We’re finally having a summer heat wave out in California, after, it should be noted, an extremely cold summer so far, but that won’t slow down the climatistas. The chart below of California electricity sources as of 7:30 pm this evening is a little hard to de-cypher, but if you study it a bit you can see how crazy California’s fetish for wind and solar power is.
First, the inverted u-shape curve is wind and solar power, which spikes huge in the middle of the day. So much so, in fact, that we have a surplus of power that we export to other states (and may even pay them to take, though perhaps not on a region-wide hot day like today). See the red line at the bottom which is labeled “imports,” and you’ll see it goes negative mid-day, but we start importing power from other states again in the evening. If tonight is like last night, overnight we’ll be importing ~5 GW from other states.
“Batteries” (the beige line) are also negative mid-day, which means they are charging, and then discharging in the evening, but contributing barely ~ 3 GW of the roughly 43 GW of total demand right now, and running out of juice around midnight or so, and then charging from natural gas. Large hydro is available this year on account of record rain and snowfall this winter, but is still only ~ 5 GW, and that can’t be counted on in drought years.
Natural gas (the orange line) has to double output to fill the gap, which means that wind and solar power actually have the real world effect of locking in natural gas production. This the greenies refuse to grasp.
Meanwhile our sole nuclear power plant (the flat dark gray line) provides a steady 2 GW 24/7. Imagine if we had five of those!
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