The story lede of this article is buried in the final paragraphs:
Aside from the fact that California produces far more solar power than it can effectively use, solar projects "have cleared thousands of acres of pristine land in the Mojave Desert, where it has angered local residents worried about declining property values and environmentalists concerned about the loss of wildlife habitat."
As the final graph of the article notes, the people who live in the California desert regions are not deceived.
"We have this planet to save and they are throwing away power?" said Mark Carrington, a resident of Desert Center, a town east of Joshua Tree National Park, which has been nearly surrounded by solar projects.
There seems to be a blindingly obvious solution, to capture some economic value from the otherwise excess solar power generated -- Bitcoin mining. In theory, it's very similar to this application, using otherwise wasted gas flares from oil drilling: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/12/23-year-old-texans-made-4-mi...
Please note, I am not advocating for Bitcoin mining as a productive means of consuming electricity that could have gone to something else (either industrial or commercial or residential) -- I'm specially talking about what the article is covering, aka EXCESS generation that truly has nowhere else to go... Might as well convert that electricity into Bitcoin, to capture something (better than nothing) from the generated electricity.
From a technical and high-level economic point of view, solar should be 'overbuilt' so that it supplied excess energy a decent percentage of the time, to make up for when it doesn't output near 100%. It sounds like the main issue is how the incentives are set up and rewards are distributed, not with building more solar in and of itself.
This article is light on exact details. When prices go negative, who is paying that and how, exactly? It sounds like it's at least partially effectively a government subsidy through credits. Is that necessary to compel the amount of building? The article doesn't even ask that question. They talk about trades making large profits by buying electricity when it's cheap and selling it when it's expensive. How are they doing that? Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or they're predicting electricity demand and supply and trading derivatives, in which case what inefficiencies are driving that market to be very lucrative for pure traders? And finally, are the high electricity prices in California at all related to the wholesale pricing? From what I could quickly find online, California's wholesale prices are not particularly high (lower than Texas, in fact). But that's usually only part of a household's electricity bill.
>From a technical and high-level economic point of view, solar should be 'overbuilt' so that it supplied excess energy a decent percentage of the time, to make up for when it doesn't output near 100%....
> Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or ...
Storing it is the big problem. You can't just overbuild solar power and put the energy in the network. You need to meet the demand. ND that is problematic if you must mix and match different energy sources across the network.
You can actually if you have energy trading between regions. The problem with California is that during peak-power use times (18:00->20:00) there is no where to buy more solar from. But California can sell its solar for other regions peak-power use time.
I think the problem is that the US grid is also not well set up for this to be viable though, but I don't know the specifics (I think the east coast is on a different grid from the west coast, and Texas has its own grid?)
Washington, Oregon, and Idaho all have lots of hydro with OR/ID good amounts of wind. CA should definitely get the transmission up to par to supply all their solar during the daytime and receive hydro+wind at night.
While it's possible that the over supply of solar power in California is a case of poor incentives, my money is on it being a result of different parts of the CA solar + electricity ecosystem have progressed at different speeds. Assuming that we see increases in our facility with electricity transmission and storage, having "too much" solar power now doesn't seem as big of a deal as this article makes it out to be.
Which is more likely? That excess transmission and storage infrastructure gets built out before excess generation gets built out? Or that the demand for better transmission and storage infrastructure is preceded by an oversupply of solar power?
The only downside with drawing these kinds of analogies is that you're still paying an operating cost for the unused portion of your production server.
The light falling on a solar panel is free.
Yeah there's theoretical lost revenue, but that's a theoretical loss versus a real loss from operating costs.
If you want to be pedantic, hail falling on solar panels isn't free and happens sometimes. But adding up these kinds of cost requires a large dose of pedantry, because the costs are so small compared to the cost of operating devices that have moving parts.
There are two aspects to this that are part of the way this will play out in the future.
1) More storage is required to spread the solar/wind power out over the day. Most countries are well behind on grid storage. Its more common in domestic solar installs and that depends significantly on policies on import/exports.
2) Green power will always require over provisioning. For example in Australia they get about 1.5x the Solar power daily in Summer compared to Winter and the system needs to be designed for the winter which involves more storage and more production. In the summer this means there is excess power.
What I think will happen is that there will be periods of almost free power when there is excess and there will be periods of very expensive power where grids pay for people to reduce their usage, we are seeing this in the UK already at ~50% renewables.
There will be businesses that will make sense to run when power is cheap in the near future, ideally I would hope maybe energy intensive hydrocarbon fuel creation from CO2 in the atmosphere and desalination but a lot of business will become competitive is power is nearly or actually free.
The future looks very different and curtailment is a sign the market and systems haven't yet caught up to the reality of renewable energy.
California grid storage growth has increased every year for five years, now that everyone has realized the importance of having batteries to buffer solar for peak and evening demand, and it will likely continue to grow — especially once someone in power realizes that desalination plants can turn their waste sodium into batteries.
I believe natural gas plants have a minimum idle so they can respond to the volatility of energy demand that needs to be met in real time. I don't think you can run the plants at 0 during the entire day and start them up again quick to respond immensely at 6pm.
The story lede of this article is buried in the final paragraphs:
Aside from the fact that California produces far more solar power than it can effectively use, solar projects "have cleared thousands of acres of pristine land in the Mojave Desert, where it has angered local residents worried about declining property values and environmentalists concerned about the loss of wildlife habitat."
As the final graph of the article notes, the people who live in the California desert regions are not deceived.
"We have this planet to save and they are throwing away power?" said Mark Carrington, a resident of Desert Center, a town east of Joshua Tree National Park, which has been nearly surrounded by solar projects.
There seems to be a blindingly obvious solution, to capture some economic value from the otherwise excess solar power generated -- Bitcoin mining. In theory, it's very similar to this application, using otherwise wasted gas flares from oil drilling: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/12/23-year-old-texans-made-4-mi...
Please note, I am not advocating for Bitcoin mining as a productive means of consuming electricity that could have gone to something else (either industrial or commercial or residential) -- I'm specially talking about what the article is covering, aka EXCESS generation that truly has nowhere else to go... Might as well convert that electricity into Bitcoin, to capture something (better than nothing) from the generated electricity.
Then you need to have the hardware sitting idle when the power produced isn't in excess of what can be used. I'd guess that's not economically viable.
From a technical and high-level economic point of view, solar should be 'overbuilt' so that it supplied excess energy a decent percentage of the time, to make up for when it doesn't output near 100%. It sounds like the main issue is how the incentives are set up and rewards are distributed, not with building more solar in and of itself.
This article is light on exact details. When prices go negative, who is paying that and how, exactly? It sounds like it's at least partially effectively a government subsidy through credits. Is that necessary to compel the amount of building? The article doesn't even ask that question. They talk about trades making large profits by buying electricity when it's cheap and selling it when it's expensive. How are they doing that? Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or they're predicting electricity demand and supply and trading derivatives, in which case what inefficiencies are driving that market to be very lucrative for pure traders? And finally, are the high electricity prices in California at all related to the wholesale pricing? From what I could quickly find online, California's wholesale prices are not particularly high (lower than Texas, in fact). But that's usually only part of a household's electricity bill.
>From a technical and high-level economic point of view, solar should be 'overbuilt' so that it supplied excess energy a decent percentage of the time, to make up for when it doesn't output near 100%....
> Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or ...
Storing it is the big problem. You can't just overbuild solar power and put the energy in the network. You need to meet the demand. ND that is problematic if you must mix and match different energy sources across the network.
You can actually if you have energy trading between regions. The problem with California is that during peak-power use times (18:00->20:00) there is no where to buy more solar from. But California can sell its solar for other regions peak-power use time.
I think the problem is that the US grid is also not well set up for this to be viable though, but I don't know the specifics (I think the east coast is on a different grid from the west coast, and Texas has its own grid?)
Washington, Oregon, and Idaho all have lots of hydro with OR/ID good amounts of wind. CA should definitely get the transmission up to par to supply all their solar during the daytime and receive hydro+wind at night.
Love this grid map for stats on transmission: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO
While it's possible that the over supply of solar power in California is a case of poor incentives, my money is on it being a result of different parts of the CA solar + electricity ecosystem have progressed at different speeds. Assuming that we see increases in our facility with electricity transmission and storage, having "too much" solar power now doesn't seem as big of a deal as this article makes it out to be.
Which is more likely? That excess transmission and storage infrastructure gets built out before excess generation gets built out? Or that the demand for better transmission and storage infrastructure is preceded by an oversupply of solar power?
I tried estimating how much power was curtailed from their big scary number(tm).
3 million megawatt hours per year.
Assuming 2200 hours of sun per years that's 1.4GW average. Total solar is 15-18GW maybe. So what 10% gets curtailed.
Maybe throw some more containerized batteries at it.
LA Times always feels like The Wall Street Journal of the west. Your go to source for reactionary negativism.
10% goes to waste…
I've never worked anywhere that had significant servers and managed to load the production server CPUs anywhere near 90%. 9% perhaps.
Yes I think that's a fair comparison. Both are about choosing the appropriate capacity and the solution involves electronics without any moving parts.
The only downside with drawing these kinds of analogies is that you're still paying an operating cost for the unused portion of your production server.
The light falling on a solar panel is free.
Yeah there's theoretical lost revenue, but that's a theoretical loss versus a real loss from operating costs.
If you want to be pedantic, hail falling on solar panels isn't free and happens sometimes. But adding up these kinds of cost requires a large dose of pedantry, because the costs are so small compared to the cost of operating devices that have moving parts.
(Pedantry is fun, of course. I love it.)
There are two aspects to this that are part of the way this will play out in the future.
1) More storage is required to spread the solar/wind power out over the day. Most countries are well behind on grid storage. Its more common in domestic solar installs and that depends significantly on policies on import/exports.
2) Green power will always require over provisioning. For example in Australia they get about 1.5x the Solar power daily in Summer compared to Winter and the system needs to be designed for the winter which involves more storage and more production. In the summer this means there is excess power.
What I think will happen is that there will be periods of almost free power when there is excess and there will be periods of very expensive power where grids pay for people to reduce their usage, we are seeing this in the UK already at ~50% renewables.
There will be businesses that will make sense to run when power is cheap in the near future, ideally I would hope maybe energy intensive hydrocarbon fuel creation from CO2 in the atmosphere and desalination but a lot of business will become competitive is power is nearly or actually free.
The future looks very different and curtailment is a sign the market and systems haven't yet caught up to the reality of renewable energy.
California grid storage growth has increased every year for five years, now that everyone has realized the importance of having batteries to buffer solar for peak and evening demand, and it will likely continue to grow — especially once someone in power realizes that desalination plants can turn their waste sodium into batteries.
Incentivize batteries.
https://archive.is/LIj1F
It's fun to follow along on gridstatus.io:
https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
12% Natural gas at peak times also refutes this article.
It's not too much solar if we still have to burn fossil fuels for power generation.
I believe natural gas plants have a minimum idle so they can respond to the volatility of energy demand that needs to be met in real time. I don't think you can run the plants at 0 during the entire day and start them up again quick to respond immensely at 6pm.
Occasionally on sunny days.