Remember: The "California is Mostly Renewables" Muskism?

"SBA Thanks You For All The Fish" (santabarbarianlsx) 08/18/2020 at 01:14 • Filed to: None

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The California grid is about to set a demand record for electricity, one that’s stood for almost 15 years...

And, remember that Musk-ism about how “California is leading the way” on renewables? Here’s the reality with almost 40 Gigawatts of demand on the grid tonight... Even past the peak, renewables are only 12%. And we have lots of electric cars to charge yet tonight.

So, the week’s about to get really, really interesting...

onlytwowheels > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 02:01

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I lived in California during the first(?) round of rolling blackouts 20 years ago. See “Enron Scandal” and “California Electricity Crisis”. The power to certain parts of the grid would be shut down for an hour at a time. The boss would come into the shop and yell “Okay guys, go to lunch”. It’s 10:00 am, and who has power anywhere around here......

Anyway, they eventually built several new power plants, and people were content that the rates went down too. Like many projects the government get involved in, the future does not seem to be well thought out. Make it enough for now, so we’re caught up, but let’s not consider potential increased usage. Much like the congest ed roads many sit in total gridlock each day.

Eventually they’ll catch up with power demand, but I doubt they will ever figure in the future needs........

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

Nick Has an Exocet > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 02:24

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A few things I’ve learned in the last few days:

1) Renewables kind of suck. I actually knew this already. I worked with the former head of NOAA’s largest lab. He proposed a US power grid to the US House / Senate that used down to the minute weather data to predict renewable efficiency then a new type of high power transmission line to move power around preemptively. It would also be used to find the correct locations to build them. They basically booted him out. The problem with renewables is that they are idiots about where they put them (like putting solar in New England) and they are insanely weather dependent.

2) Someone is getting very rich. Energy prices on some transmission lines jumped 100x.

3) An independent expert who analyzed this weekend’s blackouts found that on a percentage basis, they were being overly cautious. Last year actually got much closer to empty reserves (3%) vs this blackout (8.9%).

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/business/california-blackouts.html?smid=fb-share

4) There’s a battle going on about shutting down power plants. “ Redondo Beach officials want to see the local gas plant closed this year, not in 2023. AES was supposed to cease operations by Dec. 31, 2020, under a state policy requiring coastal energy generators to either shut down or stop sucking up ocean water for cooling, a process that harms marine life.” Typical Californian thinking to trade human lives for fish. Fish lives matter.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-03-30/redondo-beach-coastal-power-plant-closing-2023

https://cacoastkeeper.org/what-we-do/coastal-power-plants/ <- These people are the worst. These are the kind of people who would rather you drink your own piss than desalinate water (because that would harm the fishes). Of course, don’t even think of pulling water from a river instead because that is already illegal. California is soon approaching “buy water from China” levels of crazy.

facw > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 03:28

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From wikipedia:

So if renewables are really only servicing 12% that’s much less than usual (or this chart is wrong). Musk’s quote would of course still be wrong (though note that there is basically no coal here, this mix would still be way cleaner for powering a car than using an ICE) . Regardless, probably not ideal to use the current extremely high demand period as a model, because it’s introducing a lot of weirdness into the system.

BigBlock440 > facw 08/18/2020 at 07:24

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That chart may be California generated electricity, not California consumed electricity.  IIRC, they buy a bunch of electricity from other states, coal included.

TheRealBicycleBuck > onlytwowheels 08/18/2020 at 08:07

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“If you build it, they will come.”

Building roads leads to additional land development. If the roads can’t support the traffic, demand for housing and commercial development goes down. Building more capacity leads to less congestion which, in turn, leads to more development.

This also applies to deforestation.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they discover that building more capacity into the electric grid leads to more population growth.

SiennaMan > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 08:14

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As I see it, there are a few problems currently with renewables I think.

First, storage is nowhere near where it needs to be to really switch en masse.

Second, solar in particular needs to get either cheaper or more efficient still and I think we should have more local grid segmentswith decentralized solar and storage in those segments. Currently our grid in much of the country lacks resilience in disturbing ways. Or to put it another way, if we got the grid up to renewables but leave it very unreliable we might well have worse emissions with all the gasoline powered generators running every other day.

Finally, we as a society have to decide if it’s really a priority or not. There are a lot of places with strong wind or wave potential, places where the wind/waves are just about reliable enough to be a part of the base load, but either locals don’t want the asthetic or they are worried about gutting a tourist industry.

Personally, I think the short term answer is natural gas while renewables improve and next generation nuclear that is much safer and produces far less radioactive waste gets to market. I think if we’re going to get emissions down we’ll need something like a safer nuclear to help with  base load, surge demand will either need to come from improved storage or we’ll have to find was to live with natural gas generation long term..

For Sweden > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 08:57

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But California knows how to party

facw > BigBlock440 08/18/2020 at 09:04

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True enough, though coal generation has been decreasing rapidly, I think only in the Midwest and Appalachia  is it still a dominant part of the mix.

DipodomysDeserti > Nick Has an Exocet 08/18/2020 at 09:38

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I would much rather have Californians drink their own piss than do much of anything else. I’d certainly have them drink piss over trusting them with more water.

Back in the day there was an Arizona politician names Fred Colter. Homeboy didn’t want to sign the Colorado River Compact, and asserted that Arizona could take whatever water flowed i n the Colorado before it got to California.

We did that for a while and stored it in underground reservoirs. When he died we signed the compact, were allotted way more water than we needed, and have been storing the extra underground for half a century . Meanwhile in CA, morons keep moving in with no sense of resource management.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > facw 08/18/2020 at 11:32

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Nah. There’s a lot of subtle lies in this whole, ugly mess, but the “oh, all the coal plants are closed” is one of the worst. LA still gets most of its night power from this big boy. (Intermountain Coal Plant, Delta UT) The SoCal utilities take most of the power from it.

There’s a good case to close Intermountain, much like there was for Four Corners and Navajo and all the rest... but the reality is that if those plants were closed... the lights would be off across most of the Southwest this week.

The problem really boils down to some nitwits claiming you can replace 7x24 reliable gas, coal and nuclear plants with a power source that’s only on 5 hours a day. Even a 5 year old can understand that concept, but the Green New Dealers can’t seem to grasp it.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > onlytwowheels 08/18/2020 at 11:34

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Yeah, the reality is that despite the “miracle” of solar construction, CA has much less reliable supply of power than they did even 30 years ago. Most of the nuclear plants are closed, the other fossil fuel plants are closed... so they are reduced to the insane notion that supplies only good for 5 hours a day can somehow solve the problem.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > TheRealBicycleBuck 08/18/2020 at 11:35

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High power rates have certainly sent heavy industries packing for more friendly states to do business.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > SiennaMan 08/18/2020 at 11:39

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Yeah, the utilities all know they need a LOT more natural gas plants... but the pushback from the “enviro” community is intense.

Even with tremendous subsidies, “utility grade battery storage” is a pipe dream. The math doesn’t support the premise that this ever works, even if you ignore the ugliness of mining the cobalt and lithium mining.

It’s a mess— and all self-inflict ed by CA leadership.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > facw 08/18/2020 at 11:50

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Those charts always get flashed around, but keep in mind that they are YEARLY idealized averages of available supply, NOT what’s actually available at 7 PM on a hot August night.

The whole problem with the “green power movement” is that they lie so much with “averages”. It’s like the old adage about there being three kinds of liars:

“Liars”
“Damned Liars”

“Statisticians Trotting out Green Energy proof points”

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > BigBlock440 08/18/2020 at 11:54

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Another “dirty little CA lie” in all this is how much coal they own and buy from out of state to keep the lights on. On a night like tonight? They’ll be the biggest buyers of coal power in the whole country— mostly from Pacificorp’s western power plants (Wyoming, UTAH, Montana).  IN fact, the whole reason Warren Buffett bought Pacificorp was to gouge California selling them the coal CA needs to keep the lights on in that “unattributed” bucket CAISO loves to cite. That bucket is filled with coal.

facw > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 11:57

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Coal usage is plummeting though:

And yeah, and California, it is even lower than that:

Having a some coal imports doesn’t really change the picture much.

And yes solar is limited in duration, but is also most productive during the typical peak consumption time. It also pairs nicely with hydro in the sense that hydro plants can build up water in their reservoirs during the day, and then release more at night to make up for decreasing solar production (though there are plenty of environmentalists who don’t like hydro either) . And of course there are ways to store generated solar energy.

facw > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 12:01

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Yeah, but avera ge pollution is what we care about. It’s not a problem that in extreme cases you are using dirty sources as long as the average pollution is acceptable. Of course my understanding is that coal cannot be easily spun up to meet high levels of demand, so it’s not ideal for that. Regardless the average case is the important one here.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > facw 08/18/2020 at 12:03

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Uh, you do know that “unattributed” is mostly coal bought from Pacificorp?

I always see that gross chart floated around, but generally CA has mostly hidden the coal by siting plants out of state and continuing their purchases.

There’s a few plants being closed this year, but you sure seem intent on greenwashing a huge issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stations_in_the_United_States

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > facw 08/18/2020 at 12:07

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What makes you think that average pollution is going down?

Despite all this “progress” you claim....

CO2 levels are way, way up.
We’ve added natural gas generation capacity at over twice the rate of retirement of coal plants.
We have over 200 giga watts of aging nuclear capacity to cope with.

And, CA still can’t’ keep their lights on. Tell me again how any of this is making it better?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/08/17/democrats-say-california-is-a-climate-model-but-its-blackouts-say-otherwise/

Merkin Muffley > SiennaMan 08/18/2020 at 12:14

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Natural gas compound cycle plants are the only answer...

Too bad one party is running on a platform to ban f racking, which is the reason we have so much natural gas.

Merkin Muffley > onlytwowheels 08/18/2020 at 12:15

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Those rolling blackouts are just the worst. 

facw > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 12:15

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So your answer to rising CO2 is to not try to move to cleaner sources?

And a lot of people seem to think that it is very weird CA is having blackouts, they’ve ordered them well before they normally would based on available capacity.

facw > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 12:16

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Even if it was 100% coal (which is unlikely), that’s still a very small component compared to the nation as a whole. As I said, the big coal users are nowhere near CA.

Merkin Muffley > BigBlock440 08/18/2020 at 12:16

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Forbes did a piece recently on how California's "imported energy" has just exploded in recent years. That's almost exclusively fossil fuel purchases from corporate utility companies

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > facw 08/18/2020 at 12:22

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Oh, CA is by FAR the largest user of imported c oal. It’s not even close.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2016/04/03/californias-growing-imported-electricity-problem/

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > facw 08/18/2020 at 12:26

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You guys seem to have the inability to grasp the big picture. CO2 emissions, due to California’s very existence, continue to rise.

You can say, on a spot basis that the solar panels are “cleaner” but then somehow ignore the overall impact of “over-generation”, “curtailment” and “The Duck Curve Problem”??? That’s just nuts.  Because every night, CA ramps up very, very dirty supplies ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY DUE TO THE OVER-RELIANCE ON SOLAR DURING THE DAY.

If you can’t look at the big picture, there’s no hope. And the big picture says that CA’s emissions will continue to rise on the path it’s on.

facw > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 12:28

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Which doesn’t matter at all? What matters is coal burned per-capita, and CA is nowhere near the top of that list.

facw > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 12:31

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They are cleaner, but you are right that if you want to use lots of solar, you need to have a plan for low production. That plan does not have to be “spin up the dirtiest forms of power generation”. And if the alternative you are proposing is just “use the dirtiest forms of power generation all the time”, it’s pretty clear that’s not an improvement. What do you think CA should be doing?

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Merkin Muffley 08/18/2020 at 12:45

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Kamala’s anti-fracking, but Joe’s not. I doubt it will be on the platform - they want Pennsylvania. 

fintail > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 13:02

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Don’t worry, all of these locusts will eventually move to WA and OR, and power demand will decline.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > fintail 08/18/2020 at 13:05

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Oh, they’ve descended like a plague on Boise, where I spent a few days last week. In the good old days, at least they’d have the manners to change their license plates.  These days it’s infested with newly arrived Angelenos.

Oddly, with all the hydro power on the grid up there? Washington and Idaho are probably the two best EV locales i n the country.  It’s gonna be a bad joke in CA for quite awhile.

fintail > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 13:19

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I’ve seen recent reports about the Boise housing market. Same shit started here 35 years ago and hasn’t slowed down, while the new arrivals eventually complain about the area becoming like what they fled, not realizing the common denominator. I think the same is happening in Spokane now, too.

I’ve heard no gloom and doom about the grid from the media here, which leads me to believe it might be ok.  Rates are still quite low - my summer power bill seldom exceeds $25, and I have AC.    Great place to run a Tesla, and the techdorks here are on board - they are everywhere.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > fintail 08/18/2020 at 13:26

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The big saving grace in the Bonneville Power Administration area, despite the WPPSS fiasco (look it up), was that all the hydro power was originally allocated to the aluminum smelters up and down the Columbia drainage. That business died, ALCOA took it elsewhere, and the PNW has been able to re-allocate the excess hydro to the massive population growth.

Cities like Portland (like LA) are still playing games about the coal (including Boardman, including Colstrip and including the games being played up in Canada), but Seattle area’s in good shape.

Idaho still gets a bit of coal from Bridger Coal plant, but that will eventually get phased out.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > fintail 08/18/2020 at 13:34

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https://www.businessinsider.com/californians-priced-out-move-to-idaho-2018-10

fintail > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 13:52

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I know at one time there was a coal plant some where on the I5 corridor, maybe around Centralia/Chehalis. I think it was shuttered, but don’t quote me on that. I’ve heard about WPPSS often, my mom lives on the coast, and one can see the cooling towers on the drive out. Shame it didn’t work out, but then again, I don’t know if I’d want politically-linked officials in 2020 managing such a site.

Cheap power is a small concession for the otherwise often stupid cost of living here, but it beats nothing.

fintail > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 08/18/2020 at 13:53

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A new city gets to experience Californicator resentment. Awesome.

I know wages aren’t great there - kind of like Spokane, many locals aren’t going to be happy.

Merkin Muffley > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 08/20/2020 at 13:11

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There will be interesting tension there. In theory the entire Green New Deal has been adopted as party dogma.

It’s ironic timing given the Green Chickens finally coming home to roost this week in California. The utilities have warned for years about the reckoning regarding   over-reliance on solar. Now the Green Mob is trying to blame “bad performance by the gas plants” ...

“hey! You a-holes have fought every single CCNG plant proposal in the last 10 years, even as you saw the drought descend and San Onofre close... just what did you think WAS going to happen on hot August evenings??”

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Merkin Muffley 08/20/2020 at 13:57

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“in theory”? Biden’s said he’s a transitional candidate, so if he doesn’t seek re-election, then it definitely is with Harris at the top of the ticket (unless she realizes that’s a losing strategy).

Easy for those who like the idea of green energy but are still on the fence, to be quickly swayed back to hydrocarbons when the AC shuts off.

Merkin Muffley > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 08/20/2020 at 16:15

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Everybody’s perspective changes when they are sitting in the dark, no AC, on a 110 degree evening in The Valley.

Reminds of the Seattle Mayor all giddy about the CHAZ Street Faire... until the protesters turned up in front of HER house at 3AM with some demands.

Tip O’Neill famously opin ed on the “local” nature of all things political... people happily deal in abstractions right up until hit between the eyes- personally. Then perspectives tend to change. 

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Merkin Muffley 08/20/2020 at 16:20

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Just like no one with coastal property wants an offshore windmill farm to ruin their view... Everyone wants all the benefits, none of the guilt, and none of the downsides in their backyard.

Merkin Muffley > onlytwowheels 08/21/2020 at 15:13

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This is a great summary of how we got here...

Will be interesting to see the road map out of this cul-de-sac