
California solar power output sometimes exceeds predictions - DINKDINK
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/
======
NicoJuicy
This isn't abnormal, other examples.

Paying the chemistry industry for shutting down energy intensive operations
during low electricity periods

Transfers between countries in Europe and fines when your electricity
prediction is off ( it costs a lot)

Useless spending power on hot days for not blasting the net because of solar
power

Lower costs at night for using electricity

It's not as easy as it looks, solar power really puts an additional stress on
our net, definitely in the beginning of the 'electricity usage behavior
shift'. Read more about the reason why electricity is unstable in some
countries : [http://infoboxdaily.com/3-african-countries-with-erratic-
pow...](http://infoboxdaily.com/3-african-countries-with-erratic-power-supply-
apart-from-ghana/) \- didn't find anything better

Source: done a project for 'Electricity usage prediction' in Belgium with one
of my previous employers.

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djrogers
And yet our rates keep going up, which encourages less electricity usage and
higher adoption of personal solar installations. Seems like this is going to
be a pretty rough cycle for the power companies to navigate if they aren't
allowed to change their business models...

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jartelt
The sad part is that many people will read the title and use the article to
say "solar power is ruining everything and is a waste of taxpayer dollars!"
But, when you actually read the article you realize that the utilities are the
issue because they keep building natural gas plants and transmission lines
rather than just investing in storage, demand response, or other technologies
that add more flexibility to the grid.

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WalterBright
If the consumer electricity rates were adjusted dynamically, I bet that would
soak up the extra power. For example, one could charge one's electric car when
the power cost is very low.

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ProfessorLayton
This seems to be a temporary problem until green electricity has the capacity
and is cheap enough to be used year-round.

Natural gas is so much cheaper on a $/BTU basis, but perhaps with enough solar
capacity (or other green sources) that wont be the case much longer. It would
be great if I could keep cool and warm using electricity alone.

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mickrussom
Ill tell you what. Every single bulb is LED, tv plasma-> led, all appliances
and fans upgraded to energy efficient, all HDDs->SSD, all lights on sensors,
no heating used, no AC used, and my bills are bigger here in CA than ever. So
if there is a glut of power I can also say that datacenters pay less than
people in homes and its not cheap to charge electric cars, in fact, they are
charging more per kwh and changed a lot of free charging stations to pay-
for/metered. As a little guy in a brutal tax bracket its too bad all this
energy progress hasnt helped out with the bills.

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sna1l
California should use the power to mine bitcoin!! :)

~~~
HillaryBriss
this is the best answer. we should contact Jerry Brown.

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mahyarm
Maybe the could make our PG&E bills not be (very quickly) .30/kwh and instead
follow the .12/kwh average of the USA during these peak times.

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the8472
Utility companies usually have load shedding agreements with industrial
consumers that can tolerate power supply temporarily going down.

Is the inverse - consuming above than average and building up heat, chemical
stock or whatever they usually do that lets them ride out supply slumps - too
difficult?

It seems extremely wasteful to pay another state just to have them power down
their solar farms.

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blizkreeg
Is this just a function of how many households in CA get 100% of their power
from solar currently? I got an email recently from PGE where I can opt into
and decide the % of my power that comes from solar.

Does the state generate enough power to move over every household to solar?

------
apo
What a difference 16 years makes:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis)

~~~
intopieces
Wasn't that crises entirely manufactured though?

------
drwl
Happened in Texas too

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esturk
I'm sure there's some business opportunities that can be taken to alleviate
this surplus. There's a generation of people that have been groomed to use
their electrical appliances during the night time wether to do laundries or
wash dishes because they would be charged less from energy providers. In
recent years, people are doing their charging at home in the middle of the
night.

But perhaps this can flip around. Imagine laundromats that charge cheaper for
drying or washing during the day vs during the night. Cheaper electric car
charging during the day. Business opportunities that benefit everyone simply
by changing some habits.

~~~
thephyber
> I'm sure there's some business opportunities that can be taken to alleviate
> this surplus.

You need to be able to message the energy consumers (most likely smart
versions of large appliances) within minutes notice.

I think you would have to have appliances ready when you leave home in the
morning and set the power price at which you are willing to run it. Right now,
I don't think most large appliances support such a system. Perhaps home
assistants (Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomePod, etc) would be the right
place to integrate these settings, but you would still need the assistant to
be able to interact with your dishwasher / clotheswasher / Tesla Powerwall.

At the moment, we are adding solar to the grid faster than we are adding smart
appliances that are capable of deciding when to use power, based on the
current market price of power.

~~~
webnrrd2k
This strikes me as a viable usefor IoT-style appliances. Or maybe IoT outlets.

Also, I bet a swimming pool could be cooled down when power is cheap, and the
chilled water pumped through a heat exchanger as air conditioning.

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skybrian
Seems like some local industry would be able to use this? Or maybe turn on
some air conditioning or hot water heaters.

~~~
politician
Making ice is good way to bank cheap power at a company-scale because they can
use it to offset AC later.

------
EGreg
Solar panels can also decentralize energy generation, letting communities be
more resilient and prevent global blackouts.

------
aeturnum
Alternative title: Solar power output exceeds most optimistic predictions.

It seems like a non-story for a burst-y power source to occasionally produce
more power than we need.

~~~
scribu
Yeah, the more interesting aspect was that new traditional power plants are
still being built, despite the glut of solar.

~~~
palewire
I work at The Times on the team behind these stories and FYI we did a whole
previous investigation focused on just that

[http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-
capacity/](http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/)

------
jessaustin
I wondered whether TFA would ever get to the cause of this waste, and
eventually it did!

 _Once state regulators approve new plants or transmission lines, the cost is
now built into the amount that the utility can charge electricity users — no
matter how much or how little it is used._

Oh, so _that 's_ why they kept building natural gas plants that don't get used
most of the time! If you've ever been to a PUC meeting, you've seen corruption
at its most brazen. "Citizens' groups" entirely funded by utilities and telcos
wait their turn to dutifully read the prepared statements, the commissioners
dutifully thank them, and then they go to work with the rubber stamp. It
doesn't actually matter that power plants get built in a timely fashion or
actually operate more than a small percentage of the time, the rate-payers are
already on the hook. The only way a utility executive gets a bonus is by
saddling the public with CWIP charges, so that's what they scheme to do every
working day.

No coal, gas, or nuclear plant should ever be built by forcing the public to
do the job of investors. If investors can't be found to support a plant that
supposedly will generate for decades, maybe we should listen to the market?

[EDIT:] Great article, though, because it tells the whole story, and that
seems rare anymore.

~~~
KekDemaga
I don't understand so when a natural gas plant is built they adjust rates
upward? Isn't that the opposite of supply and demand?

~~~
caminante
No. In theory, that new gas plant is "planned" and replacing aging capacity,
while meeting expected demand.

Rates are separate.

Many power utilities are granted a monopoly, especially the transmission (high
voltage, long distance) and distribution ("last mile" / neighborhood wires)
horizontals as they're true natural monopolies.

In exchange for that concession, their profits are capped. The cap is a
function of their "rate base" \-- i.e. qualifying capex -- and an approved
rate. These rates are adjusted periodically, requiring public utility
commission (State) or FERC (federal) rate setting sessions.

For example, "Total Revenue Requirement = Rate Base [assets] × Allowed Rate of
Return + Expenses" [0]

Without having looked into this, it's easy to over-estimate how easy (hard)
life as a public utility is.

[0] [http://blog.aee.net/how-do-electric-utilities-make-
money](http://blog.aee.net/how-do-electric-utilities-make-money)

~~~
spangry
This kind of regulatory response to natural monopolies can (and does) result
in 'gold-plating'. It incentivises profit-maximising monopolists to over-
invest in qualifying capital: even though their ROI remains the same, their
absolute profit grows larger.

However, there's no easy solution here: natural monopolies are a genuinely
tricky public policy issue. Alternative solutions that come to mind are more
direct price controls or public ownership. I'm not suggesting these are
superior alternatives; just throwing them in there to provide more grist for
the conversational mill.

~~~
DrScump
California is an expert at this.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis)

------
jalayir
Could excess power from CA be exported to Mexico or Central America?

~~~
iak8god
I've heard that desalination of seawater is not a practical solution to
drought because it's too energy-intensive. Does this change when energy
temporarily costs less than $0/unit?

~~~
thaumasiotes
It's not true in the first place. Arab states, and Israel, make heavy use of
it; desalinated water is easily affordable for US residents.

What makes US desalination impractical is not the cost of desalinating, but
either or both of:

\- the cost of building a plant in the first place

\- the availability of cheaper fresh water

~~~
webnrrd2k
Southern California, for example, dumps most of it's rain water into the
ocean. I'd bet that capturing some of that would be much cheaper in the long
run.

it's not hard to come up with some creative solutions... How about a giant bag
or huge tanks out in the ocean for holding the water, instead of building
dams. Or injection wells to replenish the water tables during the rainy
season, pumping it out during the rest of the year.

It just seems weird that millions of gallons of fresh water gets dumped into
the ocean, and nothing is done to capture even some of that water.

------
digikata
If Tesla can really put up grid storage modules as fast as they claim,
shouldn't this just be a big opportunity to print money? Get paid to charge
the batteries on surplus surges, get paid to supply power at night discharging
them...

~~~
ChuckMcM
Yes. The "obvious" question when reading an article like this is "Why pay
someone to take the power, why not just turn off a gas or coal fired plant?"
There are some obvious restrictions around that (like the plant would need to
be in the general area of the grid where power was coming from of course) but
the issue according to the PUC is that "cycle time" which is the amount of
time it takes to turn off a power plant and then turn it on again, is longer
than the "event time" where you get an over power event transient.

Grid storage nicely addresses both of these issues because it can absorb the
extra energy (charging) and when the grid storage units are charged you can
safely turn off a power plant because even if the power suddenly dips for what
ever reason the grid storage can cover that loss while the power plant is
restarting.

If you reach the point where you have enough grid storage to completely cover
the variance between day time and night time power demand, then things get
even more efficient as you switch to that storage a 'primary' and then cycle
on plants as needed to top them off.

~~~
oconnore
But so much of the demand is flexible. For example, I get zero benefit from
heating my water tank at a particular time. Building grid storage so I can run
my heat pump when it's dark and the air is still is inefficient and silly.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. At the individual user level
energy usage may appear random and chaotic but at the community level that is
not the case. To use your example, at any given instant in time _someone_ in
your city is heating water (whether intentionally by consuming water from a
hot water storage facility, or passively as that facility activates
automatically to keep the water at a given temperature). All of those usages
level out to an aggregate demand on energy to heat water over unit time.

If you think about it as a capacitor that "filters" high frequency noise on
the electrical grid it might be clearer.

~~~
vidarh
They level out to some extent, but they also enable far larger spikes to form
when external events cause normally relatively "random" things to synchronise
into narrower intervals across a large number of households.

E.g. the UK has what is called "TV pickup": Shortly after East Enders ends
(daily evening TV soap opera), you'll get the sudden surge of 1.5m+ electric
kettles turned on at once.

We see that type of situation where "random" events coalesce into very narrow
time bands in all kinds of areas. I'd imagine we'll see this type of thing
also happen for automated processes. E.g. air-con units ramping up based on
thermostats in very lose proximity in the same areas etc.

I feel this is one of the areas where we need a smarter grid and smart home
tech and home based batteries to work in conjunction to time-shift load and
smooth out the demand more.

E.g. a hot water storage system can afford to turn off for 5 minutes (or
whatever) and let the water cool slightly to take advantage of a discount 5
minutes down the line, or an air con unit can reduce speed for the same
reason. Or a deep freezer that takes advantage of whatever the safe variation
in freezer temperature would be.

Or, hey, I'd like a button on my washing machine and dishwashers that say "I
want it to be done by time X. Find the lowest guaranteed rate (e.g. nightly
rates) that will let you complete by X. If between now and then you get an
offer for a lower rate, start then instead". Most of the time we just set
"random" time delays to run them during the night, but most of the time I
don't care if it _actually_ runs then as long as it's done by the morning or
by the time I'm done working etc.

You already have that happening to an extent at industrial scale. E.g. with
industrial processes that require lots of energy that can be slowed or sped up
according to prices, but there's a lot of discretionary demand in home as well
that could be leveraged to smooth out the demand curve a _lot_ more, and with
a battery tied in it could smooth it even more.

------
Camillo
Reading these articles is like listening to five year olds arguing. "These
guys says it's enough!" "These other guys say it's not!" "But what if it's
cloudy?" You can picture the journalist holding a toy microphone and nodding
intently at each source, the argument going entirely over their head.

The entire argument revolves around the distribution of power usage and of
power generation throughout the day and throughout the year. So why not
explain that for your readers? Show us charts with that information? Tell us
how much energy is produced by solar on the cloudiest days? Show us a chart of
power usage over solar power production over the last year, and tell us the
minimum and maximum percent?

At least explain the difference between minimum, maximum and average
production, and when each of those matters!

But no, none of that. We get a graph showing the increasing share of solar
generation, and another with absolute figures of the curtailed solar capacity.
And a bunch of pictures and animations, of course.

This is what innumeracy looks like.

~~~
Brakenshire
> This is what innumeracy looks like.

I don't know whether it's innumeracy so much as lack of time, and also the
specific expertise (not just ability to understand numbers, but expertise in
this specific area) to be able to understand the information. For a general
reporter (not an 'energy correspondent' or something similar) the article
you're proposing would take at least a week of study and research, probably
more, this 'he said, she said' stuff can be knocked off in a few hours.

~~~
throwaway76543
It's innumeracy. I don't need to know anything about the subject matter to
understand why the concepts, numbers and relationships mentioned above are
important. In fact, I am absolutely not a solar expert -- I have no expertise
in this specific area -- and I know that I am entirely qualified to understand
the basics of load variation over time.

------
paulsutter
They should pump water uphill during these surges. California hydropower is
constrained by rainfall, so the dams and generators already exist. Pumps cost
less than batteries and this process has about an 80% roundtrip efficiency

~~~
Animats
They do. Many of the reservoirs of the California Water Project also do power
storage. They usually pump up at night and generate in the daytime. Sometimes
they can't store more energy because they're full of water, as happened at
Oroville Dam this year. Sometimes they don't have enough water. A year ago,
some hydro plants in California were down due to lack of water.

There's one big pure pumped storage plant in California - Helms, near
Fresno.[1] The geography has to be right for pumped storage. You need a high
reservoir and a low reservoir near to each other, and since the water levels
will change drastically each day, they can't be used for boating or recreation
much. Helms has about 1500 meters of elevation difference between the
reservoirs. Sites like that are hard to find.

Excess solar power isn't a big problem in areas that use air conditioning.
Peak A/C load and peak solar output tend to coincide. The big excess power
headache is wind, where output varies 4:1 over a day over wide areas. Excess
wind generation late at night is common.

The best way to understand the power business is to read PJM 101, the
introductory training material for the US's largest power grid. Unfortunately,
PJM recently put that behind a login.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms_Pumped_Storage_Plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms_Pumped_Storage_Plant)

~~~
paulsutter
Peak power usage is around 7-8PM, this discrepancy is the source of the duck
curve. More storage could allow tons more solar to be installed.

[https://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/21/utilities-cry-fowl-
over...](https://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/21/utilities-cry-fowl-over-duck-
chart-and-distributed-solar-powercrying-fowl-or-crying-wolf-open-season-on-
the-utilitys-solar-duck-chart/)

(deepsun - the "no sun" critical event happens every night)

~~~
_delirium
7-8pm according to that link is the _net_ peak, after solar production has
canceled out the original afternoon peak. The problem is that even though
solar supply does roughly coincide with the peak of demand, solar production
has increased enough that, since about 2013, it's gone past the point of
offsetting peak afternoon A/C usage, to now producing an actual net trough in
the afternoon hours (you can see the afternoon extremum flips from a local
maximum to a local minimum from 2012 to 2014, and just keeps going further
down every year since, as peak afternoon solar grows faster than peak
afternoon A/C).

The new net peak around 7-8pm is because demand has a long tail into the early
evening, while solar drops off sharply around 5-7pm. But yeah the end result
is that it does cause a problem for grid management if you add more
incremental solar, since the original afternoon peak it helped smooth out has
long since been smoothed and then some.

~~~
Animats
Wind is really variable, and often way out of sync with load. I just looked at
PJM's dashboard, and peak wind in the last 24 hours was 4 gigawatts at 4 AM.
Wind bottomed out at 0.65 GW at 8 PM. That's total output from wind farms from
Illinois to New England. Averaging over a large area isn't that helpful.

Piping energy in from the wind corridor that runs up from the Texas panhandle
to Canada has promise. The wind is steadier there. It's quite possible to run
megavolt DC power lines now; China has 16,000Km of them. California has had a
half-megavolt DC link from Oregon to Southern California since the 1970s.

