California's Giant Duck - Is It a Turkey?
As California tries to move from 20 to 30 percent renewable energy in the next few years, it is facing the problem that critics have cited all along - renewable energy isn't always there when you need it. The sun shines fairly close to peak hours during the day - when it isn't blocked by cloud cover - but the wind blows more at night, when the demand for electricity is lowest. Since electricity can't yet be stored in commercial quantities, that means other generators - mostly fossil fuels - must be available to ramp up and down quickly in order to fill in the gaps. Too little power, of course, means brownouts and blackouts but too much power can damage electrical equipment with "power surges" and must be dumped into neighboring jurisdictions - if they'll have it.
The California Independent Systems Operator - ever compliant with the orders coming out of Sacramento - believes it has solved the problem with "the duck." That's the graph above that shows how fossil fuel power will be rapidly ramped down in the morning when solar power begins to kick in and then ramped up again even faster as the sun starts to go down in the evening and power demands peak as people come home and start turning on lights and TV sets. It all looks good on paper but merchant generators may not like the bottom line. All this will have to be done with natural gas - nothing else can respond fast enough. California already gets 60 percent of its electricity from natural gas - twice the national average - and that will now go higher. But even existing gas plants won't do because they still involve boiling water and can't be ramped up fast enough. The only kind that can react suitably are the "gas turbines," which are essentially jet engines bolted to the ground. They consume monstrous amounts of fuel and are insanely expensive. Robert Bryce, author of Power Hungry, has also calculated that using gas this inefficiently actually creates more carbon emissions that just running the plants all the time - which is the whole point of this exercise.
But the other problem is money. GE has now developed a hybrid turbine that can ramp up and down quickly while still relying mainly on boiling water. But building a whole new generation will be insanely expensive and also relies on natural gas prices remaining low. Then if they're going to be run only half the time, they're not going to be very profitable. E.ON, Germany's largest utility, has just announced it's sick of losing money running its fossil plants only half time in order to accommodate wind and solar and is moving its generators to Turkey.
So good luck, California. But over the next few years that duck may start to look more and more like another giant turkey.
