California is generating so much solar energy, it’s paying other states to take it

The Golden State may want to consider changing its nickname to the Solar State.

According to a recent expose in the Los Angeles Times, California’s solar boom is growing so fast and with such intensity that utility regulators are frequently paying neighboring states to absorb surplus production. The forces behind this baffling problem are largely due to the falling cost of solar, the state’s major energy players, and the struggle to find the best way to incorporate a clean energy source that has become increasingly decentralized into the power grid.

“It’s not the renewables that’s the problem; it’s the state’s renewable policy that’s the problem,” Gary Ackerman, president of the Western Power Trading Forum, an association of independent power producers, told the LA Times. “We’re curtailing renewable energy in the summertime months. In the spring, we have to give people money to take it off our hands.”

Since 2010, solar production in California from utilities has risen from a scant .05 percent in 2010 to over 10 percent today. Combined with a dramatic rise in rooftop installations on homes and business across the state, amounting to over 5 GW, and you have a state that contains half the nation’s solar-generating capacity.

It’s a good problem to have (but it is a problem)

Scaling this influx of clean energy across a utility dominated by natural gas power plants (typically more than one-half of in-state electricity generation) and other sources such as hydroelectric, wind and geothermal has proven tricky. Too much electricity flooding the grid when demand is low can overload transmission lines and lead to blackouts. To compensate for this, California has to unload its glut on neighboring states like Nevada and Arizona.

“Oversupply causes prices to fall, even below zero,” explains Ivan Penn for the LA Times. “That’s because Arizona has to curtail its own sources of electricity to take California’s power when it doesn’t really need it, which can cost money. So Arizona will use power from California at times like this only if it has an economic incentive — which means being paid.”

For the first quarter of 2017, California spent millions paying Arizona utilities to take its excess solar. In March alone, there were 14 days when the state exported its solar production, including a record-setting stint on March 11 from which 40 percent of the state’s electricity came from utility-scale solar generation. While this so-called “negative pricing” eases during the summer months when consumer demand for electricity increases by more than half, Penn reports that the pay-off trend will only increase in the coming years as more solar projects come online.

The most immediate fix for utilities struggling with impact from solar is to curb production. It’s much easier to scale back a solar utility than it is to start and stop a natural gas plant.

“It’s an interesting growing pain of our increasingly green grid,” Shannon Eddy of the Large-Scale Solar Association told GreenTechMedia. “We’re curtailing the cleanest and newest resource on the grid, and leaving alone the 2,000+ megawatts of mostly fossil imports and in-state gas.”

Unlike traditional power plants, however, utilities have no control over the hundreds of thousands of installed rooftop projects scattered around the state. These private systems will continue to flood the grid with clean power, no matter how the major players reshuffle the deck.

The answer lies in storage

One solution benefiting from California’s enthusiastic embrace of solar is the nascent energy storage industry. In 2013, and again in 2016, the state passed legislation mandating the state’s three investor owned utilities to procure nearly 2,000 megawatts (MW) of energy storage by 2024. In addition, California has also set aside nearly a half-billion in incentives for private deployment of storage, such as homeowners interested in Tesla’s PowerWall battery system.

“I had relatively limited expectations for the battery industry in advance of 2020,” Michael J. Picker, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, told the NY Times. “I thought that it would not really accelerate and begin to penetrate the electric grid or the transportation world for a while to come. Once again, technology is clearly moving faster than we can regulate.”Read full article at Mother Nature Network