California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 2020

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

Does hydro count as renewable under this new law?

It doesn't under my state's law, but does under a past CA renewables requirement. So I was fearing that much more of our hydro was going to be shipped south.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

I recently had an opportunity to visit Austria which makes about ~30% renewable electricity.
I asked - how is this possible?
It is via Hydro, whereas by night, they import cheap (nuclear) off-peak electricity from France and Germany to pump the water back up into the mountains. By day, they let the water back down to generate the electricity. I guess it all depends how you draw the boundaries.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

jerry green!

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

I call that 'pumped storage'. Its real source is still nuclear, not hydro, so it should not count as renewable.

The Pacific Northwest (enter a zip code of your choice) gets 48% of its electricity from real hydro. British Columbia likely has a much higher fraction of hydro.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

well, sort of. those plants were running anyways so it's sorta like chargin PHEVs off the grid at night. No additional capacity required to pump that water. You can't just spin down nuke plants like NG peaking plants.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

Typically only small scale hydro (like run of river hydro) which has minimal environmental impacts counts towards the RPS - otherwise we'd already be very close to 33% renewable already.

If you look at the CA ISO Renewables Watch you can see how small hydro is counted as renewable while regular hydro is not.

http://www.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

European commissions put Austria in 2009 at over 70% renewable. This does not include the pumped storage that you are talking about which generated 5%. Austria, like the pacific northwest is blessed with a great deal of hydro power.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

It looks like from your source California is at less than 13% renewable, which is far short of their goal in 2010. Are there multiple ways to measure it?

All these numbers seem doable for a region like the bay area, but I am very skeptical for the whole state.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

Probably. Each utility is responsible for meeting the 20% goal in 2010 - but there is 3 years of "leeway". I know that a lot of agreements include importing renewable energy - I don't know if those are counted under imports or RECs. I think there's a limit to how much renewable energy a utility can claim using RECs.

SC Edison reported just under 20% for 2010.

SDG&E I know came in around 13% for 2010 blaming delays in getting some projects started.

PG&E came in pretty a bit under 20% for 2010 - also blaming delays in getting some projects going as well.

A lot of the bigger solar plants have been delayed which the utilities had been counting on. Luckily, it appears that most of the issues are being worked out and construction should be starting soon.

Residential/commercial PV also is not included in the RPS, I believe.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

I skimmed through the plan alternatives. They can include power from other states and Mexico as long as its used in California. Credits don't count. I did not know about 3 years leeway.

Yeah the two big ones - PG&E and SC-Edison- are close but the rest seem far away..

I would say there is quite a measure of risk on those big solar projects. I'm hoping they are sucessful. I would love to see the rate PG&E is contracting for the huge NRG pv site

SunPower and NRG's 250 MW Solar Project Closer to Reality : Greentech Media

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

What does it mean to the cost of electricity? The current CA electricity rates are already higher than other states. My guess is, it will only go up.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

For California we'd like to know how they will do this. Looking at current CA, they already have a good deal of hydro, bio-mass, geothermal plus natural gas balance. I wish the states I lived in were so green as CA already is. But sounds like they have an opportunity to do even more wind.solar which is a good thing.
But I am thinking wind.solar would be under 10% of the 33%?
Maybe under 3% or so now in CA?

PS- Question, does power from MSW (trash-to-stream) count as renewable?
I think it should count.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

I wonder how much they could get from landfill gas and anaerobic digestion.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

California is already one of the leaders in landfill gas use. Looks like Florida is out front. With the amount of bullshit in Texas you would think they would be a leader.

Energy Report - Landfill Gas

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

thanks for the link, six-fiddy.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

One of the local pilot projects is combining biogas and solar
Landfill cover promotes new energy source - Geosynthetics

Then we can also reduce polution from cattle with this program
CVPS Cow Power

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

That's interesting stuff, thanks.

It seems like there would be better ways to use the photovoltaics, like on rooftops. But at least the land and mounting system is "free" and there is a load of them in one relatively secure location to simplify things.

 

Re: California governor signs law requiring utilities to get 33% of electricity from renewable by 20

From the dree's link above solar is only 0.76% with 400MWp incalifornia today, but there are at least 800 MWp of projects, so it should increase greatly by 2013 the completion date of the last of these current plans.. These new projects may also be better at converting MWp to GWh. I'm sure the success or failure of these projects will heavily influence how much solar California has in 2020..

Wind is 4% of California now. Iowa is 15% so you see there is a large amount of wind growth possible, and adding almost all of the new renewable as wind is one of the scenarios and the least expensive one. Both wind and solar growth are dependent on many grid upgrades.