[trunnell]

They mention California. https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply is a dashboard showing electricity demand and supply, real-time and historical.

Yesterday evening's peak demand was between 7-8pm at 30.7 gigawatts. Supply breakdown around 8pm:

  Batteries: 8.4 GW
  Natural gas: 6.0 GW
  Renewables: 5.4 GW
  Large hydro: 4.4 GW
  Imports: 4.1 GW 
  Nuclear: 2.3 GW

This is a remarkable development. All of the peak demand supplied from batteries used to be supplied by natural gas just a couple years ago.

[bluefirebrand]

Yeah

Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance

It's the same kind of thing we see with self driving cars. They can navigate sunny California streets so "self driving" must be so close! But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily

California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff

[trunnell]

Respectfully disagree -- solar isn't the big story here.

One could argue that batteries will have a bigger impact than solar. Batteries obviously let you decouple power generation and consumption, shifting anytime production to peak-time demand.

Less obvious is that local demand can fluctuate 2x. It usually dips mid-day and peaks 5-9pm (see the charts at www.caiso.com) when people come home and turn on their lights, oven, appliances, etc. This pattern happens throughout the year.

So forget solar for a moment; the ability to shift energy that was produced mid-day (even by a natural gas plant) to the evening would allow you to build fewer power plants. Nuclear + batteries might also be a good combination. Batteries get you closer to being able to solve for "average demand" rather than "peak demand."

This has nothing to do w/ California. California is just on the leading edge of battery installation. Solar just exacerbates the issue of the peak-to-trough ratio (evening vs. mid-day demand) due to mid-day solar "overproduction" causing it to be uneconomical to run gas plants mid-day. But solving for "peak demand" is still a problem in the absence of solar.

Still: most of the complaints about solar are answered when paired with large battery systems.

[dinfinity]

The mid-day peak of solar can be almost entirely mitigated by adding bifacial vertical east-west mounted solar panels.

It works really well: The vertical mounting means the panels stay cooler and are thus more efficient. The east-west mounting also does that, but additionally shifts the peaks of production to close to sundown and sunrise. The only real downside is that you are using (somewhat) more panel surface. And of course you're still not generating more electricity after sundown or on cloudy days, so it is not a panacea.

Sources:

- https://undecidedmf.com/298-vertical-bifacial-solar-panels/

- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-68018-1

[DoesntMatter22]

Yup by far batteries are the bigger deal. If battery prices were minimal then it makes household solar far more feasible to begin with.

[foobarian]

The OP numbers are fascinating. I wonder how the equivalent to the "station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" looks for batteries.

[ben_w]

> I wonder how the equivalent to the "station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" looks for batteries.

Looks terrible.

I think the best are only about 500Wh/kg, so a shipping container* full of them would be 28870kg * 500Wh/kg = 14.44 MWh, so if it takes an hour to the destination it's about the capacity of one not particularly thick cable.

Cables are great for electricity. If the (aluminium) cable had a cross section of one square meter, you could get all the way around the planet and back to where you started with just 1Ω of DC electrical resistance.

* https://www.maersk.com/support/faqs/cargo-weight-limit

[Yoric]

I seem to recall that one of the main reasons to doubt batteries was that they relied on minerals that are just too rare on Earth to consider scaling them up to the entire grid.

Was my understanding incorrect? Or perhaps have new technologies emerged that work around this limitation?

[jdlshore]

The linked article addresses that. Modern batteries are lithium-iron, without the rare cobalt and nickel. Sodium batteries are also in development, but lithium is turning out to be so cheap and abundant that investment in the sodium batteries isn’t economical.

[defrost]

Grid storage batteries don't have the same weight constraint as vehicle batteries which opens the door to many other combinations that have a lower energy density but are cheaper per GW despite weighing more per GW.

[throwaway473825]

Sodium-ion batteries have extreme good performance in low-temperature environments. CATL is working on sodium-LFP dual-power batteries to get the best of both worlds:

https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html

That's mainly for EVs though.

[epistasis]

That was never the case. Some people looked at "current reserve" amounts for lithium or other minerals and assumed that we had already discovered all usable deposits. That was a very incorrect assumption.

[colechristensen]

Germany is famous for being cloudy and is much further north, much of it is north of the primary US-Canada border. It is one of the leading solar adopters.

Not being ideal for solar just means you need to install more area, and there's plenty available space. Solar is already the cheapest (if not it's competitive with the cheapest wind power) power source. Also having to, say, double the panel area in lower solar irradiance requires less than double the non-panel costs (you don't need double the inverters or power transmission).

California is leading because the politics/economy/irradiance are the best combination, you would expect a place like that to lead first. It does not follow that other places are unsuitable for solar, it will just cost marginally more.

It's a strange but persistent pattern where success in ideal conditions will draw out a litany of reasons why that success is actually a sign of failure when instead the early success is just a sign of ideal conditions. Why wouldn't something promising succeed first in the place with the best conditions for success?

[bluefirebrand]

> Germany is famous for being cloudy and is much further north, much of it is north of the primary US-Canada border. It is one of the leading solar adopters

Looks like it's about 12 cents (in USD) more expensive on average per kwh in Germany than Cali

So maybe Germany isn't exactly a great example of energy production if it's that much more expensive

[colechristensen]

>Looks like it's about 12 cents (in USD) more expensive on average per kwh in Germany than Cali

What is? Consumer energy prices?

Apples-to-apples consumer energy prices are difficult between the US and EU, Germany has historically had particularly high energy prices for various reasons, taxation is significantly different. Also they were a heavy importer of Russian gas and foolishly dismantled their entire nuclear generation capacity, so there are other reasons why their energy prices are high. The peaking energy costs caused by the Ukraine/Russia war have gone down.

[acdha]

That’s both moving the goalposts and also leaving out the true cost comparison. Solving climate change should be worth a lot more than $0.12/kWh and viability in countries like Germany suggests that fossil fuel advocates saying that it would be economically ruinous are not making a good-faith argument.

[colechristensen]

Solar is still cheaper than anything else is in Germany. Deutsche Bank thinks so [1]

There's no "moving goalposts" possible. Without any morality, preventing future costs, or any such way of adjusting the "real" costs... solar is just cheaper, and by a large margin which is only expected to grow. Yes you need storage and methods to move power east and west, solar is still cheaper. The greediest, most short sighted, heartless monster would still invest in solar before anything else because it makes them the most money.

https://www.dbresearch.de/PROD/RPS_DE-PROD/PROD0000000000528...

[acdha]

Good point. I’m not familiar with the German power market but the amount in question is small enough that I suspect our descendants will consider it trivial compared to the cost of dealing with a broken climate.

[bluefirebrand]

For what it's worth I'm a nuclear advocate not a fossil fuel advocate

[acdha]

I think it has a place in the portfolio but one of the reasons why fossil fuel-backed think tanks like to push nuclear or hydrogen as the green option is that it means years of continued growth in oil consumption before anything competing comes online, whereas solar cuts into their profits within weeks. Deploying solar as much as possible buys the decades we need to get much new nuclear power online and in many cases it doesn’t require much more than buying commodity products.

[seec]

Germany also generates very little electricity from solar in the winter, use quite a bit of coal plant and imports multiple Twh from its neighbors in the worst months.

So yeah sure, it can pretend to be ahead on green tech, as long as France invests in nuclear and sell it cheap electricity in the winter when it is most needed and most expensive.

I am so tired of the bullshit about Germany "success", I think they should be disconnected from the EU grid so they can walk the walk before talking the talk.

[sealeck]

> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance

We can also build power lines! Between different places! Such as the places with lots of sun, and the places without lots of sun!!!

[bryanlarsen]

Solar has gotten so cheap that it's cheaper to just overbuild solar in cloudy places than to build long distance HVDC lines between sunny and cloudy locations.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...

[Aurornis]

The great thing about solar is that you can put it nearly everywhere. Avoid the transmission losses and put the panels close to the load, even if it’s not as ideal as one state over.

It’s easy to put extra solar panels into a system to make up for reduced average sunlight. It’s standard practice to have a ratio of PV capacity to inverter capacity of something like 1.2:1. In a low sun location you could bump that up to 1.5:1 or higher.

[bluefirebrand]

It consumes a lot of power to transmit over long distances. From what I understand it's basically always preferable to generate power as close to where you are using it as possible.

[hvb2]

Absolutely, but besides rooftop solar we don't have a single power source currently that does that.

Traditional power generation was always centralized big plants. Most people wouldn't want to live next to them and from a health perspective you probably shouldn't.

So "close" has always been within air quotes.

[acdha]

Also small-scale fossil fuel, hydropower, wind, geothermal, etc. What solar does differently than those is be directly usable and not have significant negatives which made it undesirable to have near non-industrial users because it doesn’t make noise, air, or water pollution.

[bluefirebrand]

Batteries are significant amounts of "nearby risk" that is being handwaved away imo

They are fire/explosion hazards, heavy metals, etc.

[hvb2]

Genuine question, what do you mean by small-scale fossil fuel

What power output in megawatt are we talking about here? I'm struggling to think of a fossil power source efficient at small scale

[bluefirebrand]

Well, nearby is relative.

My point is that a nuclear power station near a city is probably better than a wind farm offshore 1000km away even if the wind farm and the nuclear generate the same

[hvb2]

It's hard to define 'better'

Nuclear has significant downsides besides the waste and proliferation risks.

You wouldn't want to build a grid on just nuclear.

Let's assume that city takes 1.2MWh at its peak every day. That would mean you need to be able to supply that. So you build a nuclear plant producing 1.2MWh of energy.

Now you have the argument against renewables (the sun doesn't always shine) in reverse. The city doesn't always need that peak power. And nuclear is the slowest of all power sources to tune up and down in terms of output.

Nuclear for base load makes a lot of sense as it'll always be fully utilized. But nuclear to power a grid 100% doesn't exist anywhere for a reason either.

[acdha]

That wind farm needs to be like 4% bigger to cancel out transmission losses so the question has to involve the relative costs.

The EIA has it at $81 for advanced nuclear, which is competitive with offshore wind ($88) but not hydro ($58), PV+battery ($53), PV ($31), or onshore wind ($29). Now, both of those could see big improvements with scale but I think the uncertainty of the markets and our political climate are going to complicate that a lot. A big nuclear push needs a lot of upfront funding and while Trump has boosted it a bit and hates wind, I’m not sure how much that counts on a loan that big since right now that plant is guaranteed to lose money most of the time unless it’s near a big industrial user with high baseline demand.

[rstuart4133]

> It consumes a lot of power to transmit over long distances.

No, it doesn't. This is plain wrong. Power loss for a 1000 km HVDC line is 3.5% [0], which is the same order of magnitude as battery losses.

If you had of said it cost a lot of money to transmit over long distances, then fine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#:~...

[reverendjames]

Who told you that? I build power lines. It consumes a couple percent.

[asdefghyk]

RE ".....We can also build power lines! Between different places! ...."

We certainly can. However it is expensive. In my country (Australia) is is estimated to be cira $20 Billion

[Retric]

20 billion for infrastructure that lasts 50 years is 400 million per year hardly a major issue for a 1.6 Trillion dollar economy.

The US recently spent more than that on a single nuclear power plant.

[asdefghyk]

20 Billion is a rough guide. Apparently this estimate is approximate to 100% It also depends on lots variables, like - for a large powerline the towers can cost $1M each. I also assume the initial cost does not include maintenance costs.

[Retric]

Maintenance costs exist, but they can also extend the lifespan well past 50 years. So it’s all a big cost vs benefit tradeoff where maintenance occurs because it’s a net gain.

The point is the upfront costs aren’t actually that significant.

[bluefirebrand]

> 20 billion for infrastructure that lasts 50 years

Average solar panels last 20-30 at most right now just fyi

50 years is practically right out of the question

[bryanlarsen]

There are several 50 year old solar installations that are still working fine. They've only degraded 10%-20% or so. The reason that they are typically replaced after ~20 years is that the technology has gotten so much better that you can replace the old panels with new ones and get 4X the power in the same space. The wires and the mounts are worth more than the panels, so reuse those with modern panels.

[Retric]

“We can also build power lines! Between different places!”

The actual panels themselves are a different kind of infrastructure.

[hvb2]

But if you're from Australia you should know that your country isnt exactly typical?

There's a few big metros the rest of it is sparse, where sparse is a stretch? Isn't Perth like the most isolated city in the world?

[asdefghyk]

Perth and that part of WA has its own generators and independent electrical network. Darwin in NT Australia is probably the same situation too. Large expanse's of desert and very sparsely separated areas to the east coast.

[nehal3m]

That's a steal compared to racing toward extinction.

[inglor_cz]

You need to persuade the median voter about this, and looking at the state of Western politics right now, it seems to me that peak willingness to spend huge money on environmental projects is behind us.

[nehal3m]

I agree with you, but surviving is worth more than almost any amount of money and that fact doesn't depend on the median voter's opinion.

[cperciva]

You say that, but recent regulatory history suggests that building power lines in the USA isn't necessarily something which can be done.

[nudgeOrnurture]

one state supplying the rest is not what you want, especially if there are chances that something will disturb that states grid.

I remember the uni day discussions about Africa supplying the rest of the world with solar energy and that the material requirements for such an infrastructure should become a thing around 2025 - 2035 ... then someone explained climate change and hinted at the exponential function ...

back to topic: you'd have to maintain an "inert" backup, which isn't portfolio-communist-economically "viable". or you share the load "as much as necessary", which would still become an issue if any of the suppliers have a fallout ...

[hvb2]

That was a real plan

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec

[nudgeOrnurture]

one of the projects listed is probably somewhere in my bookmarks.

and AFAIK it still is a real plan but, officially, we are not where we wanted to be material science-wise ... heat, distances and batteries are still somewhat an issue, meaning, not efficient and cheap enough to be a no-brainer (despite already being a no-brainer but, you know, wolfs of the wall street bangers are super cool and smart and who wouldn't be partisan with leBuffets et al???)

[JimDabell]

The white paper they are discussing [0] includes multiple cities around the world:

> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply and Muscat in Oman – 99%, using 6 GW solar panels and 17 GWh battery. Even cloudier cities like Birmingham [UK] can get 62% of the way to a constant supply every hour of every day across the year.

[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

[bluefirebrand]

62% is a long way from 97%

I'm all for not letting perfect being the enemy of good, and I used to work in solar. I'm very in favor of it. I just really think people need to be realistic about this stuff

[hvb2]

I think the real way to read it is: Renewables are at a point where, combined with battery storage, they can supply 100% if we chose to while being competitive on cost.

The Birmingham case is a perfect example where solar might not be the source, wind is

[bluefirebrand]

Yeah

I do think that the batteries side of the equation is handwaved away too much though

Batteries at this scale are going to be awful for the environment once we start to have to decommission and dispose of them

There are no perfect solutions unfortunately

[epistasis]

What is the harm, specifically? Is it greater or less than the harm for steel? How?

I have never gotten a clear explanation of this from someone who expresses concern for batteries causing environmental damage. They aren't harmful like car batteries, for example. And the people expressing concern about batteries never seem to express concern for the far greater use of other minerals in their daily life.

[hvb2]

Batteries can be recycled though as the degradation is mostly on the kathode anode pair AFAIK

[Aurornis]

> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance

There are many place that get a lot of sun. As solar panels come down in price, it becomes even easier to compensate for deficits with additional panels.

It’s common practice to install more solar panel capacity than inverter capacity because panels are rarely operating at peak output anyway. If you’re installing 100kW of inverters, you might install 120kW of panels. The panel array wouldn’t exceed 100kW most of the time anyway.

In a location with suboptimal sun, you might install an even higher ratio of panels to inverter and battery capacity.

Some people get bothered by this because they feel like some of the solar power is wasted at peak capacity, but you have to consider that the inverter and battery capacity is also wasted when you’re not sending enough from the panel array. It’s a balancing act.

You also have to consider that the same sunlight that makes California good for solar also creates additional demand for air conditioning. A location with less sun would have less solar heat gain, which is easier to serve for many reasons.

[supplied_demand]

==California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff==

It also represents 12% of the country's population, which makes it a better benchmark than just being 1 of 50 states.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

It's also not too dissimilar from Texas, Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, and Utah - which together are a much larger part of the US - and not too far from being able to ship power not too expensively to even more areas.

Florida and Colorado are not much farther below California in total solar radiation per year per sq meter, either.

Ditto for even Idaho and Oklahoma.

[pchristensen]

For reference, those states cover 4.5x more land but only 20% more population (50M vs 40M) compared to California.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Texas consumes almost 2x as much electricity as California [1], and is almost 1/8th the entire US consumption, so population is not the most important factor.

[1] https://ksdata.ku.edu/ksdata/ksah/energy/18ener7.pdf

[dragonwriter]

More land with fewer people makes them even better for solar, though.

[cptskippy]

> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark.

California is representative of more than 25% of the United States in terms of solar intensity.

People really need to get away from the idea that if a solution doesn't work for 100% of use cases then it's nonviable.

[bluefirebrand]

This is not what I'm saying at all

What I am saying is "it works in California, it must be ready to roll out globally immediately" is silly

It works in California means "it is ready to roll out in areas with very optimal conditions but long-term it still likely has a lot of speedbumps so temper your timelines accordingly"

That's all. I'm just tired of people thinking timelines are short when stuff performs under super ideal conditions

[acdha]

How about “it works in California, it’s ready to roll out in most places between, say, 45° north or south where most of the human population lives”? It’s not universally solving every problem but pulling the gigawatts of power demand it _can_ solve out of the mix buys time for us to decarbonize harder problems.

[bryanlarsen]

The whitepaper says that the optimal power generation for Birmingham is 62% solar. That's about as far from ideal as you can get bar locations north of the Arctic circle, and it still says that solar should supply a small majority of the power to Birmingham UK.

[cptskippy]

"It works in California" means that it is potentially viable elsewhere. As others have pointed out: California is not the sunniest, not the simplest roads, most consistent weather, or the most favorable regulatory environment.

If it works in California then it will probably work elsewhere. AND more importantly, if it doesn't work in California then it's probably not going to work anywhere else.

[supplied_demand]

==I'm just tired of people thinking timelines are short when stuff performs under super ideal conditions==

This feels like a strawman. We just started doing this in one place with ideal conditions. The next step could be other places with even more ideal conditions New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada (all have more sunshine than "ideal" California). [0]

We need to start investing immediately to begin overcoming the speed-bumps you mention. California has gotten to this point in about 5 years. Spend the next 5 years on the states I mentioned above. Then move on to Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Utah, South Carolina, and Kansas.

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/sunniest-st...

[erulabs]

Solar, self-driving, tax policy, software engineering, cryptocurrency, the list goes on and on. You can have 100,000 successes and 1 failure and someone will say "It just doesn't work!".

[bryanlarsen]

> fog, or even just grey skies

So San Francisco?

[haiku2077]

Electricity can be moved long distances over wires.

[bluefirebrand]

For some definition of "long distances" sure. At a certain point it basically becomes more economical to charge batteries and ship them by truck than to build wires :/

[bjourne]

HVDC losses are roughly 3.5% per 1000 km.

[bryanlarsen]

I think referring to the costs of 1 - 3 million per GW-mile.

[AnimalMuppet]

True, but the quote was actually in a paragraph about self-driving cars.

[bityard]

Easy to say, hard to do. The cost per mile rises non-linearly.

[reverendjames]

That's not correct. It's basically cost per distance, unless you're talking huge power over huge distances.

[CyberDildonics]

No it doesn't.

[icelancer]

Western Washington is a great contrast. We get a decent amount of sun (despite the reputation), however, our electricity prices are insanely low due to close-proximity hydroelectric power.

As a result, solar is rarely cost effective even with subsidies, and basically never without them.

Doesn't mean people don't install it for various other reasons, but it serves as a good contrast to California despite similar political landscapes.

[hvb2]

Which is perfectly fine? You're just using what's abundant to you? And even better, hydro has the ability to control how much it generates. You have a surplus? Let less water flow through the turbines. So it can regulate, something solar can't do, it needs batteries to do that.

The one big upside that I haven't seen mentioned is that rooftop solar is local. So what I overproduce doesn't go on the big grid, it's probably consumed by my neighbor or someone in my street.

All those big power plants, and big consumers of electricity (because they're switching from their current source), will lead to net congestion where you need to decide if you want to increase net capacity... Which is slow and $$$

[icelancer]

If I go solar, which seems likely, I will definitely not be sending it back to the grid since I don't think that's something that scales well (8-bit guy talks about it on YouTube and it's persuasive).

I'll be using a local / non-grid-tied system with Ecoflow batteries and a smart panel or transfer switch of some sort. IMO this is the best way to go when solar is non-competitive in terms of selling electricity back - also significantly more robust against disasters, since grid-tied systems do not work when the grid is down (something consumers tend to gloss over or be ignorant of) due to safety regulations.

[destitude]

> But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily I have winter basically 5 months of the year where I am and have no issues being fully off grid with only solar and batteries as energy sources. You do have to compensate for winter by having more panels and more batteries but easily doable.

[bluefirebrand]

"You have to compensate for winter by having more panels and more batteries" is exactly the point I was making

:/

[pinkmuffinere]

I think it has been a good benchmark during early development, but you’re right that it becomes less useful now that Solar is further along. Maybe some Midwestern place would be a good benchmark now? Or like England?

[JimDabell]

The white paper being discussed includes Birmingham, UK and several other cities around the world.

[hvb2]

The Midwestern places probably lack the demand.

Because solar isn't energy dense, you will probably be told that you picked an area with low land cost to make it look better.

For England you can replace the word solar with wind and the same would probably apply

[PicassoCTs]

But those conditions are not globally unique- why not convert solar to a transportable media (ammonia) and ship it around the globe?

[awjlogan]

Because conversion to chemical storage and then back is very inefficient. Also ammonia, specifically, is highly toxic and nasty to handle.

[pshirshov]

I have negative energy bills and high net export with my moderate system in Ireland which is definitely not considered a good solar country.

[bluefirebrand]

Most power generation is not used for peoples homes, though

[pshirshov]

What exactly changes at larger scale?

[bluefirebrand]

It's a completely different ballgame

Houses don't tend to have consistent electricity usage. Think of the electricity usage for a suburb. Chances are it's almost 0 most days. People get home and turn on the stove, the washer, the TV, etc. Big demand spikes at certain times of day, low demand for the rest

Commercial usage goes the opposite direction. Higher during the day when stores and offices are open, lower overnight

Industrial usages tend to be more consistent, but constant. Factories don't shut down overnight, but they have high constant requirements

But as a power company you are supplying all of this. You have to supply a consistent load that satisfies all of these usecases. It's all one grid after all, outside of some very unusual cases

And if you oversupply too much you break the grid. If you undersupply then stuff that relies on you shuts down and breaks

It's very much a goldilocks problem, which is non-trivial to optimize or automate

[pshirshov]

These are questions of getting the storage capacity to a certain level.

[hopelite]

Not to mention that combining batteries, i.e., storage, with generation is not exactly accurate or even honest. It is merely an offsetting and also a compensation for the deficiencies of “renewable” energy, which are always mitigated by that type of intentional muddling of classifications.

[Nicholas_C]

That is much higher than I would have expected. Good news. What are they using to charge the batteries though? I wonder if it's offpeak renewables or mostly natural gas?

[mjamesaustin]

Daytime solar, in the summer especially. Power demand yesterday was negative from 11:30 to 3:30, for instance, meaning batteries can charge for free to absorb excess solar generation during those hours.

[gpm]

If you scroll to the "Supply trend" graph you can see when the batteries were charging and how electricity was being generated at that time.

It's the renewables during the day while the sun is shining.

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

[asdefghyk]

RE "...All of the peak demand supplied from batteries...." This is a very good start.

My question is how do the batteries go , if there is 1 - N days of cloudy weather? Can the batteries supply the peak for more than one day? Is there ( or where would they go ) transmission lines to bring in the needed peak supply from other storage (battery / pumped hydro ) areas?

Another step would be to include days of peak electricity demand, which in my country occurs in cold weather ( heaters) and very hot weather ( air conditioner's ) OR is there demand limits like in Spain demand limit for some houses is around 3KW (YUKS)

[reactordev]

It's the imports that get you. The energy marketplace is all over the place in regards to price because of the demand for energy.

[UltraSane]

That is impressive but California electricity is pretty expensive compared to most of the rest of the US.

[woodpanel]

Aww, that old „pick a specific timeframe on a specific day, preferably summer, to get an convenient picture“ trick. incompleteness by design.

Supply itself is an inadequate metric. Yet convenient to obstruct the view upon CA that beacon of the future, suddenly being littered with third world brown and blackouts.