CA Extreme Temperatures, Electricity Demand Peaks, Timing of So Called "Renewable Energy" peaks.
Last edited Sat Jun 19, 2021, 01:03 PM - Edit history (3)
Extreme heat being experienced in California and it is worth considering how so called "renewable energy" is faring on addressing the electricity demand associated with the need for cooling. I have been following this extreme weather event as well as sources of electricity over the last few days utilizing the real time data at the CAISO website, which details in graphics and text how power is being generated on the California electrical grid.
The data is available at the CAISO website: CAISO Website.
CAISO uses the 24 hour clock, (military time).
Parts of this post will include verbatim language from the previous two posts in this series, particularly with respect to an interesting note from the scientific literature on human survivability in extreme heat situations listing some references - not comprehensive by any means - to the death tolls associated with similar events.
The two earlier posts are here:
CAISO: Heat Wave in CA,So Called "Renewable Electricity" Matched Gas Electricity for 10 Minutes.
Looking at CAISO demand and supply of electricity during extreme California temperatures.
For the record, I am an ex-Californian (but not a native of that state). I lived there, on an off, for a total of about 13 years, leaving for good in 1993. For many of those years, I heard about how wonderful so called "renewable energy" was, and observed many bills that were passed by the legislature and signed by the Governors of the State setting goals for a "renewable nirvanas" the state was going to become with the "...by 'such and such year.'" This historical "...by 'such and such year'" language is still in use today, even as the planetary atmosphere is collapsing, as the current events in California show, not "...by 'such and such year,'" but now.
I pulled up the daily hourly temperature data from some random inland California cities that I remember visiting or passing through:
Indio's high on 06/18/21 was 119°F, (48°C), recorded at 17:53 (2:53) pm. From 11:45 PDT to 19:00 PDT (17:00) the temperatures were above 110°F, (43°C), and from 8:45 to 22:10 PDT (10:10 PM) the temperature was above 100°F, (38°C).
Indio is in the Imperial Valley, a major agriculture area, the "salad bowl" of America; the agriculture is supported by irrigation using the rapidly dying Colorado River where all time lows (since the 1930's when it was built) in the level of "Lake" Mead behind the Hoover Dam are being recorded, not by "...by 'such and such year,'" but now. This is not going to be a good year for cheap salads.
Bakersfield's high was 109°F, (43°C) at 17:54 PTD (5:54 pm). This is the same temperature used by the researchers testing human heat endurance in the reference and text I will repeat below from the earlier post. Temperatures in that city were at or above 100 °F, (37°C) from 11:00 PDT to to 18:00 PDT (6:00 PM).
Lancaster's high on 06/18/21 was 109°F, (43°C), recorded at 15:40 PDT (3:40 PM). Temperatures in that city were at or above 100 °F, (37°C) from 9:45 PDT to to 17:56 PDT (5:56 PM).
Pretty much every day my wife and I celebrate the fact that we now live in what, for me, is the best state in the Union, New Jersey. We enjoyed the time we spent together in California in our early marriage, but we now consider that California is rapidly becoming uninhabitable. I lived through California droughts, and always tried to do my part, flushing the toilet with collected shower water from short showers, wearing clothes a few extra days to avoid needing to laundering them, fixing leaks as soon as I saw them, among other things.
No crisis in California I experienced however, is anything like the crisis now being experienced, a climate crisis.
The real time CAISO graphics by the way reset each night at midnight.
It happened that I was up in the middle of the night around 2 am EDT, so I was able to capture the electricity state near the end of the California for nearly the entire day.
California is often presented as a so called "renewable energy" paradise.
We are nearing the summer solstice, and of course, California is a putative solar energy nirvana in particular.
Since I check this website frequently, and have been doing so as we approach the solstice, we can expect that so called "renewable energy" will be dominated by solar production in the early afternoon.
People like to cheer for what so called "renewable energy" does at peaks or to compare brief periods when it is producing more energy than energy production for energy production systems they hate, or pretend to hate. For about 2 hours yesterday in the morning hours, well before the peak heat hours, so called "renewable energy" was producing more than dangerous natural gas. Advocates of so called "renewable energy" love to tell me that they hate dangerous natural gas, which they call "transitional." I know better. They're full of shit. Perhaps they're lying to themselves when they say this, but I'm unimpressed when they try this lie out on me. So called "renewable energy" depends on access to dangerous natural gas; this was true yesterday in California, after decades of jawboning in that State about how so called "renewable energy" would save to day "...by 'such and such year,'" the majority of air conditioners in an extreme heatwave would have had to shut down if California did not have access to dangerous natural gas, lots of dangerous natural gas.
Dangerous natural gas is not clean; it is not safe, and it releases significant amounts of the important dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide, and leaks for the transport and use of dangerous natural gas releases the second most important climate forcing gas, methane.
Even though the climate change is killing the planet, and in this event and in other areas, California, California was compelled to make things worse because their "renewable energy" fantasy continues, and I contend will always continue, to depend on access to dangerous natural gas.
There is no doubt in my mind that people are being killed by heat this week in California, even if there have been no major power outages and most of the air conditioners in the State or running. Most of the dead will be poor people, not that bourgeois types who have bet the future of humanity on so called "renewable energy," a form of energy with an oxymoronic title inasmuch as the dependence of vast mining of irreplaceable elemental resources means it is inherently not sustainable, give a rat's ass about poor people. They'd rather discuss their Tesla electric cars.
Humans cannot survive temperatures much higher than 120°F (49°C) without drinking copious amounts of water. A small human clinical trial with 10 young healthy male volunteers, evaluated strategies for survival at lower temperatures (43.0 ± 0.5 °C) than we're seeing in Indio, in a 90 min trial, in the absence of air conditioning:
Intermittent wetting clothing as a cooling strategy for body heat strain alleviation of vulnerable populations during a severe heatwave incident (Song, Wang, Zhang, Journal of Thermal Biology 79 (2019) 33–41).
The subjects, all men in their early 20s dressed in light clothing, all lost about 120 - 130 grams of water to evaporation and produced about 350 grams of sweat in this period.
The introduction to that paper had some fun text about the death toll associated with heat waves, albeit assuredly not in any way a comprehensive accounting:
In extremely hot environments (Tair? 40 °C), people like the poor and the homeless in backward areas do not have a chance to access air-conditioning. Hence, they have a high risk of suffering heat stress during prolonged heatwave incidents. In fact, statistical data showed that those populations account for a large proportion of heat-induced death tolls (Åström et al., 2011, Gronlund, 2014, Gubernot et al., 2014). Besides, extreme heatwaves put strains on the electrical power grid and cause power outages in some regions which renders electrically powered cooling devices (e.g., air-conditioning, electric fans and water pumps) useless...
Power outages in these conditions can kill a person.
Of course, people don't often discuss the death toll associated with heat waves. Most people, in my experience, would rather talk about the 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan in which 20,000 people died from seawater, although the deaths from seawater are in no way as interesting as the possibility that someone some day somewhere may die from radiation that leaked from nuclear reactors destroyed by the Tsunami.
I'm frequently told that nuclear power is "too dangerous," by people who apparently believe that climate change is not "too dangerous." By contrast, I've been hearing for most of my adult life - I'm decidedly not young - that so called "renewable energy" will save the day. It hasn't saved the day and it isn't saving the day, but in these times, we like to substitute faith for facts.
Blind faith, and even cognizant faith, often involves lying, lies we tell ourselves, lies we tell other people.
And of course, we live in an age of the celebration of the lie, both on the right wing, and regrettably, on our side of the aisle.
There is one nuclear plant left in California, Diablo Canyon (2 reactors). For most of the day yesterday it was producing about 2,265 MW of electricity in two small buildings, more than all the wind turbines in California were producing between the hours of 4:50 PDT and 17:40 PDT (5:40 PM). The reactor came on line 36 years ago, and is functioning fine. It's reliable and predictable. No one has been killed by pollution produced by the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant. I contend that the used nuclear fuel stored there, all of it on site, will be a valuable resource for future generations that will be less stupid than mine has been.
Some graphics from the CAISO site relating to the period that all the wind turbines in California were producing less energy than all the wind turbines in California, including many hours of extreme temperatures:
According to the California Energy Commission the "capacity" of wind energy is 5,983 MW, more than 40 years after the State began authorizing the destruction of huge stretches of pristine wilderness for wind farms, beginning in the late 1970's at Altamont. I lived in California at the time, and I confess, with more than a little contempt for my youth, that I cheered for the wind turbines in California. I will not forgive myself, nor should I.
People who embrace the lie that so called "renewable energy" is sustainable and environmentally benign like to point to peak capacity of wind (and solar) installations as if they are the same as peak capacity at nuclear plants. At 2265 Megawatts, the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, about to be destroyed out of a sense of contempt for the collapse of the atmosphere by people who can't think straight, was functioning very close to 100% of its rated capacity. By contrast, all of the wind turbines spread over vast areas now rendered into industrial parks in the State were operating for the period they were producing less energy than the nuclear plants were operating at less than 37% capacity.
I'd like to point to the fact that at 4:50 PDT solar energy was sucking energy out of the grid rather than adding to it. This was related to the fact that there is a period of time known as "night" every 24 hours, predictably and reliably. The fact that solar energy was sucking power out of the grid is involved with the requirement that copper wires are required to connect all of this so called "renewable energy" garbage to the grid, all of which will become landfill within the next 25 years.
An interesting fact about California energy supplies is that in the case of electricity it has been found out that all these wires connecting all this unreliable crap sometimes overheat. Huge fires have resulted, because the dryness caused by climate change, climate change being connected with the faith based fashion for so called "renewable energy" has had no effect on slowing climate change at all - the rate of degradation of the atmosphere during these years of world wide enthusiasm for so called "renewable energy" is accelerating, not decelerating. As a result, the California power grid has been shut down at times of high heat and high winds by its operators to prevent fires.
If you think all these wires are not connected with enthusiasm for so called "renewable energy," you're not paying attention. A recent scientific paper in a scientific journal I regularly read reported that way to address what the Germans call "Dunkelflaute," wind and solar droughts that mimic water droughts, has proposed that the way to address Dunkelflaute in California is even more mining of more copper to make more wires:
Wind and Solar Resource Droughts in California Highlight the Benefits of Long-Term Storage and Integration with the Western Interconnect (Katherine Z. Rinaldi, Jacqueline A. Dowling, Tyler H. Ruggles, Ken Caldeira, and Nathan S. Lewis Environmental Science & Technology 2021 55 (9), 6214-6226)
Again, unfortunately the last nuclear plant in California is about to close because of appeals to ignorance. That will raise the dependency of gas on California. No replacement of this valuable resource, which is at this exact point, producing more energy than all the wind turbines in the entire state, this without turning vast tracts of wilderness into industrial parks, is planned.
The nuclear plant will be replaced by dangerous natural gas. There will be lots of outright lies told to the contrary, but the plant will be replaced by dangerous natural gas.
With the climate induced failure of the Lake Mead/Hoover Dam hydroelectric system expected this summer, large hydro will also be replaced by burning dangerous natural gas. So much for making more and more and more of California's electricity supply dependent on good weather, even if the State is known for "good weather," which ironically enough, includes an absence of rain.
Some more graphics downloaded from the CAISO website in the early morning hours of EDT about the late evening hours PDT:
The solar energy peak power production:
Peak power demand in California, which was 40,751 MW, recorded at 17:53 PDT, (5:53 PM). This graphic shows the grid at 17:50 (5:50 PM) :
This graphic, part of which, the exact number so called "renewable energy" portion, was mistakenly cut off in the sloppy wee hours of the morning when I was suffering from insomnia, shows pretty much all of the energy sources at the peak hour. By eyeballing the graphics, one can see that so called "renewable energy" was producing about 12,000 MW, and falling, as the sun went down. Except for the lone nuclear plant and the large hydro which is now due to become as unreliable as solar and wind in Dunkelflaute events, almost all of the electricity in California was produced by burning dangerous fossil fuels and dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste, including but not limited to carbon dioxide, directly into the planetary atmosphere where it is destroying that atmosphere:
The supply position at around the hour I gave up in disgust and tried to go back to bed.
There is a serious risk of California, particularly Southern California, becoming uninhabitable, particularly with respect to the effect of climate change, to which dangerous natural gas is a contributor, on water supplies. You may think I'm being extreme here, but I don't think so.
We're kidding ourselves if we think we're doing anything to address climate change.
History will not forgive us; nor should it.
I wish all fathers a happy "Father's Day" tomorrow. Both my sons will be with me tomorrow to celebrate our relationship.
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Of course, it could be too late before that makes any difference. 
