California ISO solar production soars to new record - 8,030 megawatts

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISO-SolarProductionSoarsToNewRecord-8030Megawatts.pdf

[font face=Serif]For immediate release | July 14, 2016

[font size=5]California ISO solar production soars to new record - 8,030 megawatts[/font]
[font size=4]Clean energy now consistently serves large percentage of consumer demand[/font]

[font size=3]FOLSOM, Calif. – Solar power production hit a new record of 8,030 megawatts at 1:06 p.m. Tuesday, July 12, 2016. This is nearly twice the amount of solar energy produced in mid-2014 and nearly 2,000 megawatts higher than in May 2015.

“This solar production record demonstrates that California is making significant strides forward in connecting low carbon resources to the grid in meeting the state’s goal of reaching 33 percent renewables by 2020,” said ISO President and CEO Steve Berberich. “California continues to lead the nation in adding clean resources to the system and writing a playbook for operating a low carbon grid.”

Solar and wind combined with the other Renewables Portfolio Standard resources to provide nearly 29 percent of the electricity needs at Tuesday’s system peak, which occurred at 5:54 p.m. For short periods of time on May 14 and 15, 2016, renewables were serving 54 percent and 56 percent of demand, respectively.

California leads the nation interconnecting renewable resources with total clean capacity as of this date about 18,718 megawatts. Solar resources make up nearly 8,600 megawatts while wind resources total about 6,000 megawatts, which compose one-third of all renewables on the grid. Geothermal, biofuels, small hydro-electricity and energy storage round out California’s renewables portfolio standard resources.[/font][/font]

[msongs]

1. solar on every business and home roof top...it is our sun not edison's nt

[Old and In the Way]

2. Decentralized energy is labor intensive and impossible to target.

[caraher]

3. I hate sentences like this one

"This is nearly twice the amount of solar energy produced in mid-2014 and nearly 2,000 megawatts higher than in May 2015."

It's power, not energy. Watts are a unit of power... and it's also what allows these flashy figures to appear - it's a snapshot, a moment when renewables hit a high instantaneous production mark (hence the very specific 1:06 PM).

I think it's remarkable that the May 14 and May 15 peaks were a much higher fraction of demand; does that give a sense of how much of that power goes to air conditioning, that in July this record production was only 29% of demand while the percentages in May (for what I presume was comparably high production in absolute terms) were over 50%?

[NNadir]

4. This news item is illiterate, since it cites a unit of power as a unit of production. The data...

...on the failed, extremely expensive and useless California solar production is available on the web page of the California energy commission.

It's here: Open the California Energy Page Electricity Generation by Resource Type (1983-2014) Excel File


In 2014, California produced 10,557 Gigawatt-hours of solar electricity. By contrast the state consumed 293,843 gigawatt-hours of electricity. This translates to the equivalent, as average continuous power to 1,204 MW, except that solar plants cannot and never will be able to produce average continuous power, since, unbeknownst to the advocates of the expensive failure, something called "night" exists.

So called "renewable energy" as a whole is declining in California, because what has always been the largest source of it in the state, hydroelectricity, is rapidly declining, failing in fact. Some people, myself among them, suspect that climate change is going to make the situation worse, dramatically worse, and we don't give a rat's ass, because we have a dogmatic faith based belief that so called "renewable energy" will do something meaningful. It hasn't; it isn't; and it won't.

This continuous need to lie to ourselves, to scatter toxic materials over huge amounts of surface area with no regard to the future and future generations in a futile effort to claim that the so called "renewable" solar energy industry is worthwhile is why 2016 is seeing increases in the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide concentrations that are running, on average, 3.5 - 4.0 ppm, greater than those observed in 2015, with 2015 having been the worst year ever recorded, at 3.05 ppm over 2014.

This is a disaster on a vast and irredeemable scale, and we're literally pissing in the wind of a hurricane.

The biggest source of electricity in California is dangerous natural gas, which was responsible for the generation of 121,934 gigawatt-hours of electricity. The waste from this energy generation was dumped, indiscriminately, without any significant treatment, directly into the planetary atmosphere. This is a crime against all future geneerations.

This figure was nearly matched by California's electricity imports, 85,500 GWh.

Happy Friday.