The large and growing amount of solar generation has occasionally driven power prices on the CAISO power exchange during late winter and early spring daylight hours to very low, and sometimes negative, prices. However, consumers in California continue to pay average retail electricity prices that are among the highest in the nation.
Everyone hates paying for something that they don’t use (how many cable channels do you have?). In California, local electricity customers may finally get satisfaction about paying for the transmission grid capacity that they don’t use.
The California Independent System Operator (CAISO), the largest electricity grid in California, broke its own solar generation record on Tuesday of this week. The 8,030 megawatts put out at 1:06pm were approximately double the 2014 high, and ~2,000 megawatts (MW) higher than last year’s record. Naturally, as a lot more solar … [continued]
The solar-friendly voices at CleanTechnica.com have been saying it; solar advocates everywhere have been saying it; Californians have been saying it — solar saves. Solar saves money, saves the environment, and saves lives in this way. Yes, Californians just saved $192 million via rooftop solar and energy efficiency. Why are so many others still so … [continued]
A previous CleanTechnica article reviewed the basics of power generation. That article is a good primer for this follow-up article delving deeper into the subject. How do we most efficiently integrate the maximum amount of renewables into the grid? Let’s start with understanding how things work. As first-order simplification, we … [continued]
CAISO will seek to understand how a regional system affects California’s transition to 50% renewables by 2030 According to Utility DIVE, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) will study the possibility of turning the entire West into a single electricity market. This study is predicated, in part, on California’s landmark … [continued]
Originally published on EV Obsession. All 3 major investor-owned utility companies in California have awarded demand response contracts to the electric vehicle charging solutions company eMotorWerks, according to a new press release. The contracts regard participation in the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) Demand Response Auction Mechanism (DRAM) — which … [continued]
Can we really generate most of our power from renewables in a few decades? In a word, yes. But to understand further, we must understand how we produce and distribute power today. Part of the difficulty lies in the concepts we use to understand the electrical power system. A simple … [continued]
Originally published on RMI Outlet. By Garrett Fitzgerald Earlier this month, energy storage developer Stem aggregated a fleet of behind-the-meter (BTM) energy storage systems and successfully bid into the CAISO real-time energy market as participants in PG&E’s new supply-side pilot. This accomplishment marks the first-ever occurrence of aggregated, customer-sited storage … [continued]
Rocky Mountain Institute. By Jesse Morris. Four short years ago, the U.S. solar industry surpassed expectations by installing 340 MW of solar at a cost of $6.40 per watt in the first half of 2010. How times have changed. In the first quarter of this year alone, the U.S. installed … [continued]
