We are way way past that at this point. The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day. Because of solar PV, the cheapest generation now, the daytime electricity supply is actually more than we need in California. Solar farms (and also wind farms)get curtailed here due to supplying more than the grid can take at times; this is usually for several hours.
Source; reporter covering solar news through interviews with grid operators, solar developers and policymakers since 2008
It's fine to say that California is producing more than it needs on net, but adding up total production over 24h and subtracting total consumption over 24h and seeing a positive value isn't meaningful if you're actually dependent on conventional sources for 12 hours a day.
But sure, it's more than a few minutes.
The article says renewable supply exceeded demand for “0.25-6 h per day”. This is great, but its not most of the day.
Nuclear makes for square supply curves which are kind of hard to handle, especially if you have a large percentage of your supply from a few reactors like they do in Finland.
However, battery is improving the capacity factor of renewables; especially solar by allowing two things:
- when there's too much of it, you can charge batteries with energy that would otherwise be curtailed/wasted. - when there's not enough solar, you can discharge batteries.
Both effects help dampen peaks and dips in renewable energy supply and demand. I.e. it helps flatten the curve similar to what you point out is the case with nuclear. The first effect is often over looked: we are actively curtailing renewable energy that we don't know what to do with. People talk about shortages but not about surpluses. And that's actually a lot of energy. It also leads to the fallacy in believing that having lots of EVs increases energy demand when actually it also allows for better utilization of surpluses. Which dampens the impact this has.
Grids are bottle-necked on a lack of cable capacity. We have overproduction of energy in one region and shortages in another. Northern and southern Germany are a good example where on a windy day in the north, the wind energy can't get to the industries in the south that need it. So, they fire up coal plants. The same is the case in the UK where getting wind energy from Scotland south is a problem.
Cables and batteries help improve utilization of renewables. The main thing that drives these things is cost. Nuclear is costly and very slow to deploy. Realistically, any nuclear we don't have right now, won't be there for at least a decade or two. And that's if we would be really diligent about getting to that right now, which of course we aren't.
In the time until then, we'll be deploying solar by the TW/year. Same with batteries. And wind is also growing rapidly. And of course laying some more cables is a lot less controversial than building new nuclear plants. There has been quite a bit of talk of upgrading existing cables with better ones to effectively double capacity. This is even less controversial since the permitting is a lot easier and faster. In short, we'll deploy orders of magnitude more of all this than nuclear, and a lot earlier too. So much that nuclear might turn out to be a rounding error.
20% is more than enough to modulate side by side with renewables.
The French Grid does that all the time intraday.
https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
The reason the French can get away with it is because they have to. If you have this much nuclear on your grid, you can't get around it, the reactors need to follow demand. The good news is that because they have so many reactors, they can have them take turns poisoning their fuel and still have enough time to slowly come back up again. So each night a different reactor ramps down and gets poisoned.
Also, French reactors can take the financial hit of decreasing output much better than American reactors. Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like that. They need to run at 100% all year, or lose billions.
They do it intra-day. You can currently follow that through their monitoring [^1]
> Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like tha
Nuclear reactors tends to be hugely profitable considering their lifetime (80y in USA) but requires an enormous CAPEX.
Like most infrastructure, any attempt to try to fund them entirely privately with investor seeking a 9% quick ROI is doomed to fail.
Hinkley Point is a very good example of that. It is estimated that the price per MWH would be more than halved if the project would have a funding by public bond instead of the current private investor deathtrap.
[^1]: https://energygraph.info/d/gr_6-QW4z/unit-availability?orgId...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/18/french-gove...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-14/france-an...
EDF as hugely profitable and brought back billions to its main stock holder (the French state) for multiple decades.
The recent debt crisis has mainly two causes:
- The state has used EDF to shield consumers against the 2022-2023 energy price increases. EDF has taken the losses directly for the state.
- The results of terrible energy policies the last decades (attempt to reduce nuclear at 50% and mainly the infamous ARENH).
What happened is pretty typical of when you have a state is directly managing a private actor: Incompetent politicians swiping their foots on the company to satisfy their own demagogy.
A lot of times connectivity impacts site selection of projects. A wind farm needs to have good wind, reasonable neighbors, and access to loads. There's articles about not being able to build more wind in northern england because there's not enough transmission infra to get the power where it needs to be.
How do you mean?
Nuclear power plants can scale with demand. They're primarily steam generators and those feed turbines. You have many mechanisms you can use to control total power output in these systems.
In the sense that you're wasting fuel lifetime, to a certain extent, but I imagine that also varies with the level of reactivity currently allowed in the vessel by the control rods.
There are good potential industrial loads for that intermittent extra energy (nuclear or solar): desalination, CO2->methane, air->ammonia, etc.
The headline on the original article seems unhelpful and perhaps deliberately misleading, but unless I’m reading the graphs wrong (quite possible!) this also doesn’t seem, like, a 15 minute window at 2 a.m. where unexpectedly strong winds created a temporary blip of excess production.
I don't think parent actually clicked around in the link he provided.
https://www.ehpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Additional-s...
This isn't true — prices are the same throughout a zone, but Germany and Sweden are not in the same zone. Sweden has several zones. The total possibly export from Sweden to neighbouring countries is not unlimited, which is the reason for the boundaries.
https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/the-power-market/Bidding-ar...
So even if it was a second order effect I had to pay much more than ever before due to increased spot prices in other zones.
Except sweden isn't self sufficient at all with electricity… Can I really say that I'm 100% renewable if I have a tiny solar panel at home, and for the rest I use power from somewhere else?
Sweden exported electricity almost every hour for 2023 (import 40 hours of 8760 = 0.5%). Most of the hours when importing electricity was due to low and negative prices when operators could use water reservoirs as batteries. Currently, there is an obvious overcapacity with an export of almost 20% of production.
You seem to have no idea whatsoever, what is currently going on in Germany, because literally the opposite is true. Germany is trying to practice austerity and keeping its so called "debt brake" (German states have to have a balanced budget, federal state can take up to 0,35% of GDP in new loans) by cutting subsidies, which is why farmers have been protesting in Berlin etc.
https://www.iea.org/countries/sweden
Renewables: 66.9% share of power generation, 2022
Sweden's wind is projected to grow: https://balticwind.eu/swedens-wind-power-surge-a-positive-ou...
but Sweden's grid demand is also projected to rise: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/swedish-power-demand...
I'm not sure Sweden's at the 90+% mark yet ... and besides, that's not counting energy demand in the transport sector and non power generation applications.
The big driver of renewables in California is solar - check the graph for the whole of yesterday, and you'll see how different the picture is during the day.
Yes, there's still a gap overnight which over time will come to be filled by more wind and battery storage. But California's really lucky with solar - it's already so cheap and easy that it makes battery storage financially viable even using today's tech. It's now just a matter of continuing to scale it out...
You can see that last summer, with so much more "powerful" sun, the net demand never went below 2300 MW. Last year went down to 2227 MW. Today, we are down to 366 MW. We manage to produce so much more solar in the last year that the net demand minus renewables went down by ~1800 MW. That means a few more years of improvements like that and we will have excess power generation of solar/wind at least during the day for most days. So if we start storing that excess generated power, we will start making a dent on other times of max power (since we can discharge batteries when max demand is needed).
That's the plan on how to keep lowering the net demand more and more.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html