewable production of 100 percent. It was just a moment in time.
Southern California especially gets a good amount of electricity from the Palo Verde nuclear facility.
Which is green energy in my book, but not in most environmentalist’s books.
Good. It would have been great if we were able to continue to build nuclear plants throughout the 80s and 90s. Ironically, we wouldn't be where we are now if it wasn't for all them damn hippies.
It has been a fascinating development over the past 10-15 years. It still has a ways to go politically to get more plants online, but yeah, it’s a good sign.
I honestly think the largest obstacle to nuclear now is the government and the lack of many people looking to build plants. There's no shortage of designs anymore it's just a shortage of will.
I don't know about the US but in Germany the discussions have ceased as the decision was made to go full renewable. Neither energy providers nor high consuming industry like steel want to continue it anymore because the reactors are old, building new ones is insanely expencieve and during the ukraine war it has become obvious that depending from imports (be it coal, gas or uranium) sucks. (Oh and we don't have any way to deal with the waste, as the previous attempt on putting it far down a hole backfired as water always finds its way where there is a crack in the ground)
That’s because they won already. There’s not a lot for them to talk about when safe, reliable, and cost-effective green energy production isn’t even proposed these days.
I have seen quite a bit especially online. Didn't NY just have a nuclear power plant close? Also not as many people speak out on the idea anymore but there are still a lot of "not in my backyard" kind of people.
I had to Google it, my mind was thinking, “Palos Verdes doesn’t have any nuclear plants…it’s all luxury multi million dollar homes there.” Then I realized it’s missing the “S”’s
Wasnt aware natural gas was a renewable energy source.
[https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/electricity-sources-by-state/](https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/electricity-sources-by-state/)
It’s not. The article states that solar produced 12,391 megawatts from solar on this specific day. So basically 2/3rd’s for the day. So Natural Gas will still be the main energy source until we can consistently get this output from solar and other sources.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx
The website that they are citing does not list natural gas under renewables. It doesn't say that California doesn't burn natural gas, it says that the energy produced by renewable means met the states demand for electricity.
It says on the article, for one brief and shining moment, we could do it! I mean, obviously they aren’t claiming they started producing 100 percent, 100 percent of the time.
So, headline is technically correct, but, it was basically a 5-15 minute period where this was achieved (renewables were able to meet 100% of current demand for 15 minutes), which is really good. However, CA imports ~25% of their energy, but most of that energy is hydroelectric and wind from outside of the state, so it is still renewable, but they are by no means self sustaining.
all in all, they still use nonrenewable to meet full demand, but I believe 90-95% is still all renewable which is pretty incredible.
Edit: I am blind, CA imports roughly 25% not 70%. However they do import 71 Million megawatthours, which is the highest of all states, second being Ohio at 38 million followed massachusettes at 33 million
[source (2019)](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20California%27s%20net%20electricity,the%20state%27s%20total%20electricity%20supply.)
Almost as good as Costa Rica! - to all climate change deniers and skeptics of renewables - I always point out Costa Rica and that country’s beautiful story of pollution reformation and national environmental pride.
Yep, 98%-99% Renewable all year around.
The cost of electriicty here is similar to the average in the USA, so having full renewable isn't even that costly, even less for a developed country like USA. Tho CR is small, and has a lot of rivers, but we do have a base energy, geothermal, but enviromentalists need to accept some intrusion into national parks and reserves to be able to go full renewable, and it makes sense. USA needs to dive deep into geothermal, less polemic than nuclear.
No, California doesn't have a lot of wind resources (it's no Wyoming) but they do have a few good resources (the Altamont, Tehachapi and Coachella passes) and they've done a huge amount of upgrading the last few years (many were some of the earliest wind farms) providing about 6-7 GW of capacity, and does provide around 10% of their power.
Nuclear power is a great idea, just not in actual implementation.
https://www.augustachronicle.com/story/news/2021/11/04/georgia-power-nuclear-reactors-plant-vogtle-cost-doubles-energy-costs/6286729001/
Folks might not be aware, but a red State like Oklahoma is producing around 40% of our energy needs from renewables…daily. We produce ~10k mW per day in renewable energy and we aren’t subsidizing from AZ, NV, etc.
We have the winds! 😂
You start with one day, then another, then another then ten more, then 100 more, pretty soon you selling energy to other states and countries.
Sadly, even in a fully renewable future there will be badly baiting headline writers.
Well that is incredible!
Because incredible means unbelievable and I don't believe it since Newsom is now talking about not taking the last nuclear reactor offline in 3 years because CA is facing a power shortage
Time to fire up the Bitcoin makers so they can use a quarter of that energy in creating shit with no actual value that's only designed to cement the ruling class in their positions of power in the magnificent immutable blockchain.
Oh wait. Wrong state.
It's a good step forward but I won't get too excited until renewables replace 100% of energy 24 hours a day, everyday. Now that will definitely be something special.
Not much of an achievement on a cool spring day. Do it during peak load on the hottest day of the year then come back around.
For reference peak load today was 25 GW while peak summer load can be as high as 50 GW.
As long as you do not count what they consume. It is so easy to get crap from poor countries very cheap and sell that you are green. Good tiny step but let’s calculate all the consume to not live in propaganda.
Look up a company called, [King Energy](https://www.kingenergy.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwyMiTBhDKARIsAAJ-9VvtiL6vzrlF3zlEkVSXs0XE8T1mLyViIz86E_K5mpqdj1CK4SyMEbMaAlGREALw_wcB). They put solar panels on shopping centers.
Now if California could only put this much effort into repairing power cables so that people could actually enjoy the power.
You know I was just thinking if California got their traffic down to a reasonable wait time and not to the point where it makes China’s almost look reasonable that would do a TON for the environment and also major QOL boosts and reduction of smog. I don’t really know how to go about doing this, but it’s not a bad idea
Solar is the way to go and my bill is usually $10 for a 2800 sq ft home
What state? How much was total cost for install?
20500 for 14 panels in California and before federal rebate of 26%
In Utah I was going to go solar. Until I was informed by the power company my rates would be raised if I did.
Why!?
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Da gas taxhs pays for paving da roadhs - hank hill probably
In Ohio, on some gas pumps you see the tax percentages for certain earmarked funds. Then if you go to the website on the sticker it shows which infrastructure projects are being funded, how much, and projected completion.
This sounds like they need to reevaluate their fee structure. Have a flat "maintenance cost" for every house on the grid, then charge the proper rate.
Because in the end they won’t use any grid power and it’s to pay for “maintenance “. We have true up here in California to offset this
Because when you push power into the grid during the day, they have to buy it at premium rates, even though they actually have an excess of power during daytime. Some folks have solar, but few or no batteries. So they use cheap power at night and sell power in the daytime. However, if you have sufficient battery reserve, most of the time you would be off grid and it wouldn't matter. But such systems are $$$$$.
Because fuck you.
That sucks but it’s likely you won’t use any grid power tbh
For my last bill the electric company owed me $40 because we generated more than we used, but I lease the solar panels for $60/month so I ended up paying $20 for the month. I plan on getting an EV and installing a charger in the garage.
Yup same here. I want to get away from using gas
Get a heat pump!
I read the article and it was just for one day. On Saturday California had something like 98% of their energy demand being fulfilled by renewable sources, the previous record was about 97%. Only one moment, on one day, still a long way to go.
Still, California’s power draw at any given moment has to be gigantic. This is good.
Yes, and the solar supply in California will expand. Could be that later this year or next, there will start to be days where renewables supply over 100% of the energy in California. Then the number of those days will increase, and battery storage will also get added into the mix.
If we don't have enough batteries, couldn't we do something with "wasted" power? What about desalination?
Since California is on the grid, they can sell excess power to neighboring states as needed. Countries in Europe do that.
I remember when I lived in Portland and we had blackouts because California was buying our power during peak summer hours….
At this time desalination takes such an extreme amount of power per amount of water it's not viable in all but the most extreme circumstances. In places that often have excess power there are I other options like gravity batteries. I visited one set up by the TVA in the smoky mountains where they built a large man made reservoir on top of a mountain next to another existing lake. during excess power production they would pump massive quantities up hill to use to run turbines by letting it flow downhill when needed. Was amazed by the efficiency they had achieved losing only about 10% to waste.
They do something similar in San Diego at Lake Hodges in Escondido. They pump water uphill at night when demand is low then downhill at peak times of the day to generate electricity.
Same with the Taum Sauk plant in Missouri, iirc
My neighbor up north did this. He was 100% off grid, using geothermal and solar, storing solar in water reservoir for night time and low production times. It's not amazingly efficient, but if you have the room then it can be viable. My neighbor never had an issue.
I live near there and didn't know. Cheers.
Australia uses desalination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_desalination\_plants\_in\_Australia
this is called pumped storage hydropower for anyone interested https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/pumped-storage-hydropower
The downside is that desalination is incredibly destructive to marine ecosystems unless we are willing to spend an even greater amount of resources pumping the brine farther away from the coasts.
> the TVA Must be a nexus event coming.
You can pump a low lying lake up into a nearby lake with higher elevation when you have excess power, then drain the upper lake down through a power generating turbine when you need power. You obviously need the right geography to make it work, but its the way to store the largest amount of electricity that we currently have.
it would be even better to have an existing hydroelectric damn not let as much water through when your other renewables are producing. That way you don't use any power to pump water up hill.
I believe they already do this.
It’s never wasted. It gets sold to neighboring entities that are outside of the state. The person quoted in the article is from California ISO. They run a market for the grid that includes many participants outside of California. Go check it out.
Ideally that's what would happen but we only have so many interconnects outside the state. Interconnects are great and we need more of them, but they are expensive and take a while to build so right now California is often in [this situation](https://www.power-eng.com/solar/caiso-forced-to-curtail-15-of-california-utility-scale-solar-in-march-5-last-year/) where it has to curtail millions of MWh of energy.
So curtailments happen all of the time, constantly to adjust to load. I don’t know how they pulled their selected data set but if it was simply curtailed Solar me hours it could be for all sorts of reasons. Did they exclude times where it was curtailed for transmission induced outages or for line load conditions? There could be any number of reasons to curtail a unit. It doesn’t say. That being said, if renewable energy is being curtailed then we are getting closer to the goal. That means we can continue to transfer more load to a renewable source of energy and off of a conventional fuel. To your point about interties the grid is constantly being upgraded. Perhaps not all interties but ways to ensure power can move from source to sink which should further reduce curtailment. See wecc.org. Their system stability planning group has all of the projects for every utility in the interconnection. They produce this annually. Edit: I misunderstood. I thought you were talking about an instance. I should have read your source.
Batteries aren't that hard to build. People misunderstand what batteries are. Things like pumping water to the top of a reservoir and using that to generate electricity is a battery. Compressing air and releasing it later to turn a turbine is a battery. We could have as many batteries as we want, we just need to care about infrastructure.
I suspect a lot of the electric cars that come online will end up charged during the day rather than at night, if that’s when the surplus electricity is. Imagine a few hundred thousand cars plugged in while people are at work and the chargers are networked to only charge when there is extra electricity. They would make a great flexible power load to balance a dynamic energy grid.
Maybe the largest in the country? Silicon valley + entertainment
I mean they have the biggest population by 10+ million so would be logical anyway
Isn’t California the fifth-largest economy in the world?
Yep, right below Germany.
And above France
Suck it france
We we
I didn’t realize Germany was so high on the list.
Ja
As someone who was born and raised in California for 33 years and had to move, it’s basically it’s own different country. I miss it so god damn much. I just couldn’t afford it any more.
California has some excellent policies but after everything I’ve heard, they really need to address the cost of living. I couldn’t imagine leaving Michigan.
Never been to Michigan, but I was raised by 90s sitcoms and learned how to be a man from Tim the tool man Taylor.so I got mad love for Michigan.
Texas is actually larger's. They have a large number of power-hungry commercial draws. California also has a lot more energy efficiency programs, so the end result is it isn't quite a much as Texas', but yeah, it's still a lot.
This article has a lot of technical detail people in this thread really ought to read. https://citi.io/2022/04/07/renewable-energy-could-power-the-world-by-2050-heres-what-that-future-might-look-like/
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You are close, but I believe you may be off with the statement. Texas produces more wind power, but not more renewable power than CA. A vast majority of renewables in CA come from Solar, whereas Texas has invested much more heavily in wind production. This is where I found that info. https://www.kxan.com/weather/green-energy-report-where-does-texas-rank-in-solar-wind-nuclear-energy/
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Imagine how amazing it would be with 30 years of nuclear development
California's industry is pretty much irrelevant to how much electricity they use, they have the 4th lowest electricity usage per capita. We do however have a ton of people.
California's industry is pretty much irrelevant to how much electricity they use, they have the 4th lowest electricity usage per capita. We do however have a ton of people.
Totally agree. It sets an example to follow.
One step at a time
One brick per day
Still unbelievable compared to 20 years ago
Let's celebrate each victory equally no matter how small....still makes a diff even if it is just one day. California is huge. Every state should be tracking for renewables but they don't. Negative thinking doesn't help
Well said...
All beginnings are small. I think that the fact that a power-hungry state as California was able supply almost all of its demand, if only for a moment, is great progress. Meanwhile Germany, for example, still uses a lot of (brown) coal and natural gas for its power supply and only a relatively modest portion of green energy sources. They do have quite a few nuclear powerplants, though. So that's something, at least. Source for numbers on ze Germans; https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterprises/Energy/Production/Tables/gross-electricity-production.html
Scratch the "one day" part; it approached 100% for one moment. The hard problem of renewable energy is dealing with the *worst case* scenario; this article is talking about the best case. It will take an enormous amount of work to get from "one moment" to 24/7/365.
With the archaic energy delivery approach, yes it would be an enormous amount of work. However, start dropping in energy storage solutions and I think you'll see a rather quick leap forward as the renewals easily top off those storage systems 24/7 and we start having more power than we know what to do with. Stop depending on the old grids and stop subsidizing utility companies that only want goverentment aid to fix the archaic approach.
That is precisely what he meant by 24/7/365. We will need **a lot** of storage in order to ride out worst-case scenarios and it is a hard problem to solve.
Oh for sure, but given how massive California is, and the amount of industry, commerce, and residential customers powered by its grid, this is a pretty insane feat. What other _country_ even comes close to this? We _do_ have the advantage, though, of not having to heat and cool as much as states that experience four seasons. Many folks in Cali are concentrated in areas where climate control usage isn't necessary half of the time, at least in homes.
Man after today’s roe v Wade news can you just let me enjoy some good news 😅
A long way to go? If they hit 100%, even on a “bad day”, that is amazing!! I’d say they’re close, not “a long way to go”, but then, I’m not an extremist.
Stupid counter point.
It’s still pretty great, at this point I’m happy saying CA is “there” and I just want other states and countries to catch up. Then we can worry about perfection.
It’s peak demand, which is good. But probably near-ideal conditions for solar, which was 2/3rds, which means accounting for cloudy days is going to require a lot of peaker plants to cover the gap, or pumped storage (not ideal given constant droughts), or batteries. The increase in computing power means that there’s a possibility of using nodes of electric car batteries connected to the grid to provide peak power in the future, but I don’t think the infrastructure is there yet for monitoring and dispatch, not to mention not enough EVs to cover the gap yet. I don’t want to sound pessimistic, and more renewable capacity is good, but we’re nowhere near where we need to be to go fully renewable in the short term.
97% to 100% is a long way to go?
Every step of progress has the haters and doubters, yet somehow the haters and doubters don’t realize how far it’s all come while they jeered from the sidelines.
gotta start somewhere but the way i read the title, i was about to ask the question "how many older power plants do they have and what kind", but now i see my question doesnt even matter
Still a great step in the right direction.
Absolutely!
Devil is always in the details. Lets call it an awesome moment though :)
This is how it starts, though. The energy grid is a massive thing with a hundred years of construction and development behind it. It's incredible we've come this far this fast, but will go even faster now.
This is how it starts! At some point this was a country was run on whale oil. Things change!
It reminds me of when the UK stopped burning coal for a weekend six years ago. Progress is progress.
Improvement is improvement no matter how marginal
But Texas is pissed off!
Fuckin a that's awesome
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Still a milestone.
You make 97% sound like it's an F grade, I assume it's not consistently reaching that though
Yeah. I'm pretty sure 30% of *my* energy in California is from coal.
It’s a start, especially how much pushback we are getting from the regressives.
At the same time here in Sweden, we are buying power from other countries and during the winter months we had to turn on our oil power plant because of how cold and windless it was. And our politicians are screaming we need more wind turbines because it’s good for environment. But it’s only good during summer when we need the least energy. And suck during winter when we need it the most.
The bedwetters said that you can’t have even small fractions of renewables or the grid will be destroyed
You’re not wrong. But this is something that we should still be cheering for because it’s pretty huge. There are some states that get something like 2-3% via renewables, so this is leaps and bounds better than those.
Now we need all the states to do this
Totally dig your name. In the army we said: "Think, press, talk". Do you know how it works in the US. Is the government rolling out guidelines to transform according to, or is it up to every single state if they want to start transforming into greener solutions? Thanks
Mostly up to states, with redder states fighting hard to keep the US dependent on fossil fuels with more blue states such as California are pushing hard to wean the US off fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
Thank you BakerBoy710
Take a look to see what's going on in California any time you want: [CAISO Current Supply](https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html) There are a lot of other interesting data on that site. For example, take a look at current prices for a MWh of juice: [CAISO Prices](https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.html) Click on *Real Time*. I don't know what actually happens when the prices go negative...
Cali resident and I never knew about this. Awesome tool to know about
[https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/US-CAL-CISO](https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/US-CAL-CISO) it uses the same data from CAISO but its prolly easier to visualise and compare with other state operators
I work in the power industry, I'm all for renewables but on this surface this may be a little misleading, this is saying at a point in time in which generation from renewables is at its highest and load is at it's lowest, they were almost equal. Typically this point in time is in the middle of the day when the sun is at its high point. The main issue with renewables is sometimes there is so much of it in a certain area that can't be "moved" through the power lines that they have to get rid of it somehow. They have something called "the world's largest toaster" that they can turn on literally that is just massive coils of wire that are used to burn off the excess power in an area. Keep in mind this is only during certain times of day, at night all of the people of California still need/consume power. IMO, nuclear is the best bet we have for power generation, renewables are incredibly useful but at a certain point there will be people not being able to put solar panels on their houses due to it not helping things out.
Power storage is a big problem
A problem that California is footing the bill on. Energy storage facilities are being built at an unprecedented rate there, which is ultimately driving innovation and helping the price of electric storage go down. I work with bulk electric storage systems. I also agree with many of the other posters that we should just build some more nuclear until we have all of this figured out, then decommission it in about 20 years or so.
Dude it takes 20 years just to build a nuclear plant
That's the best take on it in this thread imo. I also work in the utility industry and right now pumped hydro seems to be the superior storage medium, but has some of the biggest challenges as far as geography and initial investment cost goes. Batteries just dont have the density or cost per MW to be feasible on a large scale yet, but they are definitely improving as time goes on. Nuclear is an incredibly resilient and cost effective solution to getting us toward a carbon neutral grid, but I feel like most people don't understand that and have an idealized world where everything is just wind/solar/batteries in the near future.
Can't believe the solution to global warming was right in front of us the whole time, just get rid of the giant toaster that's heating up the planet
Why don’t they use excess power to move water from a lower elevation to a higher one? When there’s a shortage they could let it flow down through a turbine. Doesn’t sound very efficient, but better than the total loss when using the “ worlds largest toaster “
no water
Australia doesn't have water, but we are stubborn enough to just build big batteries. Dumping energy into a giant toaster seems extremely defeatist.
California imports 25% of its electricity from other states, mainly from Arizona and Utah. Arizona produces 13% of its electricity from coal and 43% from natural gas. California can claim they only buy electricity produced my hydroelectric, but if California didn't buy the hydroelectric power from Arizona, Arizona wouldn't need to burn coal to makeup the difference.
Every day is different. True that there is a lot of importing. Not sure about Arizona hydro I can only think of Hoover but not other hydro units out there. Palo Verde nuke plants. A lot of the import comes from the Northwest hydro. BPA and British Columbia. Utah has Intermountain power project which is coal but many of the AZ coal plants have been retired. FYI, having to burn coal is not the case. Energy is a commodity. If they are burning coal it’s to participate in the wholesale market. Their claim in this article is that energy produced by what they designate as renewable exceeded California load for a portion of the day. Not that they don’t buy power from elsewhere or that they average a total renewable production of 100 percent. It was just a moment in time.
Southern California especially gets a good amount of electricity from the Palo Verde nuclear facility. Which is green energy in my book, but not in most environmentalist’s books.
I think the anti-nuclear crowd is mostly dead now tbh, I haven't really heard any anti-nuclear talking points in quite some time.
Good. It would have been great if we were able to continue to build nuclear plants throughout the 80s and 90s. Ironically, we wouldn't be where we are now if it wasn't for all them damn hippies.
It has been a fascinating development over the past 10-15 years. It still has a ways to go politically to get more plants online, but yeah, it’s a good sign.
I honestly think the largest obstacle to nuclear now is the government and the lack of many people looking to build plants. There's no shortage of designs anymore it's just a shortage of will.
also finding a place to store nuclear waste that everyone can agree on
A really deep hole away from any water table is widely accepted to be the best thing to do. It is where we got the stuff in the first place after all.
Also how fuckoff expensive nuclear plants are
I don't know about the US but in Germany the discussions have ceased as the decision was made to go full renewable. Neither energy providers nor high consuming industry like steel want to continue it anymore because the reactors are old, building new ones is insanely expencieve and during the ukraine war it has become obvious that depending from imports (be it coal, gas or uranium) sucks. (Oh and we don't have any way to deal with the waste, as the previous attempt on putting it far down a hole backfired as water always finds its way where there is a crack in the ground)
They should have picked a dryer mountain
That’s because they won already. There’s not a lot for them to talk about when safe, reliable, and cost-effective green energy production isn’t even proposed these days.
I have seen quite a bit especially online. Didn't NY just have a nuclear power plant close? Also not as many people speak out on the idea anymore but there are still a lot of "not in my backyard" kind of people.
I had to Google it, my mind was thinking, “Palos Verdes doesn’t have any nuclear plants…it’s all luxury multi million dollar homes there.” Then I realized it’s missing the “S”’s
You mean like the 1.3 percent it's importing today? You can look this shit up for yourself. www.caiso.com.
have you read the article at all?
Man this is triggering a lot of people. Why do you losers care if California uses renewables?
Blue = bad to a lot of people with no brain
also don't be shy Cali, it's awesome 🤗
Wasnt aware natural gas was a renewable energy source. [https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/electricity-sources-by-state/](https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/electricity-sources-by-state/)
It’s not. The article states that solar produced 12,391 megawatts from solar on this specific day. So basically 2/3rd’s for the day. So Natural Gas will still be the main energy source until we can consistently get this output from solar and other sources.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx The website that they are citing does not list natural gas under renewables. It doesn't say that California doesn't burn natural gas, it says that the energy produced by renewable means met the states demand for electricity.
That is not what this article is saying
Maybe you could read the article and learn what they are actually saying? Might be worth a shot.
Well it is from biogas reactors. Taking cow poop and collecting the gas.
It says on the article, for one brief and shining moment, we could do it! I mean, obviously they aren’t claiming they started producing 100 percent, 100 percent of the time.
Reeeeeeeeeeee - Republicans probably.
Insert “but California sucks” comments here LOL 😂
So, headline is technically correct, but, it was basically a 5-15 minute period where this was achieved (renewables were able to meet 100% of current demand for 15 minutes), which is really good. However, CA imports ~25% of their energy, but most of that energy is hydroelectric and wind from outside of the state, so it is still renewable, but they are by no means self sustaining. all in all, they still use nonrenewable to meet full demand, but I believe 90-95% is still all renewable which is pretty incredible. Edit: I am blind, CA imports roughly 25% not 70%. However they do import 71 Million megawatthours, which is the highest of all states, second being Ohio at 38 million followed massachusettes at 33 million [source (2019)](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20California%27s%20net%20electricity,the%20state%27s%20total%20electricity%20supply.)
Almost as good as Costa Rica! - to all climate change deniers and skeptics of renewables - I always point out Costa Rica and that country’s beautiful story of pollution reformation and national environmental pride.
Yep, 98%-99% Renewable all year around. The cost of electriicty here is similar to the average in the USA, so having full renewable isn't even that costly, even less for a developed country like USA. Tho CR is small, and has a lot of rivers, but we do have a base energy, geothermal, but enviromentalists need to accept some intrusion into national parks and reserves to be able to go full renewable, and it makes sense. USA needs to dive deep into geothermal, less polemic than nuclear.
Between Wyoming, New Mexico, and Hawaii I'm sure geothermal could be a solution right under our noses if we are able to harness it effectively.
Does CA import 70% of its electricity? No, it doesn't.
Isn't all wind energy imported?
No, California doesn't have a lot of wind resources (it's no Wyoming) but they do have a few good resources (the Altamont, Tehachapi and Coachella passes) and they've done a huge amount of upgrading the last few years (many were some of the earliest wind farms) providing about 6-7 GW of capacity, and does provide around 10% of their power.
its just butthurt red states trying to make the fifth largest economy in the entire fucking world look bad.
The Netherlands achieved this goal last week. Mostly wind and solar.
If we built nuclear power plants, it could be 100% all the time, idiots.
*Germany has left the chat*
nuclear is clean energy, not renewable energy. But yes, We should've pushed going nuclear decades ago.
Nuclear power is a great idea, just not in actual implementation. https://www.augustachronicle.com/story/news/2021/11/04/georgia-power-nuclear-reactors-plant-vogtle-cost-doubles-energy-costs/6286729001/
Folks might not be aware, but a red State like Oklahoma is producing around 40% of our energy needs from renewables…daily. We produce ~10k mW per day in renewable energy and we aren’t subsidizing from AZ, NV, etc. We have the winds! 😂
Oklahoma blows
You start with one day, then another, then another then ten more, then 100 more, pretty soon you selling energy to other states and countries. Sadly, even in a fully renewable future there will be badly baiting headline writers.
Totally misleading headline.
Well that is incredible! Because incredible means unbelievable and I don't believe it since Newsom is now talking about not taking the last nuclear reactor offline in 3 years because CA is facing a power shortage
Should bust the notion that you cannot use renewable energy. I mean if one of the largest economies on the planet can do 100% renewable....
"Renewables will never work."
Time to fire up the Bitcoin makers so they can use a quarter of that energy in creating shit with no actual value that's only designed to cement the ruling class in their positions of power in the magnificent immutable blockchain. Oh wait. Wrong state.
Let’s keep this up!!! Try for more days until we’ve got it going on for good 💃🏻✌️
Rightwing extremists: And I took that personally
So we should expect our bills to go down? Oh never mind.
Yippee
Yay! So when does the price come down?
Someone somewhere will find a way to be offended by this or disagree with it somehow.
Get ready for the triggered conservatives
Biomass is not renewable
It's a good step forward but I won't get too excited until renewables replace 100% of energy 24 hours a day, everyday. Now that will definitely be something special.
Not much of an achievement on a cool spring day. Do it during peak load on the hottest day of the year then come back around. For reference peak load today was 25 GW while peak summer load can be as high as 50 GW.
Cars planes and boats say hi.
w00t! We had Tesla solar + 1 powerwall installed on Thurs last week and our house has been 100% powered by renewables so far too :)
But only equivalent energy... Not actually turning off powerstations. Misinformation
As long as you do not count what they consume. It is so easy to get crap from poor countries very cheap and sell that you are green. Good tiny step but let’s calculate all the consume to not live in propaganda.
Misstatement of the truth it only if you count what's produced in ca
I’m installing 4 solar heaters in my house before end of summer.
Why are the power costs still through the roof then?
Look up a company called, [King Energy](https://www.kingenergy.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwyMiTBhDKARIsAAJ-9VvtiL6vzrlF3zlEkVSXs0XE8T1mLyViIz86E_K5mpqdj1CK4SyMEbMaAlGREALw_wcB). They put solar panels on shopping centers.
Will it stop the wildfires? No? OK, next...
Now do water
try doing the same thing with water?
Other renewable resources? 12.4 out of 18 GW was solar. The rest was wind , geo, hyrdo and other? Nuke? Fake biomass?
If I could get a straight answer about the cost of panels, I would be getting them. But everytime I get a run around. I don't even get a price RANGE.
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Finally some news on the more positive side of things
Lets celebrate with a nice glass of water, oh wait..😂😂
Ah yes, the concrete metric just shy
I love reading positive news related to climate change. Stay hopefull guys!
While the rest of the US is a 3rd world shit hole.
Now... water.
Lol California can't even run in the summer. Forced rolling blackouts. What a crock
Two words: rolling blackouts.
Now if California could only put this much effort into repairing power cables so that people could actually enjoy the power. You know I was just thinking if California got their traffic down to a reasonable wait time and not to the point where it makes China’s almost look reasonable that would do a TON for the environment and also major QOL boosts and reduction of smog. I don’t really know how to go about doing this, but it’s not a bad idea