Meanwhile, in California...
As the federal government turns its back on innovation and commonsense, California is making our clean energy future a reality. The world’s fourth largest economy is running on two-thirds clean power – the largest economy on the planet to achieve this milestone.
In historic first, California powered by two-thirds clean energy – becoming largest economy in the world to achieve milestone
"Generated" is not "Powered by", and the 67% figure is "Generated". So for every 100TWh of electricity used in California, 67TWh of "clean" electricity was generated. Of which 24TWh came from nuclear and hydro power, leaving 43TWh from renewables. It is not recorded what proportion of that renewable power was exported to other states, and returned as imports, but the given by
@steve_bank above suggests that it would be around a third, so maybe 29% of the electricity consumed in CA in 2024 came from non-hydro renewable energy.
Achieving more than about 50% of power from wind and solar is essentially impossible without obscene amounts of storage capacity, so these figures are pretty impressive for those generation types, despite being only a touch over a third of what the headline suggests.
The idea that these numbers imply that CA is somewhere close to being 100% powered by wind and solar, or even that it ever will be, is pure propaganda. Not only are they not particularly close to being half way to that goal, but they are playing a game with severely diminishing returns; The first 20-30% is easy, the next 10% is hard, the 5% beyond that is very hard indeed, and getting past 50% runs into the simple and unavoidable problem that a wind turbine only generates electricity about 30% of the time, and photovoltaics only about 25%; And those timeframes have significant overlap.
CA is just about at the limit of what can be done with renewables without either massive cost increases, or regular supply interruptions.
Further progress requires either a huge breakthrough in storage cost reduction, bringing the cost down two or three orders of magnitude; or significant investment in trans-continental and trans oceanic power transmission (which would also need to see a couple of orders of magnitude reduction in costs), coupled with huge investment in renewables on the East Coast and in Asia or Australasia.
It would be a lot cheaper to just build out 100% capacity in nuclear plus hydro, at which point wind and solar would be an irrelevance. Shit, if CA had just kept it's San Onofre nuclear generating station open, that (misleading) headline figure in the article would be over 80%.
columbiacommunityconnection.com
