California has so much solar power it's throwing it away [View all]

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/04/22/california-solar-duck-curve-rooftop/

California has so much solar power it’s throwing it away

As electricity prices go negative, the Golden State is struggling to offload a glut of solar power.

by Shannon Osaka / April 22, 2024 at 06:38AM

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But now, the state and its grid operator are grappling with a strange reality: There is so much solar on the grid that, on sunny spring days when there’s not as much demand, electricity prices go negative. Gigawatts of solar are “curtailed” — essentially, thrown away.

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Over 15 years ago, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory were in the midst of modeling a future with widespread solar power when they noticed something strange. With lots of solar power on a given electricity grid, the net load — or the demand for electricity minus the renewable energy — would take on a “U” shape. Sky-high demand in the morning would be replaced by almost zero demand in the middle of the day, when solar power could generate virtually all electricity people needed. Then as the sun set, demand surged up again.

California’s grid operator, known as CAISO, later dubbed this effect the “duck curve.” (If you squint, you can imagine the curve as the belly of a duck.) It’s most prominent in the spring months, when solar panels get plenty of sunshine but there is less demand for heating and cooling.

In recent years in California, the duck curve has become a massive, deep canyon — and solar power is going unused. In 2022, the state wasted 2.4 million megawatt-hours of electricity, 95 percent of which was solar. (That’s roughly 1 percent of the state’s overall power generation in a year, or 5 percent of its solar generation.) Last year, the state did that in just the first eight months.

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