California can't use all its solar power. That's a huge problem. CA's solar plants don't even operate at full capacity

[Caribbeans]

California can't use all its solar power. That's a huge problem.

As residents see sky-high bills, California's solar plants don't even operate at full capacity

SF Gate.com | Stephen Council, Tech Reporter | Dec 2, 2024

Over the past two decades, California has become a juggernaut of solar energy production. But that doesn’t mean its residents are reaping huge benefits.

A new analysis by Los Angeles Times staff writer Melody Petersen found major problems in the state’s current solar economy. Oversupply of solar power is causing California’s operators to regularly halt production or even pay electricity traders to take power off their hands. Sometimes, other states snag the extra energy for cheap. Meanwhile, California residents, businesses and factories pay around two to three times as much for power as the national average.

There are a range of factors at play, but a key takeaway from the Times’ analysis is that California’s most-in-the-nation solar panel buildup isn’t enough for an ideal alternative energy model. Millions of dollars of electricity go to waste because the infrastructure isn’t in place to store or move all the solar power.

California boasts some of the biggest solar farms in North America, with three huge plants opened in the mid-2010s. The state was responsible for nearly a fourth of utility-scale American solar power generation in 2023. California has an even larger share of the nation’s small-scale market, with many homes and businesses sporting their own panels. But as the Times pointed out, residential rates for customers of PG&E and Southern California Edison have risen by 51% over the past three years, far surpassing general inflation.

Despite the high prices, the Times found that California’s solar farms have curtailed production — meaning slowed or stopped — of more than 3 million megawatt hours over the past 12 months. That’s more than twice the amount from 2021, per the outlet, and is enough wasted energy to power 518,000 average Californian homes for a year. Meanwhile, the state is trying to build more solar plants to reach its renewable energy goals; a UC Berkeley researcher cited by the Times raised concerns that the intense curtailment will get in the way...more
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/california-solar-power-oversupply-problem-19953942.php

Whatever could be done with too much renewable energy?

[NNadir]

1. No rational person builds a plant to accommodate a few hours every few weeks of otherwise useless power.

The solar fantasy is grotesque, a complete failure and has left the planet in flames.

The idea that one build a huge expensive plant so to satisfy bourgeois fantasies about hydrogen, this as a tool to greenwash fossil fuels, since almost all of the hydrogen on this planet is made from fossil fuels, this on a planet where billions of people lack access to improved sanitation shows just how clueless we are on this planet.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

Posting pictures of vast landscapes industrialized for the solar fantasy does not change the fact that hydrogen is overwhelming made by the use of fossil fuels. It's simply dishonest advertising since most people foolishly believe solar energy is significant and "green," neither of which are true.

[Think. Again.]

4. I agree, Hydrogen should only be made using some of this excess green energy rather than fossil fuels...

Not only would that use the immense non-CO2 emitting energy now being produced more cheaply than fossil fuels, it would also produce the transportable storage medium we need to supply that clean energy 24 hours a day.

[Figarosmom]

6. Hydrogen is only

The stored energy. If the energy is used directly there is no need to store.

[Think. Again.]

7. Or we could store the excess clean energy using Hydrogen made from other excess clean energy!

A win-win!

[NNadir]

11. Around here, there is a lot of ignorant people who regard energy storage as primary energy. In any case...

...solar energy is a trivial form of energy. California never stops burning dangerous natural gas and dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere.

[Think. Again.]

2. "Millions of dollars of electricity go to waste because the infrastructure isn't in place to store or move all the solar

Sounds like there's a simple solution...

Build out more storage and distribution resources.

Now.

[SleeplessinSoCal]

8. is there funding coming from the infrastructure bill?

There should be.

[Think. Again.]

9. Oh yes, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment Act both dedicate funds to energy distribution...

...and on top of that, as the article above points out, there is a lot of unrealized profit from currently unsold energy that could be used as investment funds for this, too.

[Figarosmom]

3. It proves it's not pie in the sky thinking

Sell it cheaply to blue states and with a markup to red states

[Think. Again.]

5. Great idea!

[druidity33]

10. That won't work.

You can't really MOVE solar energy. It's even problematic to store. It's stored in the SUN you know... and that's far away.

[NNadir]

12. It proves no such thing. It's garbage thinking.

[BubbaJoe]

13. Other forms of energy storage are possible for CA

Given the proximity to the mountains, there are gravity storage methods, either hoisting weight to a high level with excess energy then letting it descend to generate power when the sun goes down, or using pumps and resevoirs to pump water up hill with excess energy to drive turbines at night. efficiency is around 80 to 85% usingf these methods.

Although the video is using electrolysis and water to generate Hydrogen (no fossil fuels are used) efficiency is not as good (70 to 80%) but since you are using excess electricity produced by sunlight maybe that is OK. I like the idea of using fuel cells to generate the power from the hydrogen.

We need to remember although solar cells have been around for a while, how to store that energy is relatively new. There will be progress in this area (epecially if there is profit to be made). It will take time, but it will come.

[usonian]

14. How giant 'batteries' in the Earth could slash your electricity bills.

https://grist.org/climate/long-duration-energy-storage-batteries-store-solar-wind-power/

We're wasting too much of the clean energy we generate. Reservoirs and caverns can store excess solar and wind power.

So pump water.

[NNadir]

15. We don't generate very much "clean" energy.

The idea that we need therefore to store it at a thermodyamic penalty is one of the most tragic ideas to float around. It is, in fact, the opposite of good sense.

Combined the solar and wind industry produced, as of 2023 just 16 Exajoules of energy on a planet now consuming 642 Exajoules per year, despite trillions of dollars squandered on them.

The idea that energy storage is a good idea is the intellectual equivalent of the belief during the middle ages that the cure for bubonic plague was to huddle in rat infested churches to pray.

[msongs]

16. should be rooftop solar on houses and businesses not solar farms for corporate welfare nt

[NNadir]

17. Yup. There's nothing better on this planet than giving tax breaks to the rich; houses would be the thing to do it.

Zillow, average price, San Diego home.

You know what?

There are over 1.5 billion people who lack access to any kind of sanitation, not that our "solar will save us" types give a rat's ass about human poverty.

Clearly they don't.

It's not like any of these kinds of bourgeois clueless ones who pretend to give a shit about the environment by hyping the trillion dollars squandered on solar energy for no result other than the acceleration of fossil fuel use and rates of accumulation of carbon dioxide give anymore of a level of concern than they do for the extreme global heating we now experience.

The Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa: Yet Another Update 12/03/2024

To these types, subsidizing rich home owners is the way to go. It's straight out the rhetoric of that bourgeois asshole Amory Lovins, and his swell, renewable demonstration home in Snowmass Colorado, just outside of Aspen for them. You can tour it for a fee, um, whoops, I mean a "donation."

No wonder the United States is crumbling under the weight of ignorance. People are actually proud of their ignorance, especially when they couple it to willful indifference to human suffering.

The cluelessness is appalling, to me at least.