California is making so much solar energy the rest of the country looks like a joke

Just an idea, we oay .75 here in mtly state in the south.

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How is that legal

I asked this earlier and no one answered me.

Great. Now if they could stop piping in water from other states.

If California, or others, are able to produce power that is not being used, or cannot reach those that need it, then it is wasted. While the solutions to this problem can vary by the power generation type, solar, nuclear, coal, etc, the solutions boil down to the same things; reduce power output, install the required transmission infrastructure, or store the energy for use when demand exceeds the available generation capacity.

Battery storage is very efficent, but quite expensive. Keep in mind that this is not the only way to store energy.

Excess power on a grid can be used to pump water to a higher elevation, then used later in hydro electric generation.

Water, or any other suitable medium, such as salt, can be heated, the used later to produce power through standard steam turbines.

I have left out a lot of details, but I think this conveys the idea.

That being said, fossil fuel and nuclear power is going to around for a long time, but it is going to take on an ever diminishing role as technology is put in place to handle the shortcomings of wind, solar, and other alternative energy sources.

Overall, this seems to be simply a technological hurdle, not an impass.

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You are right. About it being a technological hurdle.

The problem is really that the grid was made in a hierarchical way, made to be fed from the top, not the bottom. Most renewable energy feeds the grid from the bottom, and that means problems arise when the grid at postal code level is saturated. Mostly the grid is not built for stuff like that, and replacing the transformers at that level is a very costly endeavor.

Good friend of mine did his doctorate on smart grids, and it was sort of insane to see how little was being done globally around that topic. it will probably take some time before the world rethinks its grid architecture and it's fully implemented.

If you're a programmer, you can consider it as basically a large application that used to be a web site. It was built for serving more or less static pages (i.e. using servlets/JSP or PHP) and it did that well. But now it's really becoming an application with a lot of I/O and it's got a giant user base since it was a well known web site. The devs added some methods to do I/O, but they didn't rebuild the application from the ground up as that would be too costly for business. The back-end was just a single node with high concurrency and little state, and now it has to manage state and deal with transactions. So in peak loads, the whole thing just keeps crashing, and will keep crashing until they either create a new application architected for this change, or create new SLAs and refactor their current application to meet these SLAs.

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clean some fucking seawater
turn water into drinkable water

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.075. Sorry I was half awake when I typed that out on my phone.

Everyone seems to think that solar power is only for direct power distribution.
While it can be stored and distributed (which isn't too good since our batteries still suck -> tons of loss), it's often more beneficial to put those solar panels to better use, like providing the energy to heat water in boilers somewhat, to cut down the required energy to heat water in this sentence.
And blam 50% less electricity needed.

Dont look at renewables as it sits now, its all a part of the evolution of the grid. For Southern California I believe we are in a great position with renewables. Right now the transmission and substations are properly sized to carry the Solar and wind loads during peak output. The reason solar and wind export power is because of system impedance and the power flow. In the near future a lot of Soithern California generation plants will be retiring and that power flow and system impedance will change bringing more renewables. At the same time utility based battery storage will be fully implemented as a part of the grid. With the electric cars becoming a thing electric demand will become constant where we require full utilization of our grid during the day and night. Right now the infrastructure is heavily utilized during the day and dormant at night. Battery storage and renewables will help us bridge the demand for electricity and our environment.

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i keep finding articles concerning safe disconnects, but all of them are confusing, though the common denominator in all of them is this idea that you just can't disconnect without a careful, drawn out procedure. (when someone brings up large installations)
They don't feel the need to explain it so maybe I'm just plain dumb. This has stumped me lol, someone did say disconnecting from power through a breaker can still damage the internals but that was it. I'm at a loss for why lol.

I'm no electrical engineer but as someone stated earlier it will create an arch. Whether small or not mitigating that arch is not easy.

When you're talking about shutting off enough power to run a city that's a whole bother ball game. Nothing like just unplugging a battery from a remote.

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got any facts to back this up? interested.

The excess energy issue is not a technological problem per se, rather a financial one. If California had the money they could install batteries and other mitigation strategies, clean sea water, fight violent crime (caused by MS13 and other extremely violent drug smuggling/distributing gangs, among others), save the Delta Smelt, implement universal health care, build high speed rail, ensure a chicken in every pot and bring world peace. The issue is that California is an economic basket case, second only to perhaps Illinois. They can't afford to do any of these things until/unless they get their financial house in order. Paying other states to take their excess energy will only hasten their financial downward spiral.

When politicians promise the electorate the sun, moon and stars (their motivation primarily being the promotion of their own personal political career and political power), this is the inevitable result. Adults need to realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch, no matter what these slick politicians may promise and start electing responsible and virtuous people to office. Resources (money) are always in short supply, even if you have the ability to print money, because printing excess money only serves to destroy the value of the currency. Pissing away the treasury "... for the children ..." or whatever the latest SJW cause is, is not compassionate, because eventually the bills come due. If the bills can not be paid, financial catastrophe and societal breakdown ensues.

i would but it doesn't suit the topic, i just railed on that joke of a man. It's also muchos controversial as it would also get into pol very quickly :confused:

tho weed accidents i can answer easily without too much controversy... hopefully

first some anecdotal to show why i'm concerned
as for the weed induced brutal accidents, in my home town several stoned kids have gotten killed from ramming through a building (minors, so no news coverage, deemed news worthy but distasteful), another was four days ago, high driver hit a truck in the rear at 105 mph sending both of them off the road, gas leak + lit blunt + dry grass == grass fire ensued, not sure if anyone died but cars were charred and the people weren't in great shape. Another high driver's brains were scraped off a center divider after she thought it would be a good idea to test the durability of the divider, divider won. I can't show stories as it would be a great way to tell everyone where i live, since i am active in the community lol. So take these examples with a grain of salt. not gonna dox myself to prove a point
these all happened within the last 4 months ekk. (i live in a small town, serious accidents are rare)

but since weed is new to Cali, and not many articles about it, let's see what Washington thinks


how's Colorado doing?

i doubt the kid nearly dying from overdose is true, more likely has some underlying health issue. My doctor told me explicitly, a few years back, to never even try drugs as it could possibly trigger some dormant health issues, or mental... in theory weed could kill me, indirectly, or make me go batty like my grandmother, who after smoking weed for a week straight, went full schizo and had to be locked up for 4 years.
Some nice additional crap

I could continue but i think you get the idea. I've also got anecdotal for violent crime when it comes to weed, also are close friends with several ex-convicts who have seen weed play a huge part in their lives when it comes to violence (similar to alcohol)
And a nice quick and dirty study that might just shine some light on the issue.

Everything else would get into real hot water kek.
Tho msg me if you want me to attempt to explain the others, tho kinda busy atm so it might be awhile.
also i apologize for all the reading in advance

Los Angeles Times

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You can resolve the solar panel over power issue by simply electronically disconnecting it at the panel. A single panel would not create any significant arching, my guess is they didn't install any sort of electronic switching on each panel (simple enough to do) so it all goes to one single control point which creates a big problem as regulating input is not possible.

Basically this isn't the technologies fault, but rather human implementation of said technology at fault. We humans just can't stop proving to the universe that we DON'T deserve to exist.

I agree it's like big energy are on the thread saying why solar can't work. Can people say disconnecting panels would create an arc with a straight face. What happens when a critter jumps on 2 live wires ?

Im dont know if California has any Hydro power. Pumping water back up into a dam is a good energy storage for excess energy. Creating Hydrogen and LOX and storing it for spacex another excess energy use. Desalination creating fresh water another excess energy use.

If your world depended on it. Humans would find a way.

So your suggestion is individual disconnects on hundreds of thousands of panels?

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One of the main complaints about water desalination is always the cost of boiling the waters
all of that solar would be fucking wonderful to dump into the water

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