[HN Gopher] California Electricity Mix Live Dashboard
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California Electricity Mix Live Dashboard
Author : hackerlight
Score : 82 points
Date : 2024-04-21 18:32 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gridstatus.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gridstatus.io)
| nippoo wrote:
| The fun bit here, for those who missed it, is the spot price
| being negative - ie there's so much solar being generated that
| industrial consumers are being paid to consume electricity!
| gpm wrote:
| Why is there still a gigawatt of natural gas based energy being
| produced when energy costs are negative? Is pricing regional so
| some power is still valuable or something?
| pakyr wrote:
| I'd guess it maybe takes time and money to ramp up/down
| natural gas capacity, so it makes financial sense to maintain
| capacity at a loss for now to better/more rapidly profit when
| solar capacity drops and prices go positive again? If I'm
| reading the day ahead chart on that page correctly, prices
| should go positive again around 5PM.
| gpm wrote:
| I'm definitely under the impression that that's the case
| for nuclear (which is famously bad at reacting to changing
| demand), but I would have thought that even slow gas plants
| could turn off for _hours_ profitably. Could be wrong.
| remus wrote:
| Plants will typically have a normal operating range
| (where the minimum is >0). A gas plant can respond fairly
| quickly within that range, but a cold start requires more
| time.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| So they're paying money (or at least, producing little
| income) to keep the plants working when it is not needed,
| so that things are ready to go when it inevitably becomes
| possible for the plants to spool up and make money when
| their need increases.
|
| Makes sense.
| remus wrote:
| Exactly. They can do this (i.e. keep producing power when
| the spot price is negative) because a plant that can
| respond rapidly to increased demand can charge a large
| premium in times of need.
| bombcar wrote:
| It could be that solar or wind can "shut down" much
| faster than offline natural gas can be brought online, so
| it's better to run them at some sort of "idling" power
| than to turn them off entirely.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Keep in mind it's not just generation that needs to shut
| down but also re-routing that power. Transmission lines
| and substations have certain capacities. Shutting down a
| gas plant for a few hours can mean transferring power
| from elsewhere in the grid over lines not really designed
| for that load. It could be easier/cheaper to keep the
| plant running than to build out higher capacity
| transmission to power that part of the grid.
| adrianN wrote:
| At least here in Germany transmission is the bottleneck.
| aspanu wrote:
| I thought that too on the graph, but I think that's a bug in
| labeling. When I look at the actual scale, that colour
| appears to be nuclear (and the other straight line is
| geothermal). This also makes more sense as they are sources
| that actually cannot be turned down to respond to electricity
| demand the way in which natural gas can.
| gpm wrote:
| I see 1.14 GW nuclear, and 1.1 GW natural gas at 12:20 PM
| PST, the nuclear is a flat line at the bottom of the graph
| (and I agree it makes sense), the natural gas is a dark
| blue section in the middle-ish, which shrunk from ~3GW
| overnight and does vary with time.
|
| I don't think that what I'm seeing suggests a bug with
| labeling.
| mlwiese wrote:
| Note you can toggle off sources in the chart by tapping on
| them in the legend.
|
| Gas plants can respond quickly to changes in load, but they
| need to be up and running to do that. In the future this will
| be done with batteries but we don't have enough of those yet.
| California does have about 20x more batteries than it did a
| few years ago, check out the Record Tracker link. There was a
| new record for battery discharging 5 days ago.
| jonatron wrote:
| It could be inertia, solar doesn't have any spinning mass to
| maintain the frequency.
| https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/how-
| do...
| gpm wrote:
| Would the 2.5 GW of nuclear/geothermal/hydro not do that?
| Maybe not enough (or geographically distributed properly)?
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's interesting how renewables have suddenly made time-of-day
| critical in energy consumption.
|
| IMHO, not enough attention has been paid to how important
| better insulation + workplace EV charging are to the energy
| transition. If homes were insulated like they are in Northern
| Europe (where you can go a week without heat and your home will
| still be tolerable when you get home) rather than Northern
| California (where your furnace cycles on after an hour despite
| it being 55F out), you could run basically all residential HVAC
| during daylight hours, when solar is producing abundantly, and
| turn the housing stock into a giant thermal battery. And
| similarly, if everybody charged at work rather than at night,
| you power transportation on solar rather than on natural gas.
| trunnell wrote:
| This is the way...
|
| I have solar, a powerwall battery, a high efficiency heat
| pump, and... a poorly insulated 70-year old home in Silicon
| Valley.
|
| It can be wildly expensive to properly mitigate poor
| insulation: you need good air sealing, insulation around the
| entire building envelope, double or triple paned windows, and
| a different HVAC setup with dedicated fresh air ventilation.
| In other words, it requires a major remodel in some cases.
| Homes need to be built with energy efficiency as a top
| concern, and I wonder sometimes if that is going to require
| re-training and incentivizing the entire construction
| industry. Fewer than 1 in 10 contractors I talked to even
| knew what I was talking about when I asked for how they would
| do my project. "What's an ERV?" is a common question I heard.
| Many still think that gaps are good because "a house needs to
| breathe."
| r00fus wrote:
| I have a 60 year old home and have made a huge dent in my
| winter therms and summer AC usage by simply adding some
| roof insulation and double-layer windows/sliding doors a
| few years ago.
|
| Perfect is the enemy of good enough. You are not going to
| eliminate all gaps.
| jvm wrote:
| If consumers paid close to wholesale rates for their home
| energy they would be highly incentivized to do these sorts of
| things: they'd pay almost nothing (or maybe even less than
| nothing) in the day and big bucks from 5 PM to 8 PM. There
| would be whole industries helping people shift consumption to
| daylight hours. Unfortunately legislatures have consistently
| been acting to shield consumers from variable time of day
| costs, preventing behavior adjustment.
| Spivak wrote:
| Well yeah because most people are away from home during
| those hours so there's little you can do. And workplaces,
| schools like that working hours are when electricity is
| cheap.
|
| Workers might start demanding WFH or that their leisure
| hours be during the day and we can't have that.
| nostrademons wrote:
| The point is to enable markets for the technologies (many
| existing today!) that _would_ let you time-shift
| effectively. Smart lights and smart thermostats are nifty
| gimmicks today; if electricity cost 100x more at
| primetime, they 'd become critical investments.
| Insulating and air-sealing your home is known technology,
| but often not cost-effective when you can just burn a
| little more natural gas. Workplace charging is a perk,
| not a deciding factor for where people choose to accept a
| job. If the consequences of people's decisions were
| priced into the cost of them, people might make different
| decisions.
| Spivak wrote:
| I'm not sure smart things and sealing would be the go-to
| solution when we're talking 100x the cost. Even 10x the
| cost starts to make the electricity bill close to rent.
| Whole house batteries, gas/pellet heaters, and gas stoves
| would suddenly get a lot more popular.
|
| I'm not sure "throw out your major appliances that run on
| electricity and don't even look at plug-in EVs" is the
| direction we want to go when being able to cheaply meet
| evening demand at the grid level with renewables is the
| eventual goal.
| tennis_80 wrote:
| Yeah this is all a thing in the UK where there's a lot of
| highly variable Solar & Wind electricity generation, see
| https://octopus.energy/smart/intelligent-octopus-go/
|
| Disclaimer: I work for Octopus Energy Group.
| RobinL wrote:
| I don't understand why the government don't do more to
| support these kind of tariffs that incentive demand
| shifting.. it seems such a powerful way to make the grid
| greener without huge infrastructure projects
| nostrademons wrote:
| They're very unpopular with consumers, who are allergic
| to price increases and _particularly_ to variable price
| increases. Look at the blowback to Wendy 's surge pricing
| on burgers, or to Uber surge pricing, or to toilet paper
| scalpers in COVID, or to any notion that you might lose
| your job and need to retrain in a different one in
| response to changes in the economy.
|
| The last thing a politician wants to do is lose an
| election, and losing an election is usually what happens
| when you suggest that the electorate bear the
| consequences of their behavior. As a result, we usually
| drive straight off a cliff, have a war or societal
| collapse, and then whoever survives it can go build a new
| system out of the rubble.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Make it optional and give a small subsidy to encourage
| people to switch to variable pricing
| ac29 wrote:
| The most common rate plan in California (at least with PGE)
| is a time of use plan.
|
| While the daytime rates are less expensive than the evening
| peak rates, both are very expensive compared to just about
| anywhere else.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's nowhere near the price differential that wholesale
| is, though. Last I checked, PG&E charged 62c/kwh at peak,
| and 52c/kwh off-peak. Back in 2020 it was 29c/kwh peak
| and 22c/kwh off-peak. That's roughly a 25% difference,
| but the actual wholesale price is off by several factors.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| In comparison, Ontario Canada has a 3c off-peak / 29c
| peak plan.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| There are gobs of fascinating battery ideas like this!
| Pumping water uphill, heating up enormous piles of insulated
| carbon, spinning monstrous flywheels, etc. Their plausibility
| is highly dependent on the environment. So I hope that we'll
| eventually have a constellation of these wild batteries
| supplying the world's storage needs. I suspect that we'll see
| the idea you described gain more adoption. The result: fleets
| of "air battery" homes climate controlled by municipalities
| via opt-in smart thermostats (and credit incentives) to ease
| grid loads.
| etimberg wrote:
| At a previous job I helped build a hyper local method of
| computing spot prices to enable lots of cool ideas. We could
| compute unbalanced prices on the distribution grid and had a
| pilot project where DERs were priced based on how the
| influenced the local distribution grid.
|
| For example, placing solar downstream of a transformer nearly
| at capacity could allow for deferral of capital upgrades that
| would only be needed for a few hours a day.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Nuclear had similar impacts decades ago, with "excess" energy
| at night.
|
| Similar responses happened then, including night storage
| heaters, variable tariffs and pumped hydro storage.
| toast0 wrote:
| > It's interesting how renewables have suddenly made time-of-
| day critical in energy consumption.
|
| I remember people being upset about potential time of use
| meters around 2000. Of course then we wanted to move
| consumption away from daytime when peak loads were higher
| than supply. Now we want to move consumption towards daytime
| when peak supply is higher than demand.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| Yet I am charged 40+ cents a kWh and have a bill of about 1k a
| month and still have a true up bill that adds about another 900
| a month.
|
| Yes I have solar, and it does not seem to help.
|
| Meanwhile in Texas with the AC running 24/7 never had a bill
| over 300.
| gedy wrote:
| People balk at it, but I've decided to avoid back feeding
| solar to the grid, and only consume/charge my property.
| janpieterz wrote:
| Why did you choose not to feed it back?
| bagels wrote:
| Because our electric utilities are ripping us off.
| gedy wrote:
| Long story, but basically there is a push in California
| gov't to deemphasize rooftop solar, in favor of big solar
| farms. (I've heard this is a favor to construction
| unions).
|
| So we get paid very little per watt now, and it no longer
| balances out if you say use 20kWH from the grid and feed
| 20kWH to the grid (like it used to).
| hackerlight wrote:
| Texas: https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2024-04-21
| mbrumlow wrote:
| This was not an anti solar post, but an anti PG&E one.
| wolpoli wrote:
| That's really confusing: If there is so much solar generated
| that they have to pay industrial user to consume electricity,
| why don't the solar companies just stop sending power to the
| grid instead of paying money? Are the solar companies unable to
| turn off their system due to a limitation in their system?
| rnrn wrote:
| i suspect this could be related to the renewable production
| tax credit. I think maybe it works out that the US government
| is paying, not the solar companies.
|
| https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/federal-solar-tax-
| credits-...
| himinlomax wrote:
| That's not a positive thing.
|
| Another way to spin it: renewable electricity (except hydro) is
| literally worthless. You get it when you don't need it, but you
| don't have any guarantee it'll be available when you do.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Paid to consume...by whom? Rate payers?
| BenoitP wrote:
| That'd be great if it could absorb the surplus, but right now
| at 12GW production it is curtailed at 0.29 GW. This means
| neither pumped storage, nor batteries, nor exports can deal
| with it.
|
| On one hand it might create a new market, hopefully H2
| electrolysis that replaces coal or gas in industrial processes
| rather than Bitcoin farms. On the other it also signals that
| any additional Solar is going to evict about as much capacity
| into such curtailments.
|
| Anyway, California is the record-breaking market and all eyes
| are on it to helps us guide the global energy future.
| audunw wrote:
| I think this will be solved by decarbonisation of heat
| intensive industries. There's some very good thermal storage
| battery solutions now, that can store thermal energy at
| hundreds of degrees C for a very long time.
|
| So once there's enough of this excess energy you'll start to
| see industry soaking up as much of it as they can get.
|
| If you "only" need ~200degC there's some very powerful heat
| pumps entering the market that can give you more than 100%
| efficiency.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Why load is higher at 3am than at midday?
| spenrose wrote:
| Off-grid solar "appears" as missing load
| tialaramex wrote:
| Yeah, there's a bunch of British wind power which you can
| only see in public data as a small but noticeable dip in
| demand when there's wind power available. If you own a
| hilltop farm in England, unless your neighbours are complete
| assholes _with_ political power (e.g billionaires or maybe
| MPs) you 're going to install a small wind turbine because
| it's free electricity - it's not environmentalism it's just
| capitalism, and when it's blowing your small industrial
| processes are run off the turbine whereas when weather is
| calm you pay like anyone else. Needing a loan for a net-
| profitable business investment isn't a novelty for a farmer,
| and this one at least isn't predicated on future food prices
| - it's predicated on electricity costing money, so your bank
| manager will be happier.
| p1mrx wrote:
| I would guess a combination of electric heat (it's colder at
| night) and rooftop solar.
| tshtf wrote:
| The official California ISO page is awesome by itself, as are the
| mobile apps:
| https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
| cwal37 wrote:
| Heyo everyone, cool to see this here. I'm a co-founder and head
| of product at Grid Status if anyone has specific questions about
| the site. I see some energy market questions here about CAISO and
| natural gas, net load, etc., so here's a link to a blog we wrote
| last year that covers some of these topics, might be helpful[0].
| The market has been setting a bunch of records recently, which
| you can see here[1].
|
| Also, as a bonus, if you click this link[2] while logged in it
| will enable a preview of our nodal price map app which people
| tend to enjoy playing around with.
|
| [0] https://blog.gridstatus.io/balancing-act/ [1]
| https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso [2]
| https://www.gridstatus.io/map?nodalMapPreview
| pnw wrote:
| Great site, super interesting. The fuel mix pie chart in the top
| left would be far more readable as a horizontal bar chart with
| the labels displayed.
|
| I probably don't need to give my usual lecture on why pie charts
| suck to the HN crowd.
| dntrkv wrote:
| Look at that beautiful nuclear baseload. Providing clean,
| consistent power no matter the time of day or season.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Which would be great if demand didn't vary by time of day and
| season.
|
| But, it's neat the way that flaw has been rebranded as
| "baseload". The extra energy you need when people wake up and
| go to work? That's someone else's problem.
| gimmeThaBeet wrote:
| I'm gonna be blunt, that's a strange position. I mean, even
| just math wise/FFT, you can break down a lot of stuff into a
| dc component plus your variable component.
|
| But the other part is you can absolutely adjust the output of
| a nuclear reactor, we just don't because the availability is
| there. Look up the largest power stations in the us/globally,
| and sort by capacity factor.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_statio.
| ..
| Ringz wrote:
| ,,The venerable "baseload" concept--that grid stability needs
| gigawatt-scale, steadily operating thermal (steam-raising)
| power plants--reflects the valid and vital economic practice of
| dispatching power at least operating cost, so resources with
| lowest operating costs are run most. This traditional role of
| giant thermal plants led many people to suppose that such
| plants are always needed. But now that renewables with no fuel
| cost are taking over the "baseload" role of being dispatched
| whenever available, those big thermal plants are relegated to
| fewer operating hours, making the term "baseload" an obsolete
| honorific. Thermal plants must now adapt to follow the net load
| left after cost-effective efficiency, demand response, and
| real-time "base-cost" renewable supply have been dispatched.
| Nuclear power's limited flexibility, and its technical and
| economic challenges when cycled, have thus become a handicap,
| complicating least-cost and stable grid operation with a rising
| share of zero-carbon, least-cost variable renewables. That is
| why Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) found that early
| closure of its well running Diablo Canyon reactors would save
| customers money and, by making the grid more flexible, raise
| renewables' share. Those reactors had become cheaper to close
| than to run: the power systems' shift to renewables had turned
| them from an asset to a liability, so they'll be replaced by
| competitively procured low-carbon resources, saving both money
| and carbon."
|
| Source: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-
| Industr...
| Xt-6 wrote:
| Look at that beautiful geothermal baseload. Providing clean,
| consistent power no matter the time of day or season.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Nuclear is the best source of energy if the capex is in the
| past
| hendry wrote:
| UK version: https://grid.iamkate.com/ written in PHP:
| https://github.com/KateMorley/grid
| demondemidi wrote:
| Right now cali is gettin 77% of its electricity from solar???
| That's crazy. I had no idea it was that high.
| sgt wrote:
| Yes, because the sun is out. They can crank down the hydro,
| natural gas, etc. It's very impressive.
| noreiley wrote:
| On the CAISO page, how can they get to negative CO2 emissions? I
| doubt this includes CO2 capture, so their math with exports must
| be shady, no?
|
| https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/emissions.html
| cbhl wrote:
| It means they're exporting zero CO2 solar power and offsetting
| fossil-fuel-based-generation in the other state. You'll see
| that the imports value is also negative (implying exports).
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| And also they know the CO2 values of the other grids which
| they display as a positive CO2 when importing electricity
| from them.
| Ringz wrote:
| German version (in English): https://www.energy-
| charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&l...
| r00fus wrote:
| Does battery storage show up on this chart?
| powerbroker wrote:
| I'm stunned to see upwards of 2 gigawatts of solar being
| curtailed at mid-day. As I understand it, those solar generators
| are producing beyond what the transmission grid can carry or
| beyond what native load there is.
|
| Can anyone comment on what is the greater impact: transmission
| bottlenecks or lack of sufficient demand? FYI, my back of the
| envelope calculation for daily curtailment is 11.4 gigawatt-
| hours. I'm assuming that would be bigger but for the presence of
| battery storage on the grid.
| hedora wrote:
| The mix graph does a pretty good job explaining why nuclear makes
| sense at night.
|
| (Newer reactors use a big pool of molten salt as a battery and
| can time shift production. I wonder if the same trick could be
| used instead of grid-scale battery storage. I also wonder if it's
| possible to play games with heat pumps to convert from
| electricity back to stored heat. That might be easier to ramp
| than new nuclear.)
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