Hard to keep up with the new clean energy records being set in California.
Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, and Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins are keeping us informed of ever-wilder high records for clean energy production.
Worth noting that spring heating and AC loads are not at their summer peak, but huge solar production and newly built battery storage are turning a lot priors upside down.
As always, more storage and transmission needed, but we are on a roll.
California has hit a new renewables record after exceeding 100 per cent of grid demand with clean energy sources for 30 of the past 38 days.
New data from California Independent System Operator (CAISO) shows that supply from geothermal, hydro, solar and wind exceeded demand for between 0.25-6 hours per day for more than three quarters of days since the start of March.
It is the first time that the US state has succeeded in drawing all of its electricity needs from wind-water-solar (WWS) sources for such a sustained period of time.
“This is unprecedented in California’s history,” Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University who first shared the figures, told The Independent.
“In previous years, WWS supply exceeded demand occasionally on one weekend day, but never two days in a row and never during the week, and never to the magnitude that is now, up to 122 per cent of demand.”
The California Independent System Operator inspired conversation on social media this week in response to a self-described data geek and a Stanford engineering professor posting comments about the percentage of emissions-free resources and batteries serving load on the system.
“Two things happened on the @California_ISO grid last night. 1) Battery storage discharge went over 6GW for the first time AND 2) Batteries were the largest source of supply,” Joe Deely, a nonprofit founder and analytics consultant, wrote on X April 17.
Princeton professor and macro-scale energy systems engineer Jesse Jenkins, who leads the university’s Zero carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization Laboratory, or ZERO Lab, chimed in for context. “[A]t the beginning of 2021, installed battery capacity in California was a rounding error. Now it’s cranking out the equivalent power output as six nuclear reactors when grid operators and markets call,” he responded in a repost of Deely’s tweet.
The remarks came days after Stanford civil engineering professor Mark Jacobson on April 14 posted to X CAISO graphs showing that hydropower, wind and solar resources exceeded 100 percent of the grid operator’s demand for at least 15 minutes and as much as six hours on 30 of the previous 38 days.
“This is not an anomaly. It is the new reality. The percentages will only increase each year,” Jacobson said in the widely retweeted post.
CAISO spokesperson Anne Gonzales supported Jacobson’s comments. “We are seeing higher percentages of renewables every spring, so this phenomenon has been building since we broke the 100-percent mark in May 2022,” she wrote in an email to California Energy Markets.
Gonzales said CAISO won’t have validation of the numbers for a few weeks and noted that the renewables peaks occur for a small number of hours in the year under ideal conditions. “We typically hit renewable peaks in the spring season because of mild weather reducing air conditioning and heating use, and the higher sun angle accelerating rooftop and grid-scale solar output. We tend to see records on weekends, as loads are even lower,” she said.
The numbers do reflect the reality that more renewables capacity is coming on line and that CAISO operators are managing substantial amounts of carbon-free resources on the system, Gonzales said. “It’s a preview of the modern, increasingly clean, reliable power grid of the future.”
Jacobson notes that supply exceeds demand for “0.25-6 h per day,” and that’s an important fact. The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day but in the fact that it’s happening on a consistent daily basis, which has never been achieved before.
At the two-week record mark, Ian Magruder at Rewiring America made this great point on LinkedIn:
And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January …), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight.
680MW battery power plant outside of Los Angeles is scheduled to go online in 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/california-battery-plant-is-among-worlds-largest-power-storage-booms-2024-04-12/
All very important and good, BUT a very DARK cloud is raising up to block a lot of the progress. CA, through it’s CPUC and CSLB, has crippled the rooftop PV market that accounted for some 40% of all solar being deployed in the state. Without distributed solar, so-called “rooftop solar”, we will be hard pressed to keep the momentum and to meet Climate Goals.
California Has Dealt a Blow to Renewable Energy, Some Businesses Say https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/business/energy-environment/california-rooftop-solar.html
Fairly comprehensive overall view on CA:
https://www.kqed.org/science/1985611/is-california-still-on-track-to-meet-its-goal-of-100-clean-power-by-2045
Solar went up over the last 7 years from 13% (2017) to nearly 17% (2023) of California’s power, but emissions hardly changed. Last month, grid-scale batteries stored 0.5% of the State’s power, using 6 GW of batteries. The last nuclear plant there, rated at 2.3 GW, produced 9.5% of the power. California’s emissions are also likely to rise 50% from current spring minimum for summer air conditioning, and stay high right through winter, when solar output drops.
Emissions have actually risen a bit over the past couple of years – but that’s largely down to the economic rebound from covid (plus drought meant more natural gas and less hydropower use). However, the past decade emissions in California have definitely showed a significant downwards trend:
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/news/updated-emissions-data-show-overall-downward-trend-continuing
The real question is are they dropping fast enough? California has very ambitious targets compared to the rest of the States, so that put this next link in context, but this article argues California isn’t on track to meet its own 2030 targets:
https://calmatters.org/environment/climate-change/2024/03/california-climate-change-mandate-analysis/