Saw an article talking about California power consumption dropping. I track this so thought I would post a couple interesting snippets from my spreadsheet. Here is a look at total power consumption as posted by CAISO, along with various sources of renewable power. The day shown in red is the day of the stay at home order. The days in gray are weekends when power consumption is typically lower.
You can see that power consumption has been falling from that point forward. Compared to 2019 it is down about 12%. This presents an interesting challenge to CAISO as the grid operator. Renewables are generating about the same amount of power, but feeding it into a grid that is using quite a bit less overall power. This same thing happens on the weekends, to a lesser extent. Bet we are rapidly getting to the point where the dip in total power is even below typical weekend levels. This is providing a kind of accidental experiment to see what happens when renewables generate a higher percentage of overall power. Here are the monthly cumulative percentages from the same period:
April is starting out with 38% renewable power so far. The highest level ever for any month previously was in May 2019 with about 36%. This also results in a lot of curtailment, which can be seen in the daily graph of production from renewable sources:
It looks like what they are doing is letting Ivanpah (Solar Thermal) run at peak, and wind and other renewables too, but curtail Solar PV as required. Seems like going forward we either need to store that and shift it to non-peak periods, or start charging the EV base to soak it up. It would be interesting to see how much power is being curtailed, and how many EV's one would need to have plugged into L2 chargers to soak it up.
I think @nwdiver previously posted that having to curtail solar PV peak production wasn't necessarily a catastrophe. What would probably be most efficient would be to figure out the lowest cost way of utilizing that power if possible. If storage is dropping in cost at 20% per year, it might make sense to just curtail the excess for now versus trying to immediately deploy large scale storage.
RT
You can see that power consumption has been falling from that point forward. Compared to 2019 it is down about 12%. This presents an interesting challenge to CAISO as the grid operator. Renewables are generating about the same amount of power, but feeding it into a grid that is using quite a bit less overall power. This same thing happens on the weekends, to a lesser extent. Bet we are rapidly getting to the point where the dip in total power is even below typical weekend levels. This is providing a kind of accidental experiment to see what happens when renewables generate a higher percentage of overall power. Here are the monthly cumulative percentages from the same period:
April is starting out with 38% renewable power so far. The highest level ever for any month previously was in May 2019 with about 36%. This also results in a lot of curtailment, which can be seen in the daily graph of production from renewable sources:
It looks like what they are doing is letting Ivanpah (Solar Thermal) run at peak, and wind and other renewables too, but curtail Solar PV as required. Seems like going forward we either need to store that and shift it to non-peak periods, or start charging the EV base to soak it up. It would be interesting to see how much power is being curtailed, and how many EV's one would need to have plugged into L2 chargers to soak it up.
I think @nwdiver previously posted that having to curtail solar PV peak production wasn't necessarily a catastrophe. What would probably be most efficient would be to figure out the lowest cost way of utilizing that power if possible. If storage is dropping in cost at 20% per year, it might make sense to just curtail the excess for now versus trying to immediately deploy large scale storage.
RT
