>“Our work shows that the main grid in the world’s fifth-largest economy was able to provide more than 100% of the electricity that it used from only four clean renewable sources: solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal, for anywhere from 5 minutes to over 10 hours per day for 98 out of 116 days during late winter, all of spring, and early summer, as well as for 132 days during the entire year of 2024, without its grid failing,
wow. great. so who is paying to maintain the backup?
Ratepayers, and as less and less fossil gas is needed (because batteries [1] [2] [3] and more renewables), their costs for generation and electrical supply should go down. CAISO, California's grid operator, currently has 61.7GW of hybrid solar/battery projects and 42GW of battery storage [4] in its interconnect queue. CAISO current installed capacity is 21.5GW of solar and 13.39GW of battery storage, compared to ~30GW of fossil gas generation [5].
"According to Jacobson, California electricity prices are high because of several reasons that have nothing to do with renewables. These include high fossil gas prices, utilities passing on to customers the cost of wildfires due to transmission-line sparks, the cost of undergrounding transmission lines to reduce such fires, the costs of the San Bruno and Aliso Canyon gas disasters, the cost of retrofitting gas pipes following San Bruno, the cost of upgrading aging transmission and distribution lines, and the cost of keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant open."
wow. great. so who is paying to maintain the backup?