California Poised To Hit 50 Percent Renewable Target a Full Decade Ahead of Schedule (cleantechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: Every year, the California Energy Commission releases its Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) report, which gives details about the mix of energy experienced by all utilities within the state during the preceding 12 months. The report for this year, released in November, shows that all three of the state's investor-owned utilities -- Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric -- are projected to derive 50% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. That is a full decade ahead of schedule. PG&E reports it used 32.9% renewable energy in the past year. The figure for SoCal Edison was 28.2%. San Diego Gas & Electric led the pack with 43.2% renewable energy. Now that the 50% goal is within reach, California is looking ahead to its next milestone -- 80% renewables by 2050. "Once we get to about 50 percent, we're going to start to run into new challenges -- the second 50 percent will be trickier than the first 50 percent," Brown notes. Part of the challenge will be balancing the grid using new technologies to avoid the need for fossil fueled "peaker plants" to provide additional electricity when demand is high.

Comments

Do as the French do...

[b0s0z0ku]

Run nuclear plants as peakers -- yes, it can be done with the right design.

Nuclear isn't renewable, but it's a hell of a lot cleaner than fossil fools.

Re:Do as the French do...

[blindseer]

Run nuclear plants as peakers -- yes, it can be done with the right design.

Yes it can, but why bother? I get to this in a bit.

Nuclear isn't renewable, but it's a hell of a lot cleaner than fossil fools.

True, just the radioactive material in coal ash should be enough to get coal plants shut down. That's if coal had to meet the same standards as nuclear for disposing of the naturally occurring uranium in the ash. But if it's safe for them to toss it in a ditch then certainly nuclear reactors can do the same?

So, why bother with nuclear as a supplier of peak demand? Let's consider that Germany discovered that for every 4 MW of wind power they need 3 MW of ready backup power. Let's be honest here and note that this is Russian natural gas for the most part. We don't have the same political ramifications for foreign natural gas in the USA as we produce sufficient quantities of it ourselves.

We use natural gas because the capital expense is relatively low, about $30/MWh installed, but the fuel costs are relatively high, but still low enough that with a 30% capacity factor it's $105/MWh. Wind and nuclear are not too far apart in capital expense, wind at $70 and nuclear at $83. Wind though has a capacity factor of about 35% and nuclear at 90%.

What happens though is that the costs for nuclear and wind do not rely on fuel, there's no fuel cost for wind and nuclear fuel cast is so small that it can realistically be ignored in the grand scheme. What keeps nuclear costs low is that this very high capital expense is offset by it's high capacity factor. I saw the math once and I forget the details on this output to cost curve but what was obvious is the less the nuclear power plant output the higher the cost.

We can run nuclear at a 30% capacity factor like natural gas but then the cost to run it isn't $100/MWh anymore, it would at least triple. Much of the costs on a nuclear power plant exist whether it runs or not, so you run it as much as is possible to make back the investment in capital as quickly as possible.

If you've got 4 GW of wind capacity, and 3 GW of natural gas capacity, then you can expect an average output of 2.5 GW or so. This works well so far because the costs average out to about $100/MWh. If you've got 4 GW of wind capacity, and 3 GW of nuclear to back it up, then try to run that at the same 2.5 GW average output to maximize wind usage, then your costs just went to $300/MWh.

Here's a more realistic outcome, you dump your capital into all nuclear. The capital costs will actually be lower than then combined wind and natural gas, but the maximum load it can support would be greater. If you have a 2.5 GW average demand then install 4 GW of nuclear and be done. This would be met with 3, 4, or 5 common reactors on the same site, or spread out to 2 or 3 sites, each backing up the other. Getting more realistic there would probably be 3 GW of nuclear and 1 GW of natural gas so that if there was a major problem with the nuclear reactors then the natural gas could be used to shutdown, cool, and monitor the reactor. This could be blackout or brownout territory but highly rare, about as common as peak demand meeting a no wind situation if there was a reliance on windmills.

Right now wind costs about 90% of nuclear power but it is unreliable. Even by spreading out the windmills and a "smart grid" wind will only produce 35% of it's installed capacity. Batteries don't change this, it only adds to the cost to gain back some reliability. The math gets complicated real quick on trying the right balance but it seems quite apparent that if there is a combination where we use current costs to compute this balance with wind and nuclear providing a majority of our electricity then wind is going to make almost non-existent contributions to keep costs low.

I probably did a real shitty job explaining this. I've seen people that studied this do a presentation and the math looks real bad for wind

Re:Do as the French do...

[Maury Markowitz]

> Color me unimpressed. It kicked in a few MW for a short period of time.

You obviously don't work in the power industry.

I assure you, this is *very* impressive. People have been talking about solutions to this problem since I was a kid. When they were still working on Shiva. Before I bought my Atari 400.

> The question is whether Lion batteries can stabilize the South Australian grid for years on end without losing too much capacity

LiIon, like most batteries, loses capacity when you have wild swings in stored energy. Going from 100% to 40% once is orders of magnitude worse than going from 80% to 60% three times, in spite of both examples using the same amount of energy.

For uplift purposes you have rapid cycling around maybe 10% of capacity (the recent example was 1.5% IIRC), so the pack should last until we're all long dead.

> convinced that if one were designing batteries for grid storage that Lithium-ion would be the technology you'd choose

Holy, have you read *anything* about this?!

The batteries in the SA system are NOT the same ones as the cars. They're a completely different chemistry designed specifically for cycling.

> Sodium-Sulfur (NaS) batteries

Ugh.

NaS batteries will not happen. Ever. Its a terrible technology. Boiling sulphur is the description of Hell, not the description of a useful battery chemistry. No one is really working on it, nor ZEBRA, and even the flow batteries that people periodically raise are dead from any practical definition.

This very second, the amount of money being spent on LiIon tech is something like 1000x the amount on all the others put together. There is no way any of those technologies will ever be able to compete.

Seems they import a lot of electricity (1/3).

[Fly Swatter]

From Forbes: California's Growing Imported Electricity Problem "California now imports 33% of its electricity supply from fast growing neighbors". Looks like a numbers game to me, but what do I know.

Re:Seems they import a lot of electricity (1/3).

[interkin3tic]

Renewable energy is renewable energy whether it's in one state or another.

One op-ed from a guy who is a professional promoter of natural gas says "California should really buy more natural gas," and you're willing to conclude California is running a gigantic scam?

It's not like the source of the power is untraceable once it goes over the border, or CA is claiming the source of the power is a national security secret and just trust us it's much more expensive solar power, ignore that the power lines are running to coal fired power plants just over the border.

Re:Price

[PopeRatzo]

Average residential rate in California is 50% higher than in Texas.

That is not true. I just moved from Houston, Texas, the "energy corridor" to the Central Coast of California. I know it's not true because I have first-hand experience paying the bills in both places.

Gasoline is high at the pump, but electricity and natural gas don't work out to be much higher than in Houston. Plus, living here is worth every penny.

Also, food is more expensive in Houston - even meat, and property taxes are lower. Schools are better by a long shot, the air is cleaner, the streets are cleaner, the girls are prettier and there's surfing.

Re:At what cost?

[hawguy]

Keep in mind that medicine in the US is another industry that suffers from extreme price distortion due to various sorts of government intervention (such as excessive regulation, excessive education requirements, an artificially limited supply of practitioners, mandatory insurance that encourages excessive billing, and so on).

So you agree that coal leads to health problems, and you don't have a problem with that, you only have a problem with the way health costs are accounted? A 6 year with asthma is fine as long as the cost to treat him is accounted for properly?