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Check any grid's total load and you will see its peak daily at 8pm.

Actually, no. Here's California's grid for the middle of the summer: 07/11/2018. The peak is at 5 p.m., which is because you're starting to ramp up home power use while ramping down business power use. Demand peaks later on cooler days, but it also peaks lower, because there's less power being used to cool.

Either way, though, what you see is that power starts ramping up significantly as the day gets hotter, lagging behind temperature at both ends. It starts to exceed the average daily consumption at eleven or twelve in the morning and goes up from there. Is there a perfect match between solar power and cooling needs? No. Are they reasonably correlated? Yes.

Also, we frack for natural gas.

No, we frack for oil. The overwhelming majority of natural gas comes as a side effect of oil exploration. I'm sure that a very small percentage of wells produce only natural gas, just as a very small percentage of oil wells produce essentially zero natural gas. However, these are by far the exception, not the rule. Nearly all natural gas wells also produce oil and vice versa.

The sources are getting cleaner (in California). http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOut...

The cool thing about EVs is that the cleaner the power sources get, the cleaner the car gets. Compare that to a 25mpg vehicle that will (at best) pollute at the same level throughout its workable lifespan regardless of changes to the electrical grid.

The predictions pushed money into phasing out heavy oil power plants (and presumably coal, although that was likely more influenced by fracking), along with less efficient gas power plants. While this may seem like a good thing on the surface, it has led to excess capacity of these sources; some of them should have been retired altogether.

More importantly, it likely pushed us back 3-5 years on planning for a higher percentage of renewables on the grid both in terms of policy and technology. The CAISO "net energy" graph http://www.caiso.com/Pages/Tod... (bottom of page for yesterday) represents a number of the challenges that were completely underestimated.

Hint: if you would build a 'back up power plant' for every solar plant, 50% of them would idle at night, probably more. Because: no one needs the power.

The nighttime reduction in demand is not nearly as extreme as you're making out. Take a look at a real-world example in California here.

The useful solar generation period ends around 5:30pm. Demand continues to increase (people going home after work), peaking around 8pm and not returning to mid-day levels until around 11pm. That first part of the night takes a big bite out of the period of reduced consumption from midnight-6am.

There will of course be more imbalance in summer, and less in winter. This time of year probably just about splits the difference.

And that means the top-line numbers of installed solar capacity don't have much bearing on how much conventional capacity they're actually displacing in operation.

Right. That's why system operators like California ISO aren't counting each and every megawatt generated by renewables.

http://www.caiso.com/outlook/o...

http://www.caiso.com/informed/...

http://www.caiso.com/informed/...

Also, SoCal Edison has been bringing online some incredible advances in energy storage technology. Systems like these will begin taking hold across the country over the course of the next decade, changing the dynamics of solar energy availability and reliability.

https://www.edison.com/home/in...

It ain't your grandpa's solar panel anymore. The system is evolving.

And that means the top-line numbers of installed solar capacity don't have much bearing on how much conventional capacity they're actually displacing in operation.

Right. That's why system operators like California ISO aren't counting each and every megawatt generated by renewables.

http://www.caiso.com/outlook/o...

http://www.caiso.com/informed/...

http://www.caiso.com/informed/...

Also, SoCal Edison has been bringing online some incredible advances in energy storage technology. Systems like these will begin taking hold across the country over the course of the next decade, changing the dynamics of solar energy availability and reliability.

https://www.edison.com/home/in...

It ain't your grandpa's solar panel anymore. The system is evolving.

And that means the top-line numbers of installed solar capacity don't have much bearing on how much conventional capacity they're actually displacing in operation.

Right. That's why system operators like California ISO aren't counting each and every megawatt generated by renewables.

http://www.caiso.com/outlook/o...

http://www.caiso.com/informed/...

http://www.caiso.com/informed/...

Also, SoCal Edison has been bringing online some incredible advances in energy storage technology. Systems like these will begin taking hold across the country over the course of the next decade, changing the dynamics of solar energy availability and reliability.

https://www.edison.com/home/in...

It ain't your grandpa's solar panel anymore. The system is evolving.

First, as recently as a week ago, CALISO (the folks who run the grid in CA) was issuing a "Flex Alert" to urge people in SoCal to conserve electricity because there was not enough to go around. If, in response to a "Flex Alert" people do not conserve enough, our energy rationing masters begin switching off power to businesses who have traded lower rates for the inconvienence or remort control over their usage. If the managed rationing fails to save enough, rolling blackouts happen (as happened a few years back).

Second, California becomes huge sucking hole into which energy must be pulled when the sun goes down. Solar power is only a solution for total grid power like a unicorn is a transortation solution - no matter how much solar you generate, you must still have and maintain full coal/oil/nuke/natgas capacity and have it ready at a moment-by-moment basis to fill-in for the unreliable solar panels (and wind farms) whose genrating capacity is completely out of human control.

"Green" propagandists are continually playing on the ignorance of dim-witted college kids and distracted would-be do-gooders with these sorts of misleading and incomplete headlines and articles. Sadly for the greenines, there are still too many of us who know who things actually work in the REAL WORLD, and do not thinks everything can be fixed with fairy dust and positive mental energy.

Well sometimes a giant wall of glass is useful for everyone to look at to be able to get on the same page while having their own local screens to view specifics they care about as they coordinate efforts when shit goes wrong.

You are using a very bad model to think of the electrical grid. It is not a huge pool where electricity injected anywhere on the grid is instantly available anywhere else on the grid. I call that the lake analogy. It is much more like a canal system with specific capacities between specific points and each canal has to be keeps full but not overflowing. Even though the grid may theoretically be balancing input and output there will be local shortages/oversupply because electricity takes time to move.

Here is a graph of California renewables output. The Wind line is not very smooth even though it is an average and there are no major storms going through which cause more fluctuation.

This can be fixed with flexible pricing of electricity. Charge more when electricity is scarce, and less when it is plentiful

People use electricity when they need to no matter what the price. We turn on lights when it is dark. We cook dinner at dinner time. We have showers in the morning or evening. We wash cloths when we have time. Little of this will be re-scheduled based on the cost of electricity. Are you really going to get up at 3AM to do laundry? I doubt it. Even if you have a timer are you going to leave your wet cloths in the washer till you get up? You might not remember and those cloths will sit for another ten hours. Are you going to skip your morning shower because it will cost you a dollar extra?

The other issue with wind power is that it can vary uncontrollably minute by minute. This is the kind of instability that needs to be leveled out by more storage. Storage has two functions; time shifting and supply leveling.

Look at what is happening now. Certain jurisdictions like California have peak and off-peak electricity rates. The demand is still high during high peak rate times. If you look at those two graphs you will see that price has little or no effect on demand.

> A few days ago I saw a nice graph showing PG&E's averaged output power during a typical 24h. It's a slanted U-shape, with the bottom somewhere around noon, then a sharp increase between 6PM and 9PM, tapering off after midnight and dropping slightly after 7AM.

No you didn't. That's not their curve. What you may have seen is the so-called California Duck, which is a different thing entirely -- a projection of a March weekend day in 2022 where there's tons more solar and no other changes to the generating capacity (which, of course, doesn't match reality). The CAISO (most of California -- PG&E, SoCal Ed, SDG&E, but not LADWP) daily demand curve can be found at:

http://www.caiso.com/outlook/S...

Careful -- today is Saturday, where demand is far lower than M-F workdays. Notice that on a Spring weekend, there's a local maximum at around 11am-noon, and then the daily peak in the late evening. On a weekday, you'll see a big peak in the late afternoon, sometimes before 5pm, sometimes after. Nevetheless, it never bottoms out around noon.

he grid has no inherent storage capability into which to dump your day-time excess energy.

I wonder if we could fix it so commercial customers were using most of their power during the day as opposed to the current system where all the factories, and climate control systems are running full bore at night and quiet during the day. /sarcasm

A few days ago I saw a nice graph showing PG&E's averaged output power during a typical 24h. It's a slanted U-shape, with the bottom somewhere around noon, then a sharp increase between 6PM and 9PM, tapering off after midnight and dropping slightly after 7AM.

And if you look at the Net Demand curve you'll notice that at NO POINT is solar or wind producing excess power. All they are doing is shaving off the mid-day peak.

The HUGE problem this energy generation/consumption pattern creates is that the baseline generators must provide the bottom of the U and not a Joule more. Everything else, especially the evening spike, must come from coal and NG power plants. Since in time the ratio between the peak and the baseline increases, more dirty and greenhouse gas emitting power plants MUST BE BUILT.

Another crock of shit. Hydro, wind, geothermal, and biomass all produce power 24 hours a day.

In fact, all these 3 to 5kW solar installations make the greenhouse gas situation worse if the excess energy is not stored, which is contrary the feel-good but incorrect assumption about how all these solar panels help save the planet.

Aren't you just a fountain of myths and misconceptions. There is no "excess" energy until the entire grid being fed by solar has no use for additional electricity. Even then, the extra electrons can go into the ground harmlessly. They do not undergo transmutation into carbon or some other greenhouse gas.

Because neither you nor other /. where talking about the 500%

Read the third post in this thread

The article touts producing 500% of daytime need. See the problem with the "solution"?

For a grid to work you don't need significant more storage than any 'grid in good shape' already has.

Ever seen the duck graph. Basically it shows how the drop off in solar near sunset can cause a requirement for very rapid switching to conventional power. Conventional generators have a limit on how fast they can ramp up. If the conventional plants can not ramp fast enough the grid collapses. Storage can extend this ramping period so that it is not so steep and conventional plants can handle it.

Solar is already causing a problem. It is called the duck graph. Basically as solar rapidly drops off at sunset conventional is having trouble ramping up to meet demand. There is too many incentives for solar production and not enough for storage and that needs to be changed now.

Per California ISO, which may not be representative of global production, and using yesterday's data we have:
Source / Peak MW / Daily Production MWh
Solar Thermal / 543 / 2,759
Solar PV / 5,164 / 48,086
Wind / 2,366 / 25,584
Small Hydro / 199 / 3,615
Biogas / 206 / 4,716
Geothermal / 1,058 / 25,120
(Source: http://www.caiso.com/market/Pa...)

Solar PV has over twice the peak capacity and just under twice the total production.

I tried Texas' ERCOT, but they don't have as good of breakdowns. Their wind production is about half of California's at 1,359MW.

Insults do not help your arguments.

Calling you on your lack of knowledge is not an insult. It is fact. Then you immediately prove my point.

If you don't use nuclear power (once the power station is built) you lose it.

Nuclear reactors have control rods which are used to regulate the output. You can run a nuclear plant at any percentage of maximum capacity as you want at any time of day or year. Wind and solar are regulated by weather, season and time of day. In effect you get what you get. You really need to understand what dispatchable generation is. Nuclear is dispatchable. Solar/wind is not. Dispatchable power can be regulated to provide power when it is needed. Non-dispatchable power does not have that ability to control output. Nuclear power is very different than solar/wind.

Nuclear power is notoriously difficult to integrate into the grid; you need a lot of fossil fuel or hydro plants to handle the peak load that nuclear cannot handle economically.

Again you are pulling statements out of the air. If your statement is true then how can France produce over 80% of their power using nuclear reactors.

You completely ignore the report about the duck graph. It shows how reliance on PV panels can cause an problem at dusk when PVs stop producing and conventional has to take over. If that slope gets too step then conventional power may not be able to compensate for the rapid loss of PV power.

You really need to know how conventional power works before you comment. No nuclear plant always runs at 100% capacity. There is always a reserve that can be utilized if needed. When one plant goes down other plants increase production to compensate. When the down plant comes back on the other plants decrease output. Solar and wind are usually used completely to their capacity. If you don't use wind/solar power you lose it. Weather/time of day is the governing factor in how much electricity is produced by wind/solar. Human choice governs how much power is produced by nuclear. There is a big difference.

Take a look at this report about the problems with integrating solar into the grid.

Peak load goes for about 4 hours beyond sunset. Solar thermal can cover this peak load. With Solar PV - you have to build plants that are only used 4 hours per day. http://www.caiso.com/outlook/S... Cooking birds is a real problem for some forms of solar thermal plants but not the solar trough plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.... If your only goal is to prevent CO2 release and cost of electricity does not matter - then Solar PV is the way to go. If your goal is to minimize total daily electric cost while decreasing CO2 - Solar thermal is probably a better option.

Thank you, that is actually a pretty neat resource. However, I would contend my point still stands. That 7pm peak is for today, in the middle of the winter. In August, the peak is at 4:30, and is 66% higher than the February peak. In June and July the peak times seem to be around 5pm, well within the time solar is active for those months.

A much better source is Cal Iso, which runs the California grid and publishes a graph of demand and sources every day. http://content.caiso.com/green... The peak power use is generally around 7 pm, after solar production has stopped. Wind output various greatly from day to day.

I found a very interesting report from California ISO about the difficulties of integratong large amounts of solar into the grid. It is all about the Duck Chart. It revolves around how conventional supply has to adjust to compensate for the supply of solar based electricity. You can read the report to get the fine points but the issue is the steepness of the duck's neck. During the day solar can supply a lot of electricity. During that time demand on conventional supply is low. That is called the belly of the duck. As sundown occurs the production of solar drops off quickly but demand stays high. That rise is called the neck of the duck. That requires a lot of conventional power to need to come on line quickly. If not controlled correctly over/under supply can occur. Over supply is even more dangerous as it can damage equipment. Under supply causes brown/blackouts. As more solar is integrated and demand increases due to population growth and use of electric vehicles the neck gets steeper and the risk increases.

Part of the renewable integration analysis conducted by the ISO uncovered concerns about frequency response capabilities due to the displacement of conventional generators on the system. The 2020 33% studies show that in times of low load and high renewable generation, as much as 60% of the energy production would come from renewable generators that displace conventional generation and frequency response capability. Under these operating conditions, the grid may not be able to prevent frequency decline following the loss of a large conventional generator or transmission asset. This situation arises because renewable generators are not currently required to include automated frequency response capability and are operated at full output (they can not increase power). Without this automated capability,the system becomes increasingly exposed to blackouts when generation or transmission outages occur.

Times of low load and high supply occur daily around noon.

I found a very interesting report from California ISO about the difficulties of integratong large amounts of solar into the grid. It is all about the Duck Chart. It revolves around how conventional supply has to adjust to compensate for the supply of solar based electricity. You can read the report to get the fine points but the issue is the steepness of the duck's neck. During the day solar can supply a lot of electricity. During that time demand on conventional supply is low. That is called the belly of the duck. As sundown occurs the production of solar drops off quickly but demand stays high. That rise is called the neck of the duck. That requires a lot of conventional power to need to come on line quickly. If not controlled correctly over/under supply can occur. Over supply is even more dangerous as it can damage equipment. Under supply causes brown/blackouts. As more solar is integrated and demand increases due to population growth and use of electric vehicles the neck gets steeper and the risk increases.

Part of the renewable integration analysis conducted by the ISO uncovered concerns about frequency response capabilities due to the displacement of conventional generators on the system. The 2020 33% studies show that in times of low load and high renewable generation, as much as 60% of the energy production would come from renewable generators that displace conventional generation and frequency response capability. Under these operating conditions, the grid may not be able to prevent frequency decline following the loss of a large conventional generator or transmission asset. This situation arises because renewable generators are not currently required to include automated frequency response capability and are operated at full output (they can not increase power). Without this automated capability,the system becomes increasingly exposed to blackouts when generation or transmission outages occur.

Times of low load and high supply occur daily around noon.

Peak demand on the PG&E grid in the Summer is 1200-1800 PDT

I am not sure if you are intentionally lying but here is the California outlook for supply and demand from PG&E. Notice the peak is between 5PM and 6PM and the demand does not drop off to noon levels until 11PM. Today's sunset in California is about 7PM so much of that higher energy use is after the sun goes down so angling the panels will not help much. Look a little further down the page I linked. Notice that between 5-6pm the supply from solar drops from 70% of noon maximum to 37% of maximum even though demand is at it's peak. The highers production of solar power is between 11AM and 3PM. Wouldn't it be good to store some of the electricity to be used during peak demand?

What graph are you looking at?

I see a graph showing a range of 3300MW to 5400MW, about a 10:6 ratio, not your claimed 10:1. Chart is on the top/right of this page: http://content.caiso.com/green...

The EIA (US) and German statistics show that, in aggregate, wind-energy sources produce a relatively steady amount of power. Individual turbines and even whole wind farms might not be deterministic, but all the wind farms taken together... are.

In the real world, they're not. Here's the current CAISO output graph for all of California (which is 800 miles long and has a wide range of climate zones, with wind farms hundreds of miles apart) in the last 24 hours. Max wind generation today: 3600MW. Min: 300MW. That's over a 10:1 ratio. Checking PJM (the power grid for the northeastern US), today's max was 3200MW. Min: 900MW. About 3.5:1. Most days, those ratios are around 4:1.

So you still need a lot of natural gas plants that can be started up when the wind fails. Understand that load varies about 3:1 over the course of a day, in a predictable way, with peak load in midafternoon. Solar power output matches air conditioning load very nicely. Wind, not so much.

The price of bulk power goes way down late at night. Once in a while it goes negative for an hour or two. This happens on PJM when load is low, Ontario Hydro has excess water they're running through generators, the nuclear plants are running smoothly and don't want to shut down, and the wind turbines are getting good wind. The hydro and nuclear guys have a slow response time, so they'll pay to generate power rather than shut down for a few hours. So the wind guys, who can stop in a minute or two, drop out rather than pay. The turbine blades go to zero pitch and feather, the brakes come on, and the turbines slow and stop.

CAISO utility electricity generation web page. Daily load, generation, and fractional contributions by renewables.

Refer to the middle and bottom graphs.

http://www.caiso.com/outlook/S...

That is actually done to a very large extent now. Foundries running electric arc furnaces or induction furnaces only run in the off-peak period, currently at night. This artificially increases base loads.

The problem with trying to match generation with demand is that you still have a transmission/distribution problem. Distributed generation is the only way to really solve that, and again economics make it difficult to distribute power generation to the point where local demand is matched to local production in both capacity and timing.

People are trying to get closer to this-- automated demand response can help a little bit.

The California ISO is pretty open with information. They track daily anticipated demand, actual demand, and available capacity. Some actually predict that solar energy that is not time-shifted will become nearly worthless in five years.

Take a look at today's ramp-up curve for solar in California - http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx#SupplyandDemand
That's quite a bit of MWh from other sources that doesn't need to be used during the daytime and solar in CA is quite predictable.
So while it doesn't match the evening peak, it can be planned for in advance, which reduces the spot pricing.

Also, this is December so the demand curve is shifted later than during the summer where it can reach nearly 50 GW in the mid-afternoon

Peak production from solar occurs at 12 noon, peak demand occurs at 6PM.

If you're going to be an condescending asshole, you might as well get your facts correct. :-P

Peak production for solar in the summer generally occurs at 1 PM, not 12 PM (during non-daylight savings time the peak is at 12 PM).

Peak demand for the year is generally between 3-5 PM, not 6 PM and typically around 4:30 PM.

At 4:30 PM solar output is starting to drop, but is still producing significant power since many utility scale plants use tracking systems which allow production to remain very flat for a few hours around solar noon. Fixed pitch solar can easily be biased towards mid-late afternoon peaks by aiming farther west rather than south which most systems aim for in order to maximize energy production instead of aiming to match production to demand.

It would not take much storage for your typical home PV system to shift load to the utility peak - probably no more than 5-10 kWh of storage for your typical house.

References:
California ISO Today's Outlook
California ISO Renewables Watch
California ISO Peak Load History
Are Solar Panels Facing the Wrong Direction?

Peak production from solar occurs at 12 noon, peak demand occurs at 6PM.

If you're going to be an condescending asshole, you might as well get your facts correct. :-P

Peak production for solar in the summer generally occurs at 1 PM, not 12 PM (during non-daylight savings time the peak is at 12 PM).

Peak demand for the year is generally between 3-5 PM, not 6 PM and typically around 4:30 PM.

At 4:30 PM solar output is starting to drop, but is still producing significant power since many utility scale plants use tracking systems which allow production to remain very flat for a few hours around solar noon. Fixed pitch solar can easily be biased towards mid-late afternoon peaks by aiming farther west rather than south which most systems aim for in order to maximize energy production instead of aiming to match production to demand.

It would not take much storage for your typical home PV system to shift load to the utility peak - probably no more than 5-10 kWh of storage for your typical house.

References:
California ISO Today's Outlook
California ISO Renewables Watch
California ISO Peak Load History
Are Solar Panels Facing the Wrong Direction?

Peak production from solar occurs at 12 noon, peak demand occurs at 6PM.

If you're going to be an condescending asshole, you might as well get your facts correct. :-P

Peak production for solar in the summer generally occurs at 1 PM, not 12 PM (during non-daylight savings time the peak is at 12 PM).

Peak demand for the year is generally between 3-5 PM, not 6 PM and typically around 4:30 PM.

At 4:30 PM solar output is starting to drop, but is still producing significant power since many utility scale plants use tracking systems which allow production to remain very flat for a few hours around solar noon. Fixed pitch solar can easily be biased towards mid-late afternoon peaks by aiming farther west rather than south which most systems aim for in order to maximize energy production instead of aiming to match production to demand.

It would not take much storage for your typical home PV system to shift load to the utility peak - probably no more than 5-10 kWh of storage for your typical house.

References:
California ISO Today's Outlook
California ISO Renewables Watch
California ISO Peak Load History
Are Solar Panels Facing the Wrong Direction?

Large hydro is not considered "renewable" due to the large impacts on the river - you'll see that it's broken out on the CAISO web site which shows current state of the grid and where energy is currently coming from:

California ISO - Today's Outlook

They also have a Renewables Watch page for historical data.

Large hydro is not considered "renewable" due to the large impacts on the river - you'll see that it's broken out on the CAISO web site which shows current state of the grid and where energy is currently coming from:

California ISO - Today's Outlook

They also have a Renewables Watch page for historical data.

Nuke plants are steam-based. Steam turbines have long startup and shutdown times as a consequence of the heat soaking requirements. The demands of rapidly changing the heat of different parts of the plant are very damaging. I only really know a little about the turbines themselves - the machines are so large and the steam so hot that you get differential expansion on the parts of the machine if you do not follow a very specific (and slow) regimen during startup. Heat to this temperature, this speed, soak for 3hrs, move to the next heat/speed, soak for hours, repeat 4 or 5 times to get to running speed where you can generate electricity. Other parts of the generation stream (the boilers, piping, heat exchangers, water treatment, water recovery, etc. all have demanding startup requirements of their own.

If you don't follow the plan, the rotor/blade-rotating part of the machine may thermally expand into the stationary casing (that isn't absorbing heat as fast, and consequently not expanding as fast). I've heard stories of machine trains where the expansion is measured in inches. If the innards grow an inch, but the case doesn't, well, it's bad. You will not be generating electricity today.

Power demand, for the curious.
http://www.caiso.com/SystemStatus.html

I had no idea wind power produced that little power.

Biggest single wind farm in the world: Alta-Oak Creek Mojave Project, 320 wind turbines, 36 km^2 area, 800 MW. That's 800MW for 36 million square meters, or 22W/m^2. That's peak power, though; yearly average for most wind sites runs about a quarter of peak.

A real problem with wind power is that it's like water power - there are a limited number of good sites. There are four really good wind power sites on shore in California, and there are big wind farms on all of them. Anywhere else is less cost-effective. There's good wind from the Texas panhandle north to the Canadian border, but not much there to use the power. (Basic truth: if it's a good wind power site, it's too windy for most people to live there.)

And, of course, there's the intermittency problem. Here's California's wind power graph for today. Note that total statewide wind output went up by a factor of 7 in 2 hours, after dropping by a factor of 4 in 5 hours. California buffers some of this by using the dams and pumps of the California Water Project as energy storage, but still, that's a huge variation. Extra generating plants have to be on standby for when the wind dies down. Up to about 15% wind, there's enough slack in the system to handle that. Beyond that, somebody has to build extra plants or energy storage.

Solar is more predictable. Solar energy and peak air conditioning load track closely. A reasonable goal is to get most of the world's air conditioning load onto solar power.

The vast majority of EV charging occurs between midnight and 4am, when there is ample capacity, esp from wind, so EVs actually use the cleanest part of the grid.
Which in California is quite clean to start with: most of its electricity is coming from carbon-neutral sources (hydro, nuclear, geothermal, wind...); only 7% was coal in 2010 and getting lower.

Another sobering thought: the energy spent refining gasoline alone (6kW*h / gallon) for a 20-some mpg vehicle would be enough to propel an EV the same distance.

Fair enough.

Too many things make this not possible to not have connected (air gapped). One is OATI and in California there is the CA ISO. Both use the Internet for the agencies to connect to them and both are essential for the Energy Sector to function in an inter-connected grid. Agencies have to get SCADA information into billing/historical systems and conversely schedules have to get into SCADA systems. Both of these intermediate business networks need Internet access to OATI and CAISO. So while SCADA systems are not directly connected to the Internet, through the right amount of vulnerabilities/compromises, they can in theory be remotely accessed. Yes, there are dozens of protections that can and should be in place, but it's not the same as a true air gap.

Can you name one router or switch vendor with which you can get 100% made in the USA. It's impossible these days.

If electrical heat is used then they will be in the same boat as the high costs will be for heating during the day rather than cooling.

No, the sun (which is very very warm) comes out during the day.

How many businesses do you know that can shift their hours out of the 9AM to 5PM range?

Probably a lot, with the right incentive.

Even if it was possible to shift the schedule, how many people would want to work nights when they could do the same job during the day?

Even today, people work the graveyard shift when they could do the same job during the day for less pay.

How many people do you think will wait till past midnight to cook dinner?

Electrical demand doesn't have just one huge flat peak that ends at midnight. It looks more like a sine wave. All someone needs to do is avoid the very highest peaks of the sine wave.

The CAISO ("The California ISO provides open and non-discriminatory access to the bulk of the state’s wholesale transmission grid") keeps a daily set of graphs on the utility generation demand, and contributions by renewables here:

http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx

Bad idea. Little generators and engines are much less efficient than big ones, so using hybrids as peaking plants is a desperation move. For pure electrics, the general idea is to keep the battery charged up in case the user wants to go somewhere.

The whole "smart grid" thing is mostly a marketing move to collect information about consumers and get rid of meter readers. All that's really needed for peak management is a system that broadcasts how much the grid needs power right now and the current power price, plus receivers on big loads which respond to that data.

To see the daily power generation for California's CAISO, including the contributions by wind and solar, here is the URL:

http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx

For 2011-09-21, peak power was about 38,000MW, peak wind contribution was about 1100MW, peak solar contribution was about 450MW
Perhaps as more Walmart's, Ikea's, and residental grid-tied PV is added, the solar contributions will rise to what wind adds now.

http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html
Notice how the available line almost mirrors the demand line. That is caused by producers taking generators off line.

What incentive do they have to build more power stations to support peak demands, if they can just charge more and know that there's no real competition?

Residential solar panels, which conveniently reach peak output around the same time of day that conventional electricity becomes the most expensive to produce, is competition.

The paper is disappointing.

One of the assumptions of the paper is that some sources, like wind and tidal power, can be expanded as desired. That's not the case.

Tidal power is very limited; the geography has to be just right. There are about four really good sites in the world, the Bay of Fundy being the best. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near a big electrical load.

Wind power sites are more limited than most people realize. Look at the wind maps of the United States. The high wind areas are mostly far from the populated areas. The best wind areas are from the Texas panhandle north to Canada, the big empty space in the US. Illinois looks very promising.The Northeast and South, not much. California has four really good on-shore wind sites, and all four already have wind farms.

Wind power is also more variable than its enthusiasts realize. Check out the current California wind output graph. There's been a 3:1 variation in output just today, and that's with wind farms spread over an area 400 miles across.

Hydroelectric power is great, but all the good dam sites were gone by 1940. The ideal dam is Hoover Dam - plug up a gorge in a useless desert and fill the desert with water. Few other sites are that good.

Hydrogen is, of course, a joke. It's a terrible way to store electric power. Inefficient to make, and dangerous to handle. Electric cars get that job done just fine with batteries.

Ethanol from cellulose looks promising. That works now, although it's still kind of expensive. It runs on agricultural waste and other unwanted cellulose, so it's a good renewable source. That's probably the liquid fuel of the future. Ethanol from food crops is a tax gimmick.

Solar power is very effective in the right climate. Realistically, that means the southern half of the US and points south, Spain, most of India, Africa, etc. There's also the nice property that peak electrical load in places that need air conditioning is guaranteed to coincide with peak solar power output.

The world will end up running mostly on renewable energy, though. The fossil fuels are running out. Oil at $100/bbl is the new normal. It's not going to be pleasant.

That was an informative post, but you sure came off sounding like a major league jerk.

I did some quick reading on (LiFePO4) batteries here and while they have great potential they seem to also have some high associated costs.

As to the "Long Tail Pipe Theory you might want to check here at various times of the day to see what our current electrical load is and theory aside contemplate shifting of the gasoline load to the electrical load.

have a nice day.

All this "smart meter" stuff has too much data flowing around, and too much of it is sent out of the home back to organizations which may make dubious use of it.

All that's really needed to level out peaks is to broadcast a few bits of information per hour to interested power-using devices. Here's the California Independent System Operator status page. Down at the bottom is a meter showing how tight the power system is on capacity right now. When that gets into the yellow ranges, clothes dryers and air conditioners need to reduce their power consumption, and if it goes into the red (which is rare), they need to shut down. Electricity rates should go up when the power situation is in the yellow and red.

Amazon for not load-testing their emergency backup power on a regular basis, not having more than one connection the power grid, and the power grid for not having redundancies.

It's not a matter of testing. These systems aren't things that you can just "test", because what if there is a problem? Then you have intentionally shut off power to your entire datacenter. Otherwise you could have scheduled downtime and just assume everything will fail, so have everybody shut off their servers in advance just in case, but then how often can you do that?

No, it's a problem with the fundamental design of the power backup systems. I know somebody in charge of the electrical end of constructing CaliforniaISO's new headquarters and datacenter. They manage California's entire power grid. They have two redundant utility power connections that stay separate all the way to each server rack which each have two power inputs and a fail-over switch. Each side runs off utility IN PARALLEL to battery backup. If utility fails, no switching needs to be made because power will already be running through battery backup, and can stay that way for 24 hours per side. As soon as the utility fails, both backup generators will start and will be able to power the entire building within two minutes and I think they each have enough fuel for two weeks. Each generator is tied into separate sides of the power system, and each has their own separate facilities and their own separate fuel tanks the size of tanker trucks. Each rack will also have a local UPS unit that can keep the power flowing for about 10 minutes... enough to at least get the servers shut off safely.

That, my friend, is how you set up a UPS system. No testing required, because the entire system can't possibly fail short of some(body/thing) getting around the incredible building security and destroying cables or equipment. But no amount of testing or redundancy could possibly foresee or stop that. Pretty much the only fail points would be the switches in each rack, but the entire datacenter also has multiple points of data and processing redundancy making that a non-issue as well.

Agreed, on a very level road, with an average coefficient of friction and no head wind, no acceleration,

That being said of the SF Bay bridge 30% of it is about a 1% grade up hill, about 50% of it is level and about 20% is about a .5% grade down hill with winds that increase induced drag so I would guess more like 50 hp so around 3 MW of increased load on the public power grid.

But lets not quibble, that is for only 250,000 cars. The number of registered vehicles in the state of California is about 2.8 million.

So if we can take an average of 21KW ( 30hp ) * 2.8 Million = 58GW ( yes gigawatts ) of additional electrical generating capacity. Contrast with current electrical peak demand for today of the State of California of 32 GW and I gotta tell ya, I just don't see how it is going to happen.

Now you can massage those number, estimate how many cars are going to need recharging overnight, what percentage will be on the road at any one time etc. but if my estimation is to high be even 50% then that still laves us short of about 29GW of Generation capacity.