California ISO - Todays Outlook - http://www.caiso.com/outlook...
Aug 27, 2014
from
Anne Bouey,
Jennifer Dittrich,
John (bird whisperer),
imabonehead,
Private Sanjeev,
and
Me
liked this
This page shows california's electricity use
- Amit Patel
(1) It *seems* like we have a great deal of excess electricity, especially at night
- Amit Patel
(2) If I got the calculations right, that excess electricity would desalinate between 100,000 and 200,000 acre-feet per day
- Amit Patel
(3) California uses an average of 100,000 acre-feet per day
- Amit Patel
Back of the envelope calculation suggests desalination from currently *unused* California electricity would be enough water for California's water needs. Need someone to independently do these calculations …
- Amit Patel
I couldn't figure out how to break out excess renewables from excess coal / gas / etc. I'm thinking only excess wind/solar/geothermal capacity should count as unused.
- Private Sanjeev
Some power plants are running on "standby" and have to keep generating power just in case it's needed (e.g. to fill in power when clouds go over a solar array). They take hours or even days to warm up, so they end up generating excess power. I want to count those too. But I've been told that the graph also includes the "instant on" power plants, so it's an overestimate of the "free" power we have.
- Amit Patel
How many desal plants would you need to achieve 100k acre-feet/day, I wonder?
- Victor Ganata
I'm assuming the Carlsbad desal plant that's going on-line is state-of-the-art and it's supposed to be able to produce 50 million gallons a day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... which is about 150 acre-feet/day. So it would take about 666 similar desal plants to achieve 100k acre-feet/day :D
- Victor Ganata
Apparently the Carlsbad plant was only supposed to cost $530 million but it looks like it's going to run a bill of $1 billion. I think the main reason they haven't built more of these is not only because of the environmental hurdles but because the economics of water pricing even with the drought aren't favorable for it yet.
- Victor Ganata
$666B over 30 years works out to $1.60 per CA resident per day
- Private Sanjeev
We're gonna need that water a lot sooner than in 30 years.
- Victor Ganata