Another opportunity to point out the duck curve. I think there is profit to be made if you have a battery that you charge with solar, then feed it back to the grid in the evening when demand is highest.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...
Also with these flex alerts, PG&E was willing to pay us $2 a kwh below normal usage between 4-9pm
That's really frustrating. I'm currently selling power on to the grid, but it's capped at the rate my solar panels produce, probably by policy. So, even if I was eligible for this rate, it wouldn't give me any meangful credit.
They need a rate that is proportional to marginal carbon emissions. Then, I could set my battery to that. It could look at the forecast for tomorrow, and make a killing by doing the obvious thing.
Grr. The legislation around here is decades behind the technology.
10kW at 240V is 41 amps. Our connection to the grid is hundreds of amps.
There are two reasons I can't do it: This is a Tesla pilot, and it is not a Tesla system.
More fundamentally, this is a weird emergency response program. They should just set the rate structure so that people always have a financial incentive to minimize CO2 and also stabilize the grid.
The rate structure does neither of those things, so we end up with lots of idling home batteries during peak demand events like the current one. On normal days, the batteries idle while peaker plants uselessly spew CO2.
I am, but I could make $40-60 in the next few hours by dumping the batteries' charge into the grid in the next three hours. That's much less than what I'd get normally.
Basically, I want net metering to be proportional to carbon (and therefore peaker plant use). It's less about the amount of money I get back.
In related news, my batteries aggressively charge themselves during the morning CO2 peak because power is cheap then. They should sell solar production into the grid during those hours and start charging at ~ 10 am.
>Basically, I want net metering to be proportional to carbon (and therefore peaker plant use). It's less about the amount of money I get back.
Maybe I don't understand.
Then you would receive very little compensation for the useless solar you send to the grid at mid day and pay very high prices for any power you use from the grid at night.
I'm OK with them not paying for the useless power that I dump on the grid at noon. I have 12-24 hours of battery backup, so I can get through the night on it.
Plus, they should pay more for peak usage hours (4-9pm and 6-10am) than they charge over night (the overnight power produces less than 70% as much carbon as peak power in the morning and evening), so I'd still end up selling back at a profit vs. storing electricity for my own use. Also, the cost minimizer in the battery would then charge the battery at noon, when electricity is worthless (unlike what it does now).
I want to set the battery to "minimize atmospheric CO2". The details of my power bill are rounding errors vs. the ongoing damages I am already incurring from climate change.
Can you find a single day in the CAISO records where the net grid demand (so not including home solar, grid solar or grid wind) is below the amount produced by their nuclear and hydro?
If you can't, and I don't think you can, why do you claim his solar is useless?
I'd guess a early-spring/ late-fall weekend might be the best place to find such a day.
(Weirdly, just checking this myself and his complaint that the battery charges at 9am seems to actually be the best time for a battery to charge as net demand is lowest then)
There's been lots of headlines over the last few years about negative prices and too much solar, but any time I checked, they generally still have fossil generation running.
Here's some modelling suggesting 120 Billion saving from distributed solar and batteries:
>Can you find a single day in the CAISO records where the net grid demand (so not including home solar, grid solar or grid wind) is below the amount produced by their nuclear and hydro?
If you can't, and I don't think you can, why do you claim his solar is useless?
Why would you take the number before grid wind, grid solar, and home solar?
I think the relevant number is is demand minus grid solar, grid wind, grid nuclear, and probably hydro.
My point is that it is inefficient.
It makes no sense to idle a commercial solar or wind farm with a purchase contract so that the electric company can also purchase residential solar.
It would be entirely different if the electric company had massive storage, but they don't. The residential solar generators do. It makes most sense for the electric company to buy residential solar only when it has been time shifted to when grid farms are not producing.
That's what I meant. CAISO gives what it calls 'net-demand', which is demand left over after all available solar and wind have been used, and you can subtract nuclear and hydro from that and it's never zero, so there's room for more rooftop solar. Every watt generated will be used, displacing fossil generation, at any time of day.
Once they deploy 5G or so more you might start to hit this problem, but it's never been a problem till now.
Do peaker plants produce any more carbon? I thought a small amount less because theyre usually natural gas.
The problem with peaker plants is it’s expensive keeping them around when they only operate for a short time, and bigger peaks mean more capacity needed.
I love net metering, but long term it isn’t an entirely fair system. I imagine once they move off of that they’ll be able to have better incentives for those on solar with batteries.
People often claim that, because they like to portray net metering as a pointless subsidy for rich folks, but I'd say in California it's probably short changing the benefit of solar/batteries to the grid.
Value of solar tariffs that work this out in detail get pushback from grid operators for being too high, same as net metering. It's almost as if they don't like paying a fair rate for energy and their excuses are exactly that.
So you're already heavily subsidized by legislation. Power plant operators sell electricity for something like $0.05/kWh on average, which is 15-20% of what you're getting for it. They'd love to be able to sell it for $.30/kWh. The power company also would love to not have to lose a whole lot of money on buying extremely expensive electricity from you. Nevertheless, you're the one getting a sweet deal here, and you need to thank legislators for subsidizing people who can afford to install residential solar.
I'm not complaining about the free money that they send me.
I'm complaining because they set the incentives wrong, and the incentives control the (closed source) battery software's policy. Therefore, the equipment I bought is offsetting way less carbon than it could.
Now, multiply that waste by the number of home batteries in California.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, tomorrow's expected peak demand of 51,000 MW would set the new record for CA, passing the old record of 50,200 MW from July 2006.
How much generation capacity has been shutdown since then? With the seemingly endless installation of solar panels, I am surprised of the generation warnings.
California is also using less. LED lighting, more efficient HVAC systems, individual and corporate conservation, it's all helping to reduce the amount of power we need per person.
Note that California leads the nation in EV adoption and still has an enviably low per-capita electric habit. And before you start jumping up and down that the map shows an increase in consumption from 2019 to 2020, keep in mind that the whole southwest is grey in large part because of the warmer summers.
Yep. No disagreement here; I was just trying to say that when the per-capita electricity consumption in California will go up, it's not because policies don't work, but because of EVs. And we will see drastic reductions of CO2 emissions per capita in California as a result.
Per-capita will go up, but mostly in the overnight hours, where there is lots of extra capacity. EVs might actually help the grid by reducing the overnight drop, and allowing the state to run more cheap baseline load.
Did some further research, apparently a house uses about 10Mw/y, and an electric car is about 4Mw/y, so it's a pretty substantial increase, but it's not insane.
CAISO has a lot of awesome data available just waiting to be tapped. OASIS provides realtime price data, and you can see realtime outages. Everything is downloadable in CSV and XML format.
Unfortunately, OASIS is a really crazy legacy-application, so linking to it is difficult. If you launch OASIS from the "outlook" page, you can click on "System Operating Messages" to get a realtime feed of different messages from the system, for example.
And larger drop as they went into stage 2. It's going to go to stage 3 tomorrow if not today. What a great wave.
I'm sending this from across the country now, but I lost power in 2020 last time it was almost this hot in CA.
We'll see. The day-ahead estimates have been high all week, and the temperature is dropping tomorrow. I put it about a 50/50 chance that we break 50GW tomorrow.
Maybe in parts of the state, but all over northern CA there are places forecasting a few degrees warmer. Plus the overnight will be high enough that buildings won’t lose as much retained heat, and will start out slightly warmer.
One genuine question: part of the issue, as I understood it, that TX had is that they were on their own grid. But CA isn't. They're part of the Western Interconnection. And while I learned from a google search that California has "Independent System Operators" -- shouldn't being connected to half the United States give them more stability here?
Anyway, we clearly need to make grid improvements.
TX does have its own grid, but it is able to import power from the eastern grid (not the western that CA is on, though). Moreover, in the middle of the winter, what was equally important was that the natgas pipeline capacity was shared with other states (and Mexico), and that's what had the biggest failure, because many others were using record amounts of natgas at the same time TX needed it, in part to fuel electrical plants. Unlike, for example, coal, where you have a big mound of it next to the plant, and sure it's brought in by train but it's not expected to show up just-in-time.
All of which is to say, being on a larger grid only helps if everyone else isn't peaking at the same time you are.
Also, they didn't (and still don't?) pay to winterize plants, so if it gets mildly cold by northern US standards (which happens about once a decade) a bunch of their plants (and unwinterized windmills) shut off.
That was the same problem in Texas. Everyone went on and on about how dumb these dumb Texans are for being so stupid to not be connected to one of the national grids like smart adults are.
But there were big problems in OK and KS because the weather doesn't end at the grid boundary and the grid doesn't have an infinite carrying capacity. Just because there might be extra generation available somewhere doesn't mean that the lines between generation and consumption have the capacity to carry it.
I certainly never implied Texans were "dumb." It is the case that Texas' unique situation makes them LESS connected, and therefore less stable, right?
As far as everybody else, I think the calls for updating the grid for everyone have been around for a while and that's why Congress set aside a bunch of money for it? Because it was needed and everybody agrees? No need to make this partisan. I think everybody favors a more robust grid, even folks who voted against the legislation for other reasons.
Depends on situation, I suppose.
Winter 2 years ago, it was a total cluster-f caused by generators not being properly weatherized (the owners chose to pay ridiculously small fines rather than weatherizing the equipment), extremely low temp and high demand. In that case the was grid less stable than it could have been by own doing.
We also had a shortage a few months ago when solar farms were not producing enough because of cloud coverage in west Texas, along with wind turbines not being propelled enough - and brutally high temperatures. That other time a “help” from other grids would come in handy and there was not much TX could have prepared on its own.
I wonder how much the peak could be reduced by intentionally cooling houses lower than normal (say to 18 C / 65 F) before the demand peak, e.g. from 3pm - 5:30pm so that you don't need to use as much AC right when you get home and solar is waning. Essentially using the thermal mass of your house as a battery
Anecdotally, as a Chicago transplant, I was shocked at the atrocious quality of windows when I moved here. Only fit for blocking the wind. Doubt they would be legal to install in the Midwest.
Depends on where you are. Some combination of state and local regs mean that any replacement windows have strict U-factor and SHGC requirements. If you're in one of those San Francisco victorians you'll find very few manufacturers want to sell to such a niche market. You'll also find the Napoleon of North Beach is loathe to allow a variance.
Depends on the neighborhood. Most of the urban core of the Bay Area dates to somewhere between the 1920s and 50s. The suburban stuff (a.k.a. everything else) maybe thirty-odd years later, and there was another wave after shuttered military bases started getting redeveloped. In Oakland, the building I'm in was built in the early 2010s. In Marin, Hamilton AFB got a bunch of tract housing in the late 90s. Treasure Island and the BVHP Navy Yard in San Francisco are still under development.
Per the wiki article (since I'm too lazy to go to the library), California was first in the nation with energy efficiency standards in 1974 and currently has the lowest energy consumption per capita in the United States. However lax things were in the early 80s in California, things were/are more lax in Texas.
With good insulation this is extremely effective and on hot days you absolutely want to cool your house during the morning. Good insulation is unfortunately not the norm here due to the combination of old houses and it historically being considered unimportant due to the climate.
That seems... super inefficient? California has ~40% more people than Texas (40M vs 28M) and seems to have historically [1] stayed at or below 50GW for the last 20 years.
Huh, I did not expect such a huge swing in relative weights! TX uses ~15% more energy (1744 trillions vs 1508 trillion BTUs) than CA for Residential use, but an absolutely massive 7266 trillion BTU for "industrial" vs 1701 in California.
Filtering the LLNL Sankey diagrams to Texas (last available seems to be 2019) at [1] sadly doesn't break down the Industrial use, but I'd guess it was for oil wells and such (and I'm disappointed I didn't think about that earlier). The summary at [2] includes the simple quote:
> Texas leads the nation in energy consumption across all sectors and is the largest energy-consuming state in the nation. The industrial sector, including the state's refineries and petrochemical plants, accounts for more than half of the state's energy consumption and for 23% of the nation's total industrial sector energy use.
But both the Sankey diagram and that wording suggest direct use of the energy (e.g., onsite burning of petroleum) and not anything related to the grid. I'm more confused than we began this :).
Good website, but note that the data is from 2020, which is better than I've got but one might expect Industrial to be actually higher in 2022, and residential somewhat lower.
Hard to compare with CA though because their data is probably even more skewed by 2020 special factors.
Texas has a pretty sweet setup because their solar resources are far to the west of their population centers. In California, it’s the other way around. Our solar resources are east of our principal cities, so at that critical moment right around sundown in the late summer the demand and supply have a close encounter.
Yep, if you hear about it it means it got pretty damn bad - these utility balancing grids are usually pretty good about keeping from potentially impacting anyone (asking industrial uses to shut off, etc).
I presume there is much higher industrial demand in Texas and that explains the large delta?
Both grids have challenges in extreme weather. In 2020 in California I lost power for about 4 hours due to too much load. I got to see the stars. In 2021 32 people died and $195B in damage was done when power went out in Texas. Extreme weather events are hard, and maybe they are more common than we think?
I like to ping my CA friends when I hear about rolling blackouts or grid strain. It's pretty fair after all their "hurr durr deregulation bad Texas has shit power" talk they sometimes send.
And even the 2020 blackouts were pretty mild. Affecting only a small percentage of californians, and for about an hour, and about 10 minutes on the two recorded occasions in 2020.
Indeed they were small, I think I was out about 3 hrs, but was close enough to coast temps were already down to 80 ish.
Planned PSP outages, that's another story. I think we were dark for 4 days in fall 2019
There are a lot of factors in-play that make realtime grid balancing harder. You can have more capacity on paper but have things trip offline due to faults, overloads, unexpected maintenance, etc. Just because you have the capacity on paper doesn't mean that you can always start that capacity up, route the power on enough transmission lines, etc. There are multiple wildfires and it's a very hot day right now, which can create adverse conditions.
I definitely suggest Practical Engineering's power grid series for a better explanation about how this stuff works, but grid balancing is certainly nontrivial.
Edit: You can actually see realtime transmission outage data via OASIS (http://oasis.caiso.com/mrioasis/logon.do), under the Transmission -> Transmission Outages tab. There are other tabs in OASIS that show related grid factors too.
That article seems to have been written with a strong bias built in - at no point do they even acknowledge that peaks have to be accounted for, the rising electric vehicle demand, the planned closure of many older plants, or the fact that even in 2017 we were having problems meeting demand at times…
They also don’t cite any credible sources for their claims that CA is headed to a power glut.
Many people don’t get the vast amount of planning and slack inherent in these systems.
If a power plant takes ten years from beginning to first megawatt, you need to be approving plants ten years before the one they’ll replace goes offline.
Ontario CA happens to be a major shipping hub with tons of warehouses. So it often shows up in UPS or FedEx tracking if you order a lot of stuff online.
Yeah, the various EEAs and emergency notices are basically opportunities for other participants on the grid to spin up generation capacity and help out.
CAISO encompasses a wider region than just California -- this reflects the state of everything managed by the Western Energy Imbalance Market.
Technically speaking, the Western Interconnection is just a series of interconnected grids on the western-half of the continent. There are some operators that have capacity that can't be used or can't reasonably supply things. If you view the the price map (http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.html) and switch to real-time, you can easily spot where the grid doesn't have enough interconnect ties -- the prices will be wildly out-of-proportion with the rest of the system.
The reasons for this are varied: in order to be able to adequately supply load you need physical lines connecting the grid together. One single line isn't enough to actually carry all of the electricity from A to B, because they're physical wires that have load limits (e.g., due to thermals). So while the western half of the US is widely connected, there are spots where more lines could be built to fix the imbalance. CAISO lately has been trying to onboard as many providers as are willing to, because it's a win-win (they get paid ridiculously high prices during events like this and the grid gets more stable).
So why do they want to put every car on the grid too if they can’t even manage current demand? I hope most people realize policies like this mean a lower standard of living for the lower classes.
It's only a short period of the day, 4-9, where there are constraints on these hot days. Other times of day there's ample capacity.
And car charging is a great sort of grid demand, because it's easily shiftable to other time periods. Most cars are parked nearly all the time.
And as car companies become more enlightened and allow vehicle to grid, scenarios like this will vanish. It wouldn't take a large fraction of cars in a V2G program to eliminate the problems here, especially since cars are so close to the load, which also helps with transmission and distribution. 1 million cars would be 5-10GW, completely eliminating any worries for this week.
And this is without the many GW of grid storage that is due to go online, but temporarily delayed because of COVID pandemic related parts delays.
The good news is that Congress appropriated money to update the grid so it can manage more demand. Are you really suggesting that, instead, we should ban appliances and other items like electric cars that use electricity?
And why pretend not to know why CA favors electric cars? I'm pretty sure you're aware of the debate over climate change causing extreme weather events -- including events that cause strain on the grid. One can argue California is moving too quickly, I think. They in fact may end up pushing back their deadlines--I think that's likely. But to suggest electric cars are an unmanageable problem?
Because the vast majority of those cars will charge at night, when the grid has tons of capacity. No one is suggesting that those cars will charge during the 4pm-9pm window. It's more expensive to do so, and there's little benefit to it.
We're producing more power than we need during the day, and that's a great time to charge commuter cars.
Also, the state is literally burning down due to climate change. If you want to talk about standards of living for lower classes, look at what our PM 2.5 levels do during fire season. (On those days, the middle class and up buys HEPA filters close ther windows and crank up the AC.)
Also with these flex alerts, PG&E was willing to pay us $2 a kwh below normal usage between 4-9pm
https://energyupgradeca.org/flex-alert?utm_source=aw&utm_med...