California Has So Much Solar Power That Other States Are Paid To Take It (mic.com)

"On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power," reported the Los Angeles Times. Mic reports: California is generating so much solar energy that it is resorting to paying other states to take the excess electricity in order to prevent overloading power lines. According to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona residents have already saved millions in 2017 thanks to California's contribution. The state, which produced little to no solar energy just 15 years ago, has made strides -- it single-handedly has nearly half of the country's solar electricity generating capacity...

When there's too much solar energy, there is a risk of the electricity grid overloading. This can result in blackouts. In times like this, California offers other states a financial incentive to take their power. But it's not as environmentally friendly as one would think. Take Arizona, for example. The state opts to put a pin in its own solar energy sources instead of fossil fuel power, which means greenhouse gas emissions aren't getting any better due to California's overproduction.
The Los Angeles Times suggests over-construction of natural gas plants created part of the problem -- Californians now pay roughly 50% more than the rest of the country for power -- but they report that power supplies could become more predictable when battery storage technologies improve.

Comments

Re:Clueless journalist

[bsolar]

The journalist is (a) clueless about energy production and (b) a careless writer.

Just one example of the latter: "free" is not "paying other states to take it". Which is it? I'm not going to bother to look, but what crappy writing and editing.

Maybe you should actually bother reading. From the article:

Why does California have to pay rather than simply give the power away free?

When there isn’t demand for all the power the state is producing, CAISO needs to quickly sell the excess to avoid overloading the electricity grid, which can cause blackouts. Basic economics kick in. Oversupply causes prices to fall, even below zero. That’s because Arizona has to curtail its own sources of electricity to take California’s power when it doesn’t really need it, which can cost money. So Arizona will use power from California at times like this only if it has an economic incentive — which means being paid.

In my opinion the article is actually pretty good.

Re:energy storage

[taiwanjohn]

It's starting to happen already, but it will take some time to get enough storage capacity installed to catch up with the amount of solar power already on the grid.

Re: Clueless journalist

[kenh]

Also, when there is to much sun solar plants can be disconnected and just not feed the grid.

Wow.

Most solar plants (either domestic, built on private residences, or commercial) are private, and were built to generate profits for the owner based on the premium price utilities - by law - are required to pay for every KWh they feed into the grid.

Every KWh that CA utility paid someone to take was paid for at a premium. California utilities had to pay a premium for electricity it couldn't use, then had to pay someone to take that excess to save their power grid from damaging overload.

Re:How are they storing energy for the night?

[LynnwoodRooster]

We don't. The reality is that subsidies are only in place for solar power generation, not storage. And of course, without those subsidies the profitability of solar power generation plummets as well. So for now, we in CA get to pay taxes to private companies to build solar plants to sell power to us, but because we don't pay taxes to private companies to build storage of power we get to pay taxes to other States to take our power and then pay them to sell it back to us. I guess it's a win-win for everyone else...

Re:energy storage

[SuricouRaven]

Could, but rather not. Sea water is rather corrosive, and it's full of horrid organisms that clog up the machinery. You can use seawater for pumped storage, it just means higher maintenance costs. It's also not usually convenient from a landscape perspective - you need a steep slope for pumped storage, like a good hill or small mountain, which you seldom find in a conveniently coastal location. When you do, it's usually in an area prone to erosion.

Seawater pumped storage has been done experimentally, but all large-scale commercial facilities use freshwater.

Re:Least worst option

[guruevi]

Uranium produced energy has been less toxic so far than solar panels. They may be recyclable, they often aren't but the mining of materials and production of the batteries in itself is highly toxic as well, often done in places where regulations are non-existent.

Hydro is the cleanest option to store energy, even if you have to make the lake, there are hills to be found pretty much everywhere but it requires a lot of investment, the problem is California although plenty of hills doesn't have a lot of water as it is. Perhaps if they dumped the energy in desalination plants, they'll fix both problems.

Simple Solution

[LeftCoastThinker]

The simple solution is to build a few large bore (2m diameter), high pressure pipes up into lakes in the rocky mountains. Drop them down to pumping stations with holding ponds. During the day when you have excessive solar, you pump water from your holding pond up into the lake at something like 3000 feet differential elevation. At night, when you need power, you let the water discharge down into your holding pond. Designed right this system will recover about 85% of the energy stored. If you are worried about evaporation, you can cover your ponds with ping pong balls (reduces evaporation by 90% plus.)

If you pump that water at 1m/sec up for 6 peak sunny hours per day, from the Bernoulli equation we know that the stored energy would be Volume rate * density * acceleration due to gravity * height of lift * time or:

3.14 m^3/sec * 1000 kg/m^3 * 9.81 m/s^2 * 1000 m * 6h * 3600 sec/h = 665 GigaJoules of stored energy or (*.85 efficiency) ~157MWh of recoverable electricity per day. You would need around 68,000 cubic meters of water to work with (about 6.8 Hectares) in a lake (or you could build 5 holding ponds at elevation that were 20m deep x 30m wide.)

Most natural gas power plants in California generate around this number. The main reason that 10 of these hydro lift systems aren't built post haste is all the environmental nuts that would lose their shit over human beings building pipelines in California and/or using a lake for anything other than squatting next to while meditating...

Re:energy storage

[uncqual]

By charging and discharging your car batteries for uses other than moving your car, you would be consuming charge/discharge cycles on your relatively expensive batteries designed for your automobile rather than batteries designed for fixed location storage (which would likely be cheaper as weight and compactness and certain safety considerations would be substantially less costly for the fixed location storage batteries.).

The cost of what you describe can be a very expensive replacement of your electric car batteries or substantial reduction in resell value of your electric car. That's quite a bit above zero.

Using batteries from electric cars for fixed storage after the batteries don't hold enough of a charge for automotive use might be more cost effective (both financially and environmentally) than discarding and recycling them.