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Solar + Storage Saved the Hot Day

 

Most readers of this newsletter do not necessarily need data to confirm that the summer of 2024 was sweltering and, in fact, was the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest meteorological summer on record, according to NOAA. So how did two of the hottest states with some of the largest demand in the country perform under these conditions? GridLab invited two grid experts to share findings from California and Texas as part of our monthly Reliability Communications coordination space which includes nearly 60 communicators, clean energy advocates, and technical practitioners from across the country. Ed Smeloff, former regulatory director at Vote Solar who regularly engages with CAISO and the California Public Utilities Commission, presented on California’s grid performance, and Doug Lewin, renowned grid expert and author of the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter and host of the Energy Capital Podcast, presented on Texas. The bottomline? Newly installed solar plus battery storage largely saved the day in both states and contributed to both states avoiding rolling blackouts or calls for conservation despite unprecedented grid conditions.

Below are highlights from the Texas and California analysis:

Texas

  • ERCOT set a new record for peak demand on its grid on August 20th — 85,931 megawatts.
  • Solar power generation also hit record levels on August 20th of 20,832 MW.
  • Energy storage discharged to the grid hit its own record of 3,927 MW in August.
  • ERCOT Issued no rolling blackouts or general calls for conversation. Compare that to last year when ERCOT issued 11 calls for conservation from consumers throughout the year.

California:

  • Experienced its third all-time peak demand of 47.7 gigawatts on September 5th.
  • Installed 3 gigawatts of new utility scale-solar in 2023 and 2024, bringing its total contribution to the California grid to 47 gigawatts.
  • During peak conditions in July, CA exported over 9 GW of solar to neighboring states, due to solar’s surplus production.
  • Real-time dispatched a maximum of 7,608 MW in utility scale battery storage helping to meet peak conditions in July. The battery fleet in California now represents 20% of the state’s peak load at 12 GW, having more than doubled since 2022.

This summer also marked the first in which anyone could track real-time activity on the grid using GridStatus, a tool GridLab is proud to have been an early supporter of. GridStatus provides accessible data from operators and agencies – pricing, fuel mix, and, my personal favorite, renewable deployment. In fact, Texas and California were consistently neck and neck on utility-scale solar this summer. With so much rapid change and load growth challenges before us, the more democratized data publicly available, the better.

Read more from Grid Status on the specific conditions and lessons learned from CAISO this summer and a detailed look at a record-setting day in ERCOT.