California is meeting more than 100% of midday electricity demand with clean energy
Every day so far this month
California spring days, postcards from the future
It’s exciting times on the California grid, where more than 100% of midday electricity demand is being supplied by clean power.
Accounting for curtailed solar generation, CAISO has produced enough clean power to meet more than 100% of midday electricity demand stretching back all the way to the beginning of April.
Why does gas generation still run midday?
On a system level, significant gas has to stay on midday because it's too inflexible to turn off and still get back up in time for the evening, as Brendan explains here.
Some is also needed to provide spinning mass that helps stabilize grid frequency. Other plants are needed to provide voltage support or to resolve local supply and demand imbalances within the transmission system. Still others, 'cogeneration' units, run to produce heat for industrial processes.
So what? Electricity is less than 20% of net energy consumption. A few years ago Germany was boasting about its 100% renewable electric grid, but they ignored an inconvenient fact: fossil fuel consumption as a percentage of net energy consumption only fell from 84% to 78%.
They also omitted the fact that the dependability of this grid is very different in April (when there's lots of solar radiation) compared to winter when you actually need all this energy.
The result was a catastrophic winter during which Germany spent tens of billions of dollars snapping up every spare BTU they could find, no matter how dirty or overpriced, and despite historically mild temperatures.
California did the same thing. Instead of building gas pipelines a few hundred miles from the Permian Basin to heat their state, they burned hundreds of millions of tons of dirty coal last winter in the name of "clean energy." Now we're getting rosy headlines about how much electricity they can generate in late April, which is one of the highest wind/solar production months, and one of the lightest months in terms of demand.
Let's revisit in November.