Spain as a whole 45 million country with diverse geography and scattered population is producing 75 percent of its electricity from renewables and gas and carbon have been down to almost technical zero.<p>It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery.<p>I made a website to track this: <a href="https://energy.antizone.online" rel="nofollow">https://energy.antizone.online</a><p>During the day, a huge chunk of the produced energy is sold to other countries, that's why I claim that 70% of its electricity is from renewables, even though the production share only accounts for 66%.
For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like we’re almost there and can stop caring. Just look at the excellent, accurate, and up-to-the-hour charts put out by the electricity market itself and you will see where and when the challenges we face still are.<p><a href="https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html</a>
Mark Z. Jacobson! Haven't heard that name in a few years.<p>Don't know him personally, but here's a tangent for the interested: In the first year of my PhD, I read several of his papers from the 90's on the GATOR family of climate models. At the time, I was interested in a potential intersection with my field. One thing that struck me was the absolutely exquisite attention to detail in one of his papers made to model the perspiration of water vapor from leaf stomata in forests (don't have the paper handy but can find if anyone's interested). It was really quite impressive.<p>Anyway, just thought I'd share the anecdote :)
The headline appears to be misleading. From the article:<p>"The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day ..."<p>So it's not actually that California's electricity demands were met by renewables 100% of the time as one might think, given the headline.<p>As far as I can tell, it's not even that, disregarding the intermittency problem, total energy demand was met, on average.<p>It's just that sometime during the day 100% was hit.
I know a lot of people are disparaging the 100% number but I think the article is more about indicating that this is the inflection point as renewables and batteries are still getting cheaper and more installations are happening.
<i>” California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035.
California passed a law that commits to achieving 100% net zero electricity by 2045. Will it beat that goal by a decade? We hope so. It’s going to be exciting to watch.”</i><p>Remarkable, especially considering California’s population is 39 million people.
If you are interested in renewables generation data, this dashboard shows live data across the world <a href="https://app.electricitymaps.com/map" rel="nofollow">https://app.electricitymaps.com/map</a>
Another discussion from today: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40045252">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40045252</a> (77 comments).
> And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January …), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight.<p>If it exceeded 100% energy demand, why were they still using methane?
If even a website called electrek.co doesn't understand the difference between <i>energy</i> and <i>electricity</i> I guess we might as well give up.<p>California met its ELECTRICITY demand by renewables. They still imported boatloads of oil, petrol and nat gas as energy too.<p>This is still a great milestone! So not trying to downplay it, but we need to be realistic about our total <i>energy</i> use.
"Energy demand" is a huge stretch. It is just electricity. It does not cover energy used in transportation (car, ships, flight) and energy used to produce imported goods. It also does not cover recycling and renewal. Even food gets like 60% of energy from fertiliser, that is not included here!<p>Anyway, I am just silly old person. So let's march towards bright future. We need solar powered battle tanks and solar powered fighter jets!
Spent many decades in California...<p>Somehow 100% renewable but the most expensive electric I've ever paid for. How much does 2000kWh cost again?<p>Also, the most prone to fire-hazard because of above-ground electric. Remember when PG&E caused the most destructive wildfire in California history?<p>Weird rub-it-out article IMO most likely paid for by some PAC. With all the money pumped into California power projects, it never equaled lower power prices, reliability, or safety...
[dupe]<p>Some more discussion:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40045252">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40045252</a>
I'm not sure how many want to hear this, but western deinstustrailization and shifting of domestic production to imports makes most of this irrelevant.<p>In 20yr nigeria alone will have a larger population than the whole of europe, and is industrializing.<p>Total carbon consumption by westerns is always rising due to shifting it to imports; and in any case, we're only 1bn people.<p>Actually stopping carbon consumption by westerns rising is a "war footing" economic programme; and actually stopping climate change requires changing the industrialization trajectories of many non-western countries.<p>cf. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve</a>