> No mention of exporting kWh during the summer days and importing during winter nights?

Almost certainly a great deal of this.

But

> > No offsets shenanigans.

Means they're not entering some shady arrangement with someone else that is doing green things and doing accounting magic to claim it's about the same. It's much harder to play games when you're talking about netting zero on-site.

> Still good as every kWh of solar is a kWh of gas not burnt.

This is becoming much less true in many places with a lot of solar, e.g. California.

Is California not able to export electricity?

The lowest I see in thee last week was 3.1GW of natural gas for CISO. Similar amount to the lowest gas usage last June and July (2.7GW I think on June 19)

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...

IIUC it's complicated.

Because the grid is, fundamentally, still storage-starved (though that's been improving in recent years), even with export the CA energy companies run into grid over-saturation problems on clear, sunny days. Eventually losses catch up with you pushing the power geographically far enough; they couldn't, for example, power the entire United States off of enough California solar.

So I naively suspect the issue is either exporting just saturates the adjacent grids too or other power companies are loathe to crash their prices by letting their grids saturate and therefore use whatever restrictions are allowed against exporting to keep CA's surplus off their grids.

Except the data seems to show that California Independent System Operator (CISO) has not had a single hour where Gas hasn't produced at least 1GWh of electricity, even in the height of the day in the height of summer with the lowest demand, not even close

Maybe there are local bottlenecks inside the CISO network, but that's a very separate problem.

Interesting. That makes me wonder if the gas plants have to operate at some minimal output level because they can't go all the way into cold shutdown without risking grid integrity should something unexpected happen. Except that I was under the impression that gas-plants, in general, are bootstrappable plants and can kickstart themselves from a cold shutdown.

Not all are bootstrap-capable, and many do co-generation for district heating, which can power absorption heat pumps for cooling in the summer.

Also a gas turbine core that's spinning can modulate power in seconds, unlike one that has to first be brought up to speed with external power (even if that's from batteries, or an on-site diesel (like AFAIK in the case of the black start capability of the downtown power plant in Wuppertal Barmen)).

Ultra high voltage lines can reach all the way to the east coast with 10% losses and supposedly about 10 cents per kWh for construction and maintenance. And that's AC, which HVDC might beat.

So it seems to me like you could power the US off california solar if they had enough.

That’s pretty incredible to think about. I didn’t think that was feasible.

Brazil has two or three 1200 mile plus HVDC lines in operation

The longest curently runing line is over 2500km, which from Los Angeles would cover the entirety of 17 states as well as cities like Vancouver, Calgary and even Winnipeg

> Brazil has two or three 1200 mile plus HVDC lines in operation

There are four: Xingu-Estreito and Xingu-Rio for the Belo Monte dam, and the two parallel Rio Madeira lines for the Santo Antônio and Jirau dams on the Madeira river. They all take large amounts of hydroelectric power from the sparsely populated North region to the densely populated Southeast region. (There are also the two parallel Itaipu HVDC lines, but they're shorter than 1200 miles.)

> even with export the CA energy companies run into grid over-saturation problems on clear, sunny days

Which day, specifically, had zero natural gas generation?