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Yes, you are completely correct, we should change the lead. Per California law which gives priority to renewables, Diablo Canyon (nuclear) would have faced daily curtailment, (I don't know whether that has really happened or not), but it was listed as the reason that they could not continue to be profitable as the state builds more renewables, since they wouldn't have been ALLOWED to run 24/7 per state law. ---Avatar317(talk)01:08, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
(offtopic) Lights in California are (still) on, as the governor apparently issued a decree prohibiting the closure of Diablo Canyon. I do not know the details, though, and do not think that the Diablo Canyon can ramp its power output at a meaningful rate, it is a base power plant, AFAIK. Викидим (talk) 02:00, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
(offtopic) I was confused; you are right, I re-read one of those news articles, it said Diablo Canyon would be offline for parts of the YEAR, not parts of days, so whether this qualifies as "curtailment" I don't know.
But we should still change the lead, because you are right about curtailment affecting ANY type of supply, as well as demand curtailment to prevent blackouts. ---Avatar317(talk)04:41, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Replaced with a standard definition from an NREL publication. The same publication can also be used to improve the rest of the text. Викидим (talk) 20:51, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
(offtopic, not in this source) Essentially, the VRE sources need to be overbuilt in order to replace the conventional units by a very large margin (cf. capacity credit), so they are inevitably are idle most of the time, this affects economics from both the investor side and the government coffers, thus the contemporary interest in this topic. This common-sense story must have been told by some researcher, but I do not want to look for such a work. Викидим (talk) 20:58, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've seen this discussed in some articles I've read; I'll see whether I remember which and can find any. Yes, since solar has a capacity factor (average yearly) of ~33% AT BEST for sun tracking installations (IIRC), and wind doesn't necessarily blow when solar isn't active, conversion to renewables needs not only overbuild, but batteries as well, further increasing the cost. I don't recall any specific cost estimates, but those would be valuable info to have somewhere in our articles, if we can find sources for that. ---Avatar317(talk)23:17, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
(offtopic) California in some sense is showing the world how it can be done (after burning its collective fingers few times), and how much will it cost. Of the friends I have there, many have full-power (15-30KW) backup generators in their homes, essentially very inefficient private fossil fuel plants that cost tens of thousands of USD to install and many hundreds of dollars per day to actually run in a case of a blackout (one has a small hydro but then you need to buy a small river first). Add to that a $0.60 per KW at peak time plans for households with large energy needs (they have electric cars, after all), see, for example, [1], and things might work in the end with humongous batteries and nuclear for now providing stability. I am not an expert, but there were no close calls in 2024, AFAIK. Local outages happen, thus the generators. We shall see how they are going to do it in September of this year. As you can guess, I am a keen observer of California struggles, and plan an article on the Strategic reliability reserve (yes, California has 4GW of these, generally not dispatched, but kept operational, fossil-fuel plants, too, at a cost of about a billion USD per year). Викидим (talk) 01:32, 21 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
And you probably heard of the big fire at Moss_Landing_Power_Plant#January_2025_fire, which caused lots of localities to re-write their laws about large battery installations.
Most people I know of get generators because of Public Safety Power Shutoff s, which right now describes the 2019 events, but these are ongoing. San Diego Electric had more and better wind sensors and switches to surgically shutoff neighborhoods, PG&E (NorCal) had less in number and so shutoffs were for larger geographic sizes, but they've been installing many more to reduce the size of the areas they need to power down.
It would be great to have an article on Strategic reliability reserve - from what I understand this would essentially be a list of plants granted reliability-must-run (RMR) contracts? Are you familiar with this source? It would likely be useful: [2].
Thanks for the good work I've seen you do on other energy related articles, it is definitely an area that is good for people to be able to get info about as easily and clearly as Wikipedia provides!!! ---Avatar317(talk)01:12, 22 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I did not start working on the Reserve yet, so here is my (possibly wrong) impression so far:
California lawmakers are scared by the electrical beast they unleashed (for a good reason IMHO) and want to pad their collective pants or ideally avoid the public whipping altogether;
They had allocated a chunk of money for a three-pronged approach, [3];
The third prong is the most interesting: the California Department of Water Resources (sic!) gets money to contract (or even buy out and maintain) the gas turbine power plants that would otherwise be decommissioned and dismantled under the pressure of California environmentalists;
This had essentially created a state-owned (sic!) new fossil fuel generation entity, funded by the taxpayers, which goes decidedly against the competitive energy market approach, but can provide some help if importing electricity in September becomes impossible. See some details in (somewhat obsolete) [4]
By my last count, there are 3GW in this reserve,[5] all contracted. That's like 1+1⁄2 Diablo Canyons AFAIK.
Since the entity is not entirely private, and the reserve is for the emergencies only, I am not sure RMR contracts have to be necessarily involved. If they actually buy some plants, it would be just like the good old times: dispatch, turbine roar, bill for gas and services later. Once again, I might totally misread the situation at this point, so please take all this with a large grain of salt. Викидим (talk) 01:57, 22 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
