California soon could become the nation’s bellwether on whether solar energy can make the cut when it comes to supporting a state’s energy demands.
The Golden State has federal regulators worried about a bumpy ride for the Golden State’s grid, as officials work with Washington to formulate a plan to get it over a major hump this summer and avoid rolling blackouts.
The blackout concerns stem from a lack of fossil fuels and whether a surge in rooftop solar will be enough to fill in the gaps.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the government’s grid watchdog, has been working with California to establish a plan to address a lack of natural gas in the state due to a major leak at the Aliso Canyon storage facility near Los Angeles that shut down the facility.
The commission and the state’s grid operator are looking to aggregate enough rooftop solar panels and other renewable energy to function like a big conventional power plant to fill in the gaps.
But will it work?
“You’ve got some real challenges in the mid-summer through fall timeframe that California has got to manage,” said FERC Commissioner Tony Clark in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“Number two, I am a little concerned that people may be taking all the wrong lessons from what’s happening, which is the ‘answer to the problem that we’ve got is that we double down on exactly what we’ve been doing,’ which is trying to shut down natural gas and just double down on renewables,” he said.
California has a lot of solar, but solar cannot produce electricity all the time, he said.
Clark said California’s transmission grid isn’t robust enough to accommodate for major dips in renewable generation. On top of that, solar needs to be backed up by gas-fired power plants, “and a major portion of how those gas plants get their gas is through Aliso Canyon, which is now shut down.”
The bottom line: “There are absolutely concerns about rolling brownouts, rolling blackouts,” Clark warns.
The solar industry believes California will be a success, while environmental groups are increasing the pressure on presidential candidates to endorse an agenda that seeks to replace all fossil fuels with solar and wind as the best hope to address global warming.
But the recent back-and-forth between the commission and the California grid operator illustrates something different, namely that the renewable energy rhetoric hasn’t caught up to the reality.
Norman Bay, the commission’s Democratic chairman, was clear about the state’s electricity issues earlier this month, saying “the situation remains a serious one.”
The natural gas leak at the Aliso Canyon facility has placed all of southern California on high alert this summer because natural gas power plants won’t have enough fuel to provide electricity.
Part of the California grid operator’s plan, which the federal commission approved, would help rebalance the state’s power supply with out-of-state resources while allowing for renewables to fill in the gaps.
Bay said the situation “highlights the connection between the gas and electric industries and how their operations affect consumers.”
The commission says the renewables are adding to the seriousness of the situation, not necessarily helping it.
Aliso Canyon’s “limited operations are likely to stress the region’s gas system this summer, when Southern California needs those generators to serve both peak loads and changes in load due to the variable nature of renewable generation,” the commission said earlier this month.
Renewable energy proponents like to argue that the best way to fix the situation is to pair solar with some form of electricity storage, which means placing a big lithium-ion battery in each basement of a house with rooftop solar.
California has a policy to incentivize such storage, but having enough battery power to meet the demands of southern California is not an option.
The commission recently started an examination of the barriers to market participation faced by storage.
The electric storage industry blames the increased barriers on an electric system designed to favor coal and other fossil fuel-powered power plants. It wants the commission to update the grid rules to bring electricity supply up to speed with the 21st century.
In many cases, grid storage can be penalized for doing its job, according to the Energy Storage Association in comments it submitted last week to the regulatory commission.
“Storage projects … can respond nearly instantaneously at full output in either charge or discharge mode, providing flexibility and performance that [fossil] generators are incapable of — yet certain market rules either constrain or penalize storage from operating in this manner,” the group said.
