No rolling blackouts or grid emergencies as California continues on path to a carbon free grid. Several strategies, including upgrades to vulnerable parts of the grid at play here, but key enabler is more clean energy, especially solar, and above all, battery storage, now equivalent to 5 very large nuclear power plants.
In fact, California seems to have reached a level of storage that is creating some kind of a phase-change in the grid, yielding benefits that are surprising even expert observers. More and more days where renewables supply greater-than 100 percent of California’s power – enabling exports even under these challenging conditions.
What’s a “5% higher temperature”?
That only makes sense in terms of absolute temperature (Kelvin).
314K (105°F) is 5% higher than 299K (~78.5°F), but I don’t think that’s what he means, does he?
(Like the old question that if the temperature yesterday was 0°F, what does it mean when the weather man says it will be “twice as cold” today?)
I did the calculation based on data from https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/statewide/time-series/4/tavg/4/6/2023-2024?base_prd=true&begbaseyear=1901&endbaseyear=2000 and the number came out to 5.6%. You are, of course, correct that this approach is less useful at 0F, though I think you could count on the fingers of no hands the number of days you would have to worry about that issue in CA.
So, no, I don’t think he means you should use Kelvin or even Celsius. I think you should take it as intended, the temperature is measurably and significantly warmer in California this year than last and yet the additional electricity demand was ably handled by renewables for 100 days out of this year so far.
Random observation: While West Texas wind drops down during the day, it seems that California gets wind all day.
The 5 nuclear plant equivalent from batteries is peak power capacity and not energy. They, of course, have to be charged before they can deliver any energy. Note how small of a portion of the white space on the left side of Mark Jacobson’s graphs are taken up by the thin black battery band. That’s because it all gets used up early under the white space on the right side of his graphs. Why doesn’t MZJ show a nuclear band? That would show a much more accurate representation of of how much extra electricity above the red demand lines has to be dealt with. Also, what happens to all that green and yellow on a calm, cloudy day?
Here you go:
https://themeritorder.substack.com/p/california-is-meeting-more-than-100
Noon is the *lowest* point on the demand curve? How does noon use less power than (say) 3 AM?
Is this local solar power (houses, businesses, etc) directly removing grid demand without being counted as solar (or demand) on this chart?