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0 pointstoomuchtodo3y ago0 comments

Absolutely. California alone is curtailing enormous amounts of renewables, hundreds of thousands of MWh/month (depending on the season). That is literally clean energy being thrown away (which, depending on system design, is variably tolerable; you're balancing cost, transmission congestion, and renewables offsetting fossil combustion). More transmission, more batteries, more storage, more load shifting (both temporal and geographic)? All of the above.

https://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/ManagingOversupply.aspx

0 comments

WalterBright3y ago

California's oversupply problem is caused by, allow me to guess, fixed 24/7 electricity rates. These fixed rates remove all incentive for load shifting.

Make electricity cheap when the sun shines, and expensive at night, and the market will shift demand. There are lots of cheap and easy ways to shift demand, I've outlined several on HN.

zbrozek3y ago

In most of California (served by PG&E) it's really expensive during the day, blisteringly expensive in the evening, and really expensive at night.

WalterBright3y ago

> really expensive during the day

Doesn't really seem to fit with having surplus power.

zbrozek3y ago

I blame the CPUC for basically everything regarding the crappiness of being a grid customer in California. PG&E is exactly the result you'd expect to get in our regulatory environment.

Our regulators rubber stamp every tariff plan the company puts forth, and lets them get a larger profit margin on capex vs opex. So of course the optimal strategy is to run all equipment to failure and replace it with maximally expensive everything as frequently as possible.

Torching the state is the business plan.

sdenton43y ago

PG&E also has to pay for occasionally burning half the state.

NavinF3y ago

Can confirm. Rates are 64% higher than the US average and 100% higher than a lot of states. I wonder what they do with all this money.

zbrozek3y ago

US average kWh is 14.77 cents while PG&E TOU-C starts at 37.460 and goes up to 48.902. So it's worse than you list.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...

2 more replies

Gibbon13y ago

I'm more likely to be dubious about the free markets supposedly unique ability to solve problems than not.

But buying electricity at $50/mwhr at noon and reselling it at $200 mwh six hours later.

WalterBright3y ago

Solar power gets expensive at night.

Gibbon13y ago

Yeah that's the source of the arbitrage.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

WalterBright3y ago

California's oversupply problem is caused by, allow me to guess, fixed 24/7 electricity rates. These fixed rates remove all incentive for load shifting.

Make electricity cheap when the sun shines, and expensive at night, and the market will shift demand. There are lots of cheap and easy ways to shift demand, I've outlined several on HN.

zbrozek3y ago

In most of California (served by PG&E) it's really expensive during the day, blisteringly expensive in the evening, and really expensive at night.

WalterBright3y ago

> really expensive during the day

Doesn't really seem to fit with having surplus power.

zbrozek3y ago

I blame the CPUC for basically everything regarding the crappiness of being a grid customer in California. PG&E is exactly the result you'd expect to get in our regulatory environment.

Torching the state is the business plan.

sdenton43y ago

PG&E also has to pay for occasionally burning half the state.

NavinF3y ago

Can confirm. Rates are 64% higher than the US average and 100% higher than a lot of states. I wonder what they do with all this money.

zbrozek3y ago

US average kWh is 14.77 cents while PG&E TOU-C starts at 37.460 and goes up to 48.902. So it's worse than you list.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...

2 more replies

Gibbon13y ago

I'm more likely to be dubious about the free markets supposedly unique ability to solve problems than not.

But buying electricity at $50/mwhr at noon and reselling it at $200 mwh six hours later.

WalterBright3y ago

Solar power gets expensive at night.

Gibbon13y ago

Yeah that's the source of the arbitrage.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse