California Lawmakers Set Goal for 100 Percent Renewable Energy

[Swordsmyth]

The California State Assembly has passed a bill requiring 100 percent of the state's electricity to come from renewable sources by 2030, according to the state Legislature's website.

More at: https://worldview.stratfor.com/situation-report/us-california-lawmakers-set-goal-100-percent-renewable-energy

[oyarde]

They should just shut everything down and require it now , what is wrong with them ? are they irresponsible and do not care about the planet ? On a serious note , that means there is only to 2030 to build the wall to keep them out , because they will be like the zombie apocalypse when there is not enough power to run the AC .

[Zippyjuan]

They already produce more than one might think. There is only one coal plant in the entire state.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/california-renewable-energy-record-80-per-cent-state-power-green-methods-water-hydro-wind-solar-a7748956.html


California breaks energy record with 80% of state's power generated using renewable methods

The Golden State has soaked up enough rays to generate 67.2 per cent of its energy from renewable sources last month, smashing previous records.

When combining California’s largest grid with hydropower facilities, renewable energy rose even further to 80.7 per cent of total energy generation on 13 May.

Thanks to ample sunshine, full water reservoirs and more solar facilities, the California Independent System Operator, the largest grid in the state, beat previous records.

California also set a new record on 16 May for wind power, producing 4,985 megawatts on one day.

"It's going to be a dynamic year for records," CISO spokesperson Steven Greenlee told SF Gate. "The solar records in particular are falling like dominoes."

More at link.

Yes, that was just one day. On average, it does run over 50%.

[Danke]

conclusion
The “100 percent renewable” claim is misleading and disingenuous. As much as companies like Google and Apple love to tout their purchases of wind and solar power, it’s a good thing for their customers that the companies actually still run on reliable and affordable power from the grid (factories and data centers have no use for dilute, intermittent power). The trouble with propagating the 100 percent renewable myth is that it provides the misinformation the wind and solar lobby needs in order to be successful. It makes these technologies sound practical, which helps lobbyists for the wind and solar industries push for subsidies and mandates that impose expensive and unreliable technologies on the rest of us. Going 100 percent renewable is an outrageously expensive and impractical thing to do—it’s irresponsible to make it sound easy or even desirable.

https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/wind/busting-the-100-percent-renewable-myth/

[Danke]

Researchers Have Been Underestimating the Cost of Wind and Solar



How should electricity from wind turbines and solar panels be evaluated? Should it be evaluated as if these devices are stand-alone devices? Or do these devices provide electricity that is of such low quality, because of its intermittency and other factors, that we should recognize the need for supporting services associated with actually putting the electricity on the grid? This question comes up in many types of evaluations, including Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI), Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), and Energy Payback Period (EPP).
I recently gave a talk called The Problem of Properly Evaluating Intermittent Renewable Resources (https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/tverberg_problem-of-properly-evaluating-intermittent-renewables.pdf) (PDF) at a BioPhysical Economics Conference in Montana. As many of you know, this is the group that is concerned about Energy Returned on Energy Invested (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested) (EROI). As you might guess, my conclusion is that the current methodology is quite misleading. Wind and solar are not really stand-alone devices when it comes to providing the kind of electricity that is needed by the grid. Grid operators, utilities, and backup electricity providers must provide hidden subsidies to make the system really work.
This problem is currently not being recognized by any of the groups evaluating wind and solar, using techniques such as LCOE, EROI, LCA, and EPP. As a result, published results suggest that wind and solar are much more beneficial than they really are. The distortion affects both pricing and the amount of supposed CO2 savings.
One of the questions that came up at the conference was, “Is this distortion actually important when only a small amount of intermittent electricity is added to the grid?” For that reason, I have included discussion of this issue as well. My conclusion is that the problem of intermittency and the pricing distortions it causes is important, even at low grid penetrations. There may be some cases where intermittent renewables are helpful additions without buffering (especially when the current fuel is oil, and wind or solar can help reduce fuel usage), but there are likely to be many other instances where the costs involved greatly exceed the benefits gained. We need to be doing much more thoughtful analyses of costs and benefits in particular situations to understand exactly where intermittent resources might be helpful.
A big part of our problem is that we are dealing with variables that are “not independent.” If we add subsidized wind and solar, that act, by itself, changes the needed pricing for all of the other types of electricity. The price per kWh of supporting types of electricity needs to rise, because their EROIs fall as they are used in a less efficient manner. This same problem affects all of the other pricing approaches as well, including LCOE. Thus, our current pricing approaches make intermittent wind and solar look much more beneficial than they really are.
A clear workaround for this non-independence problem is to look primarily at the cost (in terms of EROI or LCOE) in which wind and solar are part of overall “packages” that produce grid-quality electricity, at the locations where they are needed. If we can find solutions on this basis, there would seem to be much more of a chance that wind and solar could be ramped up to a significant share of total electricity. The “problem” is that there is a lower bound on an acceptable EROI (probably 10:1, but possibly as low as 3:1 based on the work of Charles Hall (http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/2/1/25/pdf)). This is somewhat equivalent to an upper bound on the affordable cost of electricity using LCOE.
This means that if we really expect to scale wind and solar, we probably need to be creating packages of grid-quality electricity (wind or solar, supplemented by various devices to create grid quality electricity) at an acceptably high EROI. This is very similar to a requirement that wind or solar energy, including all of the necessary adjustments to bring them to grid quality, be available at a suitably low dollar cost–probably not too different from today’s wholesale cost of electricity. EROI theory would strongly suggest that energy costs for an economy cannot rise dramatically, without a huge problem for the economy. Hiding rising energy costs with government subsidies cannot fix this problem.






more:

https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/researchers-have-been-underestimating-cost-wind-and-solar

[oyarde]

I have no energy problems here . Coal fired electricity , gasoline generator backup, natural gas and wood heat , natural gas , propane gas and wood cooking , lamp oil , well water , other public utility water , pond water , creek water .

[Schifference]

I would think the city's job would be to purchase their power from the most affordable provider.

[Origanalist]

http://i.imgur.com/ir0JiyM.jpg

[shakey1]

https://www.eta.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/pedalpowerdesk.jpg

[idiom]

They so borked.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Picture1-copy.jpg