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by epistasis 580 days ago
My sentence was "and without solar that peak is midday in most places." Remove the solar and California has a huge midday peak. Watch it shift over the years into the evening as more residential solar was added to the California grid:

https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...

(Note also in your visualisation that all times are Eastern and should be adjusted for different localities. And if you go to a summer week rather than a winter week, you'll find the true peak, which is much higher, and which has a pretty standard curve with a peak that overlaps sunlight hours.)

1 comments

That's why I said choose a region to get regional time. California's chart shows the time in Pacific time: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...

They have this summer's data too, though no way to link directly, and it still peaks at ~7pm: https://i.imgur.com/16mssuH.png . Using the 16th as an example, a peak demand of 44,008 megawatthours @ 20H PDT. Comparing that to their generation graphs, which you can separate into sources, like solar. On the 16th, peak solar generation is at 11 @ 13,201 megawatthours. By 6PM, it's down to 853 megawatthours. By peak time, it's nothing. My own residential solar matches that curve on that date.