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by tialaramex
30 days ago
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California's demand commonly goes from 18GW to 30GW in the same day. Lets take your smallest "Nuclear plant" idea, if California owns 6 of those they run all the time but it needs 12GW extra at peak, where does that come from? If California owns 10 of those they run intermittently, you're still paying to have ten but not getting almost twice the benefit so your prices soar. So the way you'd presumably fix it would be to... build loads of storage and own say 9 of these 3GW nuclear plants, drawing from batteries at peak then refilling them overnight. But wait, that's already what California did that you're unhappy about - so what gives? Then we notice that in reality although you think "most nuclear power plants" would produce 3-6GW in fact California doesn't own ten, or eight, or six, but one such plant and it produces... drum roll... 2.2GW nameplate. |
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That extreme intra-day variation is also partially caused by California's cheap solar power: Cheaper prices draw demand to those hours.
In other locations, (some) people (partially) adjust their consumption patters to follow the cheap wind energy hours, and this leads to different consumption patters. Less intra-day variation but but inter-day variation.
If California's prices were wind-dominated (typically a little more wind at nightime), or nuclear or burning dominated (stable), it would not cause such large variation in the intra-day consumption pattern.
This electricity price figure is readable, but 10 years old, so today the variation in California must be larger than it shows:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=32172