California Solar Generation Record!

[freeewilly]

The largest Desert Sunlight solar farm (550 MW) went online a few weeks ago. Do they supply information to California ISO grid?

 

[DaveEV]

Further, exports would not show up as load as stated above.

Good point - especially considering that exports do get a separate line item in the PDF reports.

The largest Desert Sunlight solar farm (550 MW) went online a few weeks ago. Do they supply information to California ISO grid?

It does, but these large PV farms usually come online in much smaller phases as they are completed rather than one large chunk.

 

[gbarry42]

Looks like there's an extra GW of demand popping up - I wonder where it's going?

 

[DaveEV]

Looks like there's an extra GW of demand popping up - I wonder where it's going?

Hah! Well, at 1 MW maximum per typical Supercharger site and with Tesla having 20-25 or so Supercharger sites in California, it's not quite enough demand yet to make any significant dents in load, but it's still pretty significant!

 

[DaveEV]

Since I posted last, I've been seeing solar peaks in the 5.6-5.8 GW range, but today hit another benchmark:

10 GW of renewables!

I'll link to the twitter post I saw it at first:

New #ISO #solar #wind all-time peak for Renewables @california_iso yesterday. First time over 10,000MW

Joe Deely (@jdeely) March 24, 2015

Looks like we easily exceeded 10 GW of renewables today, too.