Power surge: law changes could soon bring balcony solar to millions across US

[hunter]

30. About a third of my neighbors have large solar systems.

The big box stores have solar on their rooftops. The schools have parking lot solar, so does the hospital and a neighborhood supermarket. Our neighborhood probably exports power when the sun is shining brightly.

At night everyone who doesn't have batteries, including myself, relies on natural gas power plants to keep the lights on.

You can watch the system in operation here:

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply

or, if you like the comparative global perspective, here:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/live/fifteen_minutes

Here in California 39% of our electricity comes from renewables (including big hydro), 10% from nuclear, and the rest is fossil fuels, mostly natural gas.

California also has some of the most expensive electricity in the developed world, which tends to be the case in all places with aggressive renewable energy programs. Sunlight may be free, but capturing that power, storing it, and converting it to AC current is expensive. The limitations of these solar power systems are the same at any scale.

Solar and wind power are incapable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, which is something we need to do. The only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, capable of supporting all eight billion of us, is nuclear power.

I'm a bit blasé about power failures so long as the water keeps running. I can live without washing machines, dryers, televisions, dishwashers and refrigerators. When I was a kid this wasn't unusual, the longest stretch was for about eight months when we lived in Europe, and whenever we were visiting my great grandmother or camping for the summer.

At my worst, as a young adult, I was either homeless, couch surfing, or living in the garden shed of a Vietnam war vet. That's probably the smallest environmental footprint I've ever had.

If I was living alone I probably wouldn't have a refrigerator but I'm married and my wife wouldn't put up with that. Nevertheless, if the power was out long enough that we had to compost all the food in our refrigerator it wouldn't be a huge economic hit. My wife is a vegetarian and I'm mostly vegetarian so there's rarely any meat in there, let alone expensive meat.

Nobody likes doing business with PG&E but that's a different matter. Things went very wrong when they decided they owed more to their shareholders and upper management than they did their customers.