..... yes.... between 4pm and 10pm. They can support over 200GWh of additional demand during the other 18 hours of the day....
I'm not 'interpreting' anything. I'm getting that data directly from CAISO. Look at their resource adequacy. Demand varies from 30GW at 4am to 50GW at 7pm. Do you think that available supply magically matches that? No. The CA grid could supply another ~15GW of load at 4am but there's probably going to be rolling blackouts at 7pm. If you look at the total available resources outside 4pm - 10pm there's over 200GWh of additional energy that could be supplied.
Having lived in California my entire life, I SHOULD take offense to this. But I won’t because, from what I’ve seen, you’re not wrong. At least in the majority of Silicon Valley.
As the song says, "we love to work at nothing all day!"
Yeah, we had one airport control tower that shut down in the Bay area last night because the power went out and without HVAC the tower cab was too warm. That particular tower doesn't have a generator backup. All the larger ones do. Had a second one further inland also close early because of a power outage. Neither airport supports air carrier operations, so not a significant impact to the NAS (National Airspace System).
Why can't EVs be a huge part of that redundancy? Initially as demand response but soon with vehicle to home (V2H) and eventually vehicle to grid (V2G). Tesla is already testing a virtual power plant. CAISO was short by ~4GW and 16GWh yesterday. ~500,000 EVs with V2G could have easily covered that deficit. Spot prices were ~$2/kWh, imagine being getting credited $60 to sell half your battery into the grid and just buying it back 4 hours later for ~$5.
Because the electric utility doesn't control EVs. And although you can use EVs for transportation or for emergency power, you can't do both. It's easy to bet that if consumers fear that they're going to lose power they're not going to dump their EV charge back into the grid.
There are plenty of places where the utility can control EVs. Plenty of people opt into programs where the utility can control their thermostat in exchange for a credit on their bill. What do you think is less intrusive? The utility making your home ~2 degrees warmer or pausing your car from charging for 2 hours? Unless you have a long trip planned the next day why would you not discharge half your battery into the grid for ~$60? There's ~no chance it's going to have any negative effect on you. If something comes up you still have >100 miles of range and most people have a second car anyway.
.........The 6th largest Economy, in the World?
Yep. Which is why batteries are charged when Supply > Demand (off-peak) and discharged when Supply < Demand (on-peak). Taking 1,100MWh off-peak from a 15,000MW reserve and providing 1,000MWh on-peak when reserves are only ~4,000MW is still a win despite round trip losses because math. Increasing load on an efficient generator by 10MWh at 2am to charge a battery to reduce load on a peaker plant by 9MWh at 7pm that uses ~twice as much fuel/MWh is still a win because math.
Been hearing that for 20+ years. Still plenty to go around.
True that
