Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Real time electricity use in California

I recently found out that you can get graphs for daily electricity use, wind production, and solar production in the state of California.

This doesn't have much real value for me, but watching it the last two days it became pretty clear that wind power has some issues. It is hardly producing at all when electricity use is at its highest in the afternoon. Unless we get some storage system capable of holding electricity at night then releasing it in the day time that could seriously impede the use of wind power. Instead of competing with high cost natural gas, it is competing with low cost nuclear.

No comments: