California Wants To Sell New Energy To The West

A regionalized energy grid creates a home for California’s wasted renewables

Andy Bilich and Lauren Navarro, July 11, 2018 (Environmental Defense Fund)

“…California’s renewable energy records are regularly broken…[On June 21, it] set a generation record with solar producing equivalent to about 16 percent of all electricity consumed…[On April 27, it set] renewable energy records for both instantaneous solar generation: about 10.5 gigawatts, and instantaneous renewable generation: 73 percent of the state’s total electricity demand…[but its] renewable resources produce a lot of electricity in the middle of the day and at night, [and] not in the late afternoon or early evening when most of the population comes home from work…To maintain balance, grid managers purposefully, and increasingly, turn off (curtail) renewable energy power plants, even though those plants are otherwise operational…[Curtailing] wastes the opportunity to utilize the sun and wind…[but it] doubled from 2015 to 2017…For California to meet the energy demands of tomorrow with increasing heat waves, a ballooning population, and more devices using electricity, a portfolio of solutions is needed…A regionalized grid, such as that proposed within Assembly Bill AB 813, could supercharge the effort to utilize our renewable resources and help make California’s wasted energy problem a thing of the past…” click here for more

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