By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave’s ward
California’s power grid has faced the risk of blackouts and failures for years as state leaders continue to push for aggressive measures to switch to renewable energy sourcespolicy experts told Fox News Digital.
The state power grid, still mainly run on fossil fuelsis undergoing a major shift from natural gas and coal power to renewables such as wind and solar. At the same time, state officials are pushing for the electrification of the economy, especially in the transportation sector. through tram missionis expected to increase pressure on the power grid.
“California is dramatically reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and cleaning our air,” Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a November announcement. The world’s first detailed roadmap towards carbon neutrality.”
The state’s plan includes goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 85%, cut oil use by 94%, and deploy more solar and wind capacity over the next two decades. The aggressive plan to overhaul the state’s energy system comes three months after a top California environmental agency introduced a rule requiring all new car sales to be electric by 2035.
In 2021, the most recent year for data, wind and solar account for about 25% of all electricity generated in California while natural gas accounts for more than 50% of electricity generated in the state. And 19% of new car sales in California are zero-emission vehicles, state data shows.
Experts told Fox News The digital environmental mandates undertaken by Newsom and his administration have created instability in the power grid, an issue they say will only get worse as the public Existing fossil fuel generation capacity is cut off and replaced by intermittent sources.
“They will have to build huge amounts of wind and solar in a very short time if they are to achieve their goal of electrification – the entire transportation sector and the entire heating, cooling and our population,” Edward Ring, a senior fellow and co-founder of the California Policy Center, told Fox News Digital in an interview.
“There is a burden on consumers that is going to be very heavy,” he continued. “Even if they could do that without power outages, the burden on consumers would be ridiculous.”
The whole article is worth reading This.
The scale of the transition is evident from the current energy mix in California:
https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=CA
According to the California Energy Commission:
“To meet the 2045 goal while electrifying other sectors to meet the state’s economy-wide climate goals, California will need to triple its current grid capacity.”
My calculations show this is underrated. The current grid capacity is 81 GW, including about 40 GW of renewable energy, including hydro. The CAC figures imply a total of about 240 GW by 2045. Given that there are no new nuclear construction plans and hydropower is pretty much constrained to current capacity, much of this additional capacity will have to be Solar.
By the way, wind power is also not as reliable as it is in this country, as the latest data shows. It would be suicidal if California relied heavily on wind power:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/balancing_authority/CISO
Electricity accounts for only about 30% of total energy use in California. But the 2045 decarbonization targets imply that this rate will have to increase to maybe 90%, with the electrification of cars, heating, industry, etc.
In other words, electricity production may need to be tripled, which is probably what CAC means. But because wind and solar power have such low utilization rates, capacity would have to be more than tripled.
Here’s the back of the Weight Players pack, assuming hydro, bio, and geography stay the same and wind power doubles. Under this scenario, solar power generation would need to increase to 540 TWh from the current level of 33 TWh:
Solar capacity will need to increase from 14 GW to 229 GW, with total grid capacity increasing to 260 GW. But these numbers assume that solar panel yields are the same all year round, Currently about 25%.
During the winter months, this number is much less; for example, on February 12th, usage rate dropped to 18%. Allowing for system and redundancy, you may have to plan for around 15%, which means you will need 410 GW of solar capacity, instead of 229 GW. Certainly most of this will be redundant for most of the year. (The alternative would be to provide battery storage for seasonal peak demand and generational lows, but I doubt this would be extremely expensive).
You may also have to add capacity to meet demand during heat waves, which could add 30 GW to average usage.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/balancing_authority/CISO
Two other things to consider:
- California has about one third its power from other states, 84 TWh by 2021. At least half of this is fossil fuel/nuclear/hydroelectricity, which will not be available for another twenty years or in the event hydroelectricity cannot be increased. Given the possibility of electricity shortages in other states, it would be foolish to rely on these imports in the future.
- Governor Gavin Newsom is also heavily reliant on energy efficiency, but any savings could be offset by increased demand. Having said that, he’s doing such a good job running the state that Californians are migrating to states like Texas, Tennessee and Florida, along with some industrial facilities, so that will useful!
Which brings us to the $64 billion (or trillion?) question — storage.
For this exercise, I have assumed that storage is only needed for a 24-hour cycle and that seasonal peaks are offset by installing additional generating capacity.
Battery storage needs will need to be planned around winter, when generation is at its lowest. My calculations show that the stock will need about 70% of daily consumption in the middle of winter. Based on 540 TWh a year and allows for additional heating demand in winter. Daily solar energy consumption will be around 1.6 TWh, giving a storage capacity of 1.12 TWh. (The current battery’s storage capacity by comparison is 4316 MWh – in other words, California will need a million times more storage than it does now!).
But as CAC conveniently pointed out, battery capacity quickly drops:
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac
There will probably be a need for a 10-year continuous replacement program for the battery. During that time, the average capacity may not be more than 50% in terms of efficiency, provided you can’t run out of battery. So 1.12 TWh needs to be doubled to 2.24 TWh. (By the way, the idea that you want to run your grid on old car batteries shows how ramshackle this whole program is! In any case, it will beat itself to those car batteries. will soon become useless).
Currently the battery price is about 200 USD/KWh. Ironically, CAC expects these numbers to drop by two-thirds due to growing demand for electric vehicles. It was not discovered that the increased demand would make the price of the raw material needed much higher!
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac
So working with the current $200, that 2.24 TWh would cost $448 billion. With a ten-year lifespan, that’s $44.8 billion per year. And that’s just the cost of the battery; Infrastructure, switching equipment, transmission network and labor costs also need to be considered. I doubt you’ll get much change out of $100 billion. And this is every year after this.
It is often claimed that renewable energy reduces dependence on oil dictators. That’s always a silly argument, because you can buy fossil fuels from all over the world and the United States can be self-sufficient if it wants to.
But this suicidal wobble for solar carries far greater geopolitical risks. A grid completely dependent on batteries would subject California to a Chinese monopoly on batteries and battery raw materials.
And once California has gone down that path, there’s no going back.
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