Great writeup from Bloomberg:
There’s a Lesson for the Energy Transition in California
California’s first rolling blackouts since the 2001 energy crisis are a stark reminder that achieving 100% carbon-free energy is harder than it looks.
With the worst heat wave in generations fueling near-record electricity demand, the state’s rapid shift away from fossil fuels is making it difficult to ensure that the lights stay on. California, guided by one of the world’s most ambitious clean-energy policies, has shuttered a massive amount of natural gas-fired generation in its bid to for carbon-free power. Now, the blackouts are raising questions about whether that shift happened too quickly.
And a bit more:
During a heatwave last year, nuclear plants helped keep the lights on in Paris. In London, utilities relied on coal and gas plants. But California, which has one of the cleanest grids in the country, has retired more than 9 gigawatts of gas generation in recent years in a bid to green its grid by 2045. While the state still gets more than a third of its power from gas, that isn’t always enough meet demand at peak hours -- especially in the evening, when solar production wanes.
Solar and wind are not baseload. They cannot deliver 24/7. Nuclear anyone? Modern designs are cheap to build, cheap to run, walk-away failsafe and have minimal waste problems.
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