Just for factual background, engaging data has a new infographic about California energy production that is useful [1]
Worth noting that there isn't a lot of room for growth of solar that isn't battery-backed. California exports a ton of energy during the bright months. As a practical matter, the era of sending excess rooftop solar generation to the grid is over.
If you look at that graph for a whole day you will see a huge kick-in of power company owned battery storage in the evening. There is no reason the grid cannot operate batteries at scale to absorb excess rooftop generation. NYT: https://archive.is/t1uPj
For profit utility participants are desperately afraid of their return on equity being crushed by the new energy model, hence the need for strong political response from the citizenry. The grid can absolutely operate in the manner you describe, but profits will be diminished and investors will struggle to reach for previous profit potential unless you're in a non profit config (coop and whatnot).
Shades of "The Innovator's Dilemma" and what not. Incumbents do not care for their gravy train being taken away.
> Investor-owned utilities, or IOUs, are large electric distributors that issue stock owned by shareholders. Almost three-quarters of utility customers get their electricity from these companies. IOUs are most prevalent in heavily populated areas on the East and West coasts. In 2017, 168 IOUs served an average of 654,600 electric customers. The two largest IOUs are in California: Pacific Gas and Electric, with 5.48 million customers, and Southern California Edison Company, with 5.07 million customers.
I know BC hydro buys cheap power from other utilities to keep the reservoirs as full as possible. If California has excessive Solar power it could be used to keep the hydro reservoirs in BC, Washington, Oregon, and northern California full for other times.
Electricity prices in California are 3x higher because of PG&E's monopoly on distribution combined with their wildfire risk liability from reckless power line building standards, not because of higher generation costs.
It seems like the next major energy invention we need is long-term storage. Batteries have gotten much more cost effective, but you still need to amortize their costs over hundreds of charge-discharge cycles to get a payback. They're too expensive to store summer energy for the winter.
If you had an energy storage technology that could store energy with a very low storage cost, even if it were very inefficient, you could make use of the massive coming excess of summer solar power.
> A controversial energy project in south central Washington is one step closer to breaking ground. A federal commission released its final environmental review for the Goldendale Energy Storage Project — to the consternation of several tribes and environmental groups.
> The project is part of a potential solution to one of the biggest problems for renewable energy development: the variability of wind and solar. As the Northwest transitions off fossil fuels, power will need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow.
It's very difficult to come to simple conclusions that are accurate in the case of California power generation.
One of the reasons it's so complicated is that the State in California intervenes in the market in so many (sometimes contradictory) ways. The incentives are often perverse and exactly the opposite of what you would expect.
In attempting to protect consumers, California in the long run has created a market with almost the highest prices in the nation. Simultaneously, and surprisingly, those high prices have not translated into some kind of futuristic or resilient grid. California has not had power outages not because California is better than Texas in terms of technology ... rather California is blessed with a climate that doesn't really suffer state-wide extremes.
As bad as California's public schools are, I think within twenty years we will realize that the thing Sacramento politicians fucked up the most was not the schools ... it was the power grid. Talk to anyone that runs a power intensive manufacturing enterprise in CA. They have already moved their facilities to another state or they already have a plan to do so.
California imports from other states all the energy-intensive inputs and exports its pollution and smugly pats itself on the back. All while taxing its citizens with some of the highest residential power pricing too.
> California has not had power outages not because California is better than Texas in terms of technology ... rather California is blessed with a climate that doesn't really suffer state-wide extremes.
This is a consequence of California's grid being in the Western Interconnection, so there's a lot of capacity to import/export to other states. Texas's grid is mostly isolated in order to preempt federal regulations; they have very limited ability to import/export power.
The page on interties [1] is awfully hard to read, but I think it says socal can get ~ 4 GW from norcal via Path 26 (which can get 4.8 GW from oregon via Path 66), and socal can also get 11 GW from the east via path 46, and 3 GW from Washington via path 65.
Tres Amigas was cancelled, but was proposed to have 5 GW from each of the three grids (Western, Eastern, Texas), to the other two. I can't find a list of capacity for active ties between Texas and other grids.
Yeah, not only have we had unplanned outages, but PG&E has preemptively shut off power in large urban areas during weeks of high fire risk. Happened multiple times, but I specifically remember the 2020 rolling blackouts.
> rather California is blessed with a climate that doesn't really suffer state-wide extremes.
No the reason that California doesn't have capacity outages is because we've executed steadily on the most ambitious battery energy storage project in the nation, and now have over 8GW of said batteries. And because the CPUC regime despite the vocal whining of a few impacted industries has also walked a fine line giving us a huge installed base of rooftop solar.
Texas has 6.3GW of battery capacity installed largely in the last three years and is on track for another ~15GW (a bit over 20GW total) by the end of 2024. There's 141GW of battery projects in the queue for connection to ERCOT, with a large chunk of that coming online in 2025 and 2026.
If 8GW over several is the most ambitious, what's 160GW in five years?
Yes, but not having capacity outages is a very low bar in the developed world, whereas the prices Californians pay for electricity is much higher than most places.
no, not really accurate.. more outrage than details.
fifty years+ ago, PG&E operated an engineering marvel, built and managed by engineers with a mission and expanding economy post-WWII. Decisions were made with reliability in mind, great feats of large scale building were accomplished and made stable.
Then, things changed inside PG&E regarding upper management and their goals. Engineers retired or elbowed out by business-oriented Cxx level. The lure of continuous income coupled with a de-facto alignment with ultra-conservative political forces, castling up against the tides of 1970s-80s politics. Supervision by regulators was compromised repeatedly. Insider politics entered at all levels but not "the politicians" it was multi-stakeholder command and control making alliances and payoffs over time.
All of this was moving along as a juggernaut when de-regulation entered. Instead of a democratic market for competing providers, in came Enron. As genuine panic spread due to the first ever blackouts, legal actions were taken that drew back the curtain from the insider deals. PG&E management had found loopholes to use company money to buy out of state assets for profit. Cost-cutting ruled over safety (tree trimming, long haul line insulators).
After emergency maneuvers to regain the grid and Enron was rendered harmless, then some of the rant above applies, yes. Recent events (death and destruction) are out of the control of any faction or individual. New rate increases are evidence of Big State politics tied with Homeland Security and budget creep and a thousand other factors. With all that said, yes this is a political problem by definition, agree.
source: attorney on the Enron case for California; book Scorched Worth by Joel Engel; public news
Another reason we haven't had those blackouts is that electrical efficiency is increasing, even as we increase demand. For example imagine all the CRT screens, street lights, and incandescent bulbs that were all replaced with LCDs.
New construction is also often tied to more generation and higher efficiency. Even a brand new McMansion uses less power than a 40 year old house that's half the size. There's also even odds that new McMansion was mandated to have solar.
this is physically impossible. You can't have more demand in terms of kw-h, joules, amps, watts or whatever yet also not have more demand. The device could have 0.0001% efficiency or 99.99%. If demand goes up, demand goes up. What the device does with that power is not relevant.
They export heavily when the sun is in abundance and import heavily when it isn't. Their move to an electricity market instead of just having regulated utilities was one of the first in the nation and most of the early ones all had big issues as the experience just wasn't there in the design of the market. Now, each market region has a market monitor that looks for the things than Enron did (example: physical withholding to make prices rise). My belief is now that you should never be a first mover on those kinds of things.
The CA home solar subsidies read to me like we've given up on fixing our utilities. Like it's our job to generate our own power from our roofs now, not a power company with access to dedicated facilities that can be far more efficient. Some of my coworkers in the Bay Area even invested in whole-home UPS like Tesla Powerwall because they've been hit by too many blackouts, as if it's not the utility's job anymore to provide reliable power.
We have a similar trainwreck of horrible utility policy in south Washington where the state is sunsetting hydro & solar power at the same time they are banning natural gas.
It makes me think that the goal is to reduce capacity and increase cost to reduce demand.
Policy makers seem to think the grid is like the freeway and if capacity is reduced, demand will be reduced as well.
> is like the freeway and if capacity is reduced, demand will be reduced as well.
Reducing freeway capacity does not reduce demand. It just displaces people who can least afford to be on the road fully off the road. It's effectively just a form of regressive taxation.
It reduces demand in the long term but not without a reorganization. The rich people who work in the city move to the city, reducing traffic demand. The poor people who ideally don't work in the city move away from it, reducing traffic demand. The "inner cities" gentrify. Traffic demand is reduced though.
Look at real estate price patterns in Munich vs Berlin. Berlin's pricing is relatively flat, because it's spread out and has lots of public transportation options. In Munich, prices peak a lot higher in the center, then taper off more quickly.
Meanwhile PSE is throwing so many subsidies at homeowners for improving energy efficiency to try to delay building another dam. For a bunch of insulation and duct work I had quoted last year, I was eligible for a few hundred in subsidies, now it's a few thousand or more.
based on the gigawatts of reduced capacity i'm guessing these subsidies are a distraction. In the same way that recycling helped the industry avoid high redemption fees
As a domestic p.v. owner, I do consider p.v. ONLY for self-consumption, simply because on scale current grid can't sustain it. Harmonic perturbation and quick output variations are too big issues for today, while for self-consumption p.v. is a very good match:
- I use my energy when I can, pushing me to shifting loads as much as I can, I spend less, witch at today grid rates, at least here in France, it's already sufficient to pay back the investment (with an important note, below);
- the grid get less loads in peak moments, at least in the current state of things, where most loads happen during the day most of the time.
Now the important note: I self-made my p.v. because here it's legal to do so and I spent 11.500€ for a 5kWp/8kWh (and I regret not to have choose 10kWp) while the cheapest offer from a local p.v. company was ~30.000 and the highest ~50.000€. This is simply RIDICULOUS. If we price p.v. at reasonable rates and impose self-consumption current state of things makes p.v. viable and contemporary solve the "issue" of p.v. plant in agriculture and in nature in general, if you can't self-consume you do not install them.
The energy "model" is done just for speculation and does not work for a green transition. We need to push cheap p.v. for self-consumption and focus on load shifting (for instance with serious design of most home appliances) and storage. This or there will be no green new deal in general.
This is quite editorialized. A different way of putting this is that the government has reduced solar subsidies (reduced rates for excess) and won't be passing a bunch of new restrictions on the industry. These sound like good things. Let the market work.
That would be great if it worked both ways. I don't have a choice, I have to use PG&E. They have no incentive to lower prices when their energy prices drop. The point of all those regulations is to force them to pass on their savings to consumers who have no choice in energy provider.
If we have so much solar generation during summer, why isn't my energy free or nearly so? If the market worked correctly, they would be paying me to use energy in the summer.
But instead PG&Es profits get to go up, because I have no choice but to use PG&E.
> If we have so much solar generation during summer, why isn't my energy free or nearly so?
In general, as variable renewable energy penetration in grid increases, the cost will be more dominated by distribution of electricity, not wholesale price of generation of electricity.
I wonder how many home/commercial/community solar systems (battery-backed or not) have the equipment needed to (a) generate their own 60 Hz sine wave (of good-enough quality to sync to the grid), (b) automatically disconnect from the grid when it loses its connection (to prevent backfeeding during outages), and (c) properly reconnect (including syncing) when the grid comes back.
I remember, at least in the beginning, smaller systems were unable to provide their own sine wave, and would rely on the grid for that. And even today, if full net-metering were in place (with the possibility of export), I would expect the grid to still provide phase synchronization (when solar is not exporting), and a path to other consumers (when solar is exporting).
Enphase IQ8s have grid-forming capabilities since they came out in 2021 [1], and they're one of the major vendors. Same with the SolarEdge EnergyHub since 2020 [2], the other major U.S. vendor. Globally, Sungrow [3] and Huawei [4] both support grid-forming in their inverters, and their sales dwarf the U.S. manufacturers.
If you relax condition a), it's an even larger percentage. I've got IQ7a's and a PowerWall (installed 2020) and they transparently switch over to battery whenever there's an outage and switch back. I just looked at my Tesla backup history and there've been 5 power outages in the last year, and I haven't noticed any of them.
The sine wave syncing is probably the only real issue.
There have existed automated transfer switches for years and years. My FIL, when he lost power, would very loudly start a countdown from 60 to 0, where his system would kick over to natural gas via the detection of a power-loss event, via an automated transfer switch.
So the people against it argue, good faith or not, that it violates federal law, and the article arguing for it mentions this repeatedly but chooses not to tell us what federal law it is so we can read it and form an opinion ourselves. I don't appreciate being manipulated.
Doesn't new construction mandate solar PV (or similar) on all structures? I can't see a public utility sitting idly by and allowing that to cut into their profit.
I think it has less to do with profit and more to do with balancing generation. CA is already capped out at solar usage unless you are storing that solar energy somewhere.
Readit News
Worth noting that there isn't a lot of room for growth of solar that isn't battery-backed. California exports a ton of energy during the bright months. As a practical matter, the era of sending excess rooftop solar generation to the grid is over.
[1] https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/
Shades of "The Innovator's Dilemma" and what not. Incumbents do not care for their gravy train being taken away.
Edit: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40913 ("Investor-owned utilities served 72% of U.S. electricity customers in 2017")
> Investor-owned utilities, or IOUs, are large electric distributors that issue stock owned by shareholders. Almost three-quarters of utility customers get their electricity from these companies. IOUs are most prevalent in heavily populated areas on the East and West coasts. In 2017, 168 IOUs served an average of 654,600 electric customers. The two largest IOUs are in California: Pacific Gas and Electric, with 5.48 million customers, and Southern California Edison Company, with 5.07 million customers.
cool, but prices for electricity in California still somehow 3 times higher than places where electricity is exported?..
If you had an energy storage technology that could store energy with a very low storage cost, even if it were very inefficient, you could make use of the massive coming excess of summer solar power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/10/controversial-energy-...
> A controversial energy project in south central Washington is one step closer to breaking ground. A federal commission released its final environmental review for the Goldendale Energy Storage Project — to the consternation of several tribes and environmental groups.
> The project is part of a potential solution to one of the biggest problems for renewable energy development: the variability of wind and solar. As the Northwest transitions off fossil fuels, power will need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow.
One of the reasons it's so complicated is that the State in California intervenes in the market in so many (sometimes contradictory) ways. The incentives are often perverse and exactly the opposite of what you would expect.
In attempting to protect consumers, California in the long run has created a market with almost the highest prices in the nation. Simultaneously, and surprisingly, those high prices have not translated into some kind of futuristic or resilient grid. California has not had power outages not because California is better than Texas in terms of technology ... rather California is blessed with a climate that doesn't really suffer state-wide extremes.
As bad as California's public schools are, I think within twenty years we will realize that the thing Sacramento politicians fucked up the most was not the schools ... it was the power grid. Talk to anyone that runs a power intensive manufacturing enterprise in CA. They have already moved their facilities to another state or they already have a plan to do so.
California imports from other states all the energy-intensive inputs and exports its pollution and smugly pats itself on the back. All while taxing its citizens with some of the highest residential power pricing too.
This is a consequence of California's grid being in the Western Interconnection, so there's a lot of capacity to import/export to other states. Texas's grid is mostly isolated in order to preempt federal regulations; they have very limited ability to import/export power.
The page on interties [1] is awfully hard to read, but I think it says socal can get ~ 4 GW from norcal via Path 26 (which can get 4.8 GW from oregon via Path 66), and socal can also get 11 GW from the east via path 46, and 3 GW from Washington via path 65.
Tres Amigas was cancelled, but was proposed to have 5 GW from each of the three grids (Western, Eastern, Texas), to the other two. I can't find a list of capacity for active ties between Texas and other grids.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WECC_Intertie_Paths
California has had frequent power outages over the last 10 years due to a combination of old infrastructure and wildfires.
https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2023/09/05/califor...
https://www.bloomenergy.com/bloom-energy-outage-map/
No the reason that California doesn't have capacity outages is because we've executed steadily on the most ambitious battery energy storage project in the nation, and now have over 8GW of said batteries. And because the CPUC regime despite the vocal whining of a few impacted industries has also walked a fine line giving us a huge installed base of rooftop solar.
If 8GW over several is the most ambitious, what's 160GW in five years?
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2024/04/22/5%20CEO%20Update...
Meanwhile rates in Texas have risen a good bit...to $0.14-15/kWh.
fifty years+ ago, PG&E operated an engineering marvel, built and managed by engineers with a mission and expanding economy post-WWII. Decisions were made with reliability in mind, great feats of large scale building were accomplished and made stable.
Then, things changed inside PG&E regarding upper management and their goals. Engineers retired or elbowed out by business-oriented Cxx level. The lure of continuous income coupled with a de-facto alignment with ultra-conservative political forces, castling up against the tides of 1970s-80s politics. Supervision by regulators was compromised repeatedly. Insider politics entered at all levels but not "the politicians" it was multi-stakeholder command and control making alliances and payoffs over time.
All of this was moving along as a juggernaut when de-regulation entered. Instead of a democratic market for competing providers, in came Enron. As genuine panic spread due to the first ever blackouts, legal actions were taken that drew back the curtain from the insider deals. PG&E management had found loopholes to use company money to buy out of state assets for profit. Cost-cutting ruled over safety (tree trimming, long haul line insulators).
After emergency maneuvers to regain the grid and Enron was rendered harmless, then some of the rant above applies, yes. Recent events (death and destruction) are out of the control of any faction or individual. New rate increases are evidence of Big State politics tied with Homeland Security and budget creep and a thousand other factors. With all that said, yes this is a political problem by definition, agree.
source: attorney on the Enron case for California; book Scorched Worth by Joel Engel; public news
Deleted Comment
I think people who say this forget how large California is or have never been to the imperial valley.
It makes me think that the goal is to reduce capacity and increase cost to reduce demand.
Policy makers seem to think the grid is like the freeway and if capacity is reduced, demand will be reduced as well.
Reducing freeway capacity does not reduce demand. It just displaces people who can least afford to be on the road fully off the road. It's effectively just a form of regressive taxation.
Look at real estate price patterns in Munich vs Berlin. Berlin's pricing is relatively flat, because it's spread out and has lots of public transportation options. In Munich, prices peak a lot higher in the center, then taper off more quickly.
Deleted Comment
Golly. I am 8nterested in that.
Any links?
- I use my energy when I can, pushing me to shifting loads as much as I can, I spend less, witch at today grid rates, at least here in France, it's already sufficient to pay back the investment (with an important note, below);
- the grid get less loads in peak moments, at least in the current state of things, where most loads happen during the day most of the time.
Now the important note: I self-made my p.v. because here it's legal to do so and I spent 11.500€ for a 5kWp/8kWh (and I regret not to have choose 10kWp) while the cheapest offer from a local p.v. company was ~30.000 and the highest ~50.000€. This is simply RIDICULOUS. If we price p.v. at reasonable rates and impose self-consumption current state of things makes p.v. viable and contemporary solve the "issue" of p.v. plant in agriculture and in nature in general, if you can't self-consume you do not install them.
The energy "model" is done just for speculation and does not work for a green transition. We need to push cheap p.v. for self-consumption and focus on load shifting (for instance with serious design of most home appliances) and storage. This or there will be no green new deal in general.
That would be great if it worked both ways. I don't have a choice, I have to use PG&E. They have no incentive to lower prices when their energy prices drop. The point of all those regulations is to force them to pass on their savings to consumers who have no choice in energy provider.
If we have so much solar generation during summer, why isn't my energy free or nearly so? If the market worked correctly, they would be paying me to use energy in the summer.
But instead PG&Es profits get to go up, because I have no choice but to use PG&E.
In general, as variable renewable energy penetration in grid increases, the cost will be more dominated by distribution of electricity, not wholesale price of generation of electricity.
Funny how that only works when I borrow the energy from the grid, but not when I’m adding energy to the grid.
The cost of infrastructure doesn't change if you're consuming power 2h/day or 24/day.
Well, yeah. It's an article in the "Opinion // Editorials" section, by the paper's Editorial Board.
I remember, at least in the beginning, smaller systems were unable to provide their own sine wave, and would rely on the grid for that. And even today, if full net-metering were in place (with the possibility of export), I would expect the grid to still provide phase synchronization (when solar is not exporting), and a path to other consumers (when solar is exporting).
Enphase IQ8s have grid-forming capabilities since they came out in 2021 [1], and they're one of the major vendors. Same with the SolarEdge EnergyHub since 2020 [2], the other major U.S. vendor. Globally, Sungrow [3] and Huawei [4] both support grid-forming in their inverters, and their sales dwarf the U.S. manufacturers.
If you relax condition a), it's an even larger percentage. I've got IQ7a's and a PowerWall (installed 2020) and they transparently switch over to battery whenever there's an outage and switch back. I just looked at my Tesla backup history and there've been 5 power outages in the last year, and I haven't noticed any of them.
[1] https://newsroom.enphase.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
[2] https://www.solaredge.com/fr/SolarEdge-enhances-solar-plus-s...
[3] https://en.sungrowpower.com/upload/file/20211201/Grid%20Form...
[4] https://solar.huawei.com/en/news-room/en/2023/news-20230523
There have existed automated transfer switches for years and years. My FIL, when he lost power, would very loudly start a countdown from 60 to 0, where his system would kick over to natural gas via the detection of a power-loss event, via an automated transfer switch.