You cannot mandate away reality Pops. Just because they passed a law to be 100% renewable by 2045 doesn't mean it will be so. If you don't like my earlier sources on some of the past planning failures how about listening to the evaluation of California's own relevant agencies on the problem:
California suffered its first rolling blackouts in nearly 20 years because energy planners didn’t take climate change into account and didn’t line up the right power sources to keep the lights on after sundown, according to a damning self-evaluation released Tuesday by three state agencies. But officials should have been prepared for the climate-driven extreme heat that caused electricity demand to soar and briefly left the nation’s largest state without sufficient power supplies, the state’s Energy Commission, Independent System Operator and Public Utilities Commission acknowledged in a preliminary “root cause analysis.”
State agencies failed to adequately plan for that type of heat event despite knowing how quickly the world is heating up, the report concluded. They also failed to direct electricity providers to buy sufficient power supplies to cover the evening hours when solar panels go offline. And they created complex energy market mechanisms that masked the inadequacies. “The combination of these factors was an extraordinary event. But it is our responsibility and intent to plan for such events, which are becoming increasingly common in a world rapidly being impacted by climate change,” wrote Independent System Operator President Elliot Mainzer, Public Utilities Commission President Marybel Batjer and Energy Commission Chair David Hochschild.
Careful planning to ensure adequate power supplies will become even more important as California phases out fossil fuels and moves toward 60% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% climate-friendly energy by 2045, as required by state law. “Our planning processes may have been a year or two off on when we needed to have the resources available,” said Ed Randolph, director of the Public Utilities Commission’s energy division. “We’ll absolutely need more steel in the ground.”
The root cause analysis also faults market mechanisms put in place by the Independent System Operator, a nonprofit corporation that oversees the power grid for most of the state. A program known as convergence bidding, in particular, is meant to help keep electricity prices steady but instead “masked tight supply conditions” during the August heat wave, the analysis concluded.
What caused California’s rolling blackouts? Climate change and poor planningDear Governor Newsom:
In response to your August 17, 2020 letter, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), and California Energy Commission (CEC) have jointly prepared the attached Preliminary Root Cause Analysis (Preliminary Analysis) of the two rotating outages in the CAISO footprint on August 14 and 15, 2020. In our response, we also recognized our shared responsibility for the power outages many Californians unnecessarily endured.
In Transitioning to a Reliable, Clean, and Affordable Resource Mix, Resource Planning Targets Have Not Kept Pace to Lead to Sufficient Resources That Can Be Relied Upon to Meet Demand in the Early Evening Hours.
Preliminary Recommendations
1. Update the resource and reliability planning targets to better account for a transitioning electricity resource mix to meet the clean energy goals of the state during critical hours of grid need.
Preliminary Root Cause AnalysisI've seen this pattern play out too many times Pops. Politicans pass lofty mandates to score browning points with their constituents without looking into the plan to see if it is feasible. Then reality comes to bite in the form of high costs, lack of storage, grid stability issues, etc. And then the lofty mandates have to be re-evaluated.
Is it really asking too much to have a new system in place before we dismantle the old one? California is dismantling it's old power plants faster than it is building new capacity and storage to replace them. And it's not like this is all a big surprise. Experts warned this would be a problem but the leaders were drunk on hopium and ignored these calls.
California faced the prospect of rolling power blackouts for the first time in almost 20 years, and stakeholders are pinning the blame on regulators' failure to heed warnings that shortages could occur unless steps were taken to ensure adequate resources were on call to cover peak demand periods. "We told the CPUC 4,700 MW was needed through 2022 and that the gap started in 2020," ISO CEO Steve Berberich said during an Aug. 17 briefing. "Despite all that, only 3,300 MW was authorized for procurement, but that's not starting [until] 2021."
The ISO in August 2019 warned of a looming system resource adequacy deficiency and urged the PUC to develop a procurement plan for 2020-2022 to meet reliability needs. In addition, concerned that the rise of community choice aggregators had splintered the state's central resource planning capabilities, former PUC President Michael Picker has repeatedly warned lawmakers and commissioners that California risked another energy crisis without a plan to ensure that all load-serving entities met resource adequacy requirements.
During the Aug. 17 briefing, which was held to address rolling Aug. 14-15 blackouts in California and the prospect of more to come, Berberich said the state's resource adequacy program was broken and must be fixed because it does not address load requirements after the sun goes down and solar generation is gone. And he suggested that much of the problem stems from the PUC's failure to act on ISO warnings.
Gas-fired resource commitments
Former Western Power Trading Forum Executive Director Gary Ackerman in an interview said battery storage installations in California have nowhere near enough capacity or duration to ensure the electricity generated by existing solar facilities is available at night. Grid-connected solar accounts for about 12,000 MW of capacity in California, while wind generation now supplies only about 4,000 MW in the state, Ackerman said. And Berberich said California currently has only about 200 MW of storage.
But the amount of generation that is not already committed under contracts in or outside the state is diminishing because owners cannot stay in business selling energy during peak periods alone when solar is no longer available. "They've retired plants outside California, too, so power imports are off."
California power shortages stem from lack of firm generation capacity: experts