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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

> California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar

California's grid is pretty decently balanced. Solar isn't even close to 50% - so saying that it "dominates" is pretty misleading.

It's like ~30% solar, ~12% hydro, ~10% wind, ~10% nuclear, all other renewables ~8% (~70% renewable, including nuclear) -> ~30% fossil fuels.

Are you maybe only counting domestic production and not total consumption? Or are you looking at the best time of the year and not the full year?

Or am I looking at sources that are >1 year out of date and in one year they've jumped from ~70% renewable to ~83%?

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EIA puts this out daily:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/daily_...

Today was 31% solar, 16% wind, 16% hydro, 6% geothermal, etc.

Some of the difference to your numbers will be seasonal/weather-related, but the pace of solar and wind installation is such that data that's even a year or two old can be wildly out of date.

Yes, but the whole point is daily metrics fluctuate a large amount per day, so I'm more interested in yearly metrics

Nuclear is not renewable though, those isotopes were created when some past generation star collapsed as supernova.

Solar will no longer be renewable in 5 billion years as well.

But it is today

And wood, coal, and oil are renewable. It's funny that we have fixated on "renewable" when carbon in the atmosphere is the problem, isn't it?

No, coal and oil is not. Since we have micro organisms that can consume wood, coal and oil will never be produced again.

> During the Carboniferous period, massive amounts of plant matter accumulated to form coal because microorganisms and fungi had not yet evolved the ability to break down lignin, a tough, aromatic polymer in woody plants.

We can make synthetic oil and I think we can also make synthetic coal, too.

Though it's close to useless because at that point they're too expensive to be worth it for anything else than very niche uses that absolutely require them.

> We can make synthetic oil and I think we can also make synthetic coal, too.

IIRC, that's basically what charcoal is. Except charcoal is cleaner once made, because most of the nasty stuff happens while being made from the source plant material.

Sure, but the problem with coal and oil is not their chemical composition, per se. The problem with specifically fossil coal and oil is that the carbon atoms used to be buried deep underground and end up as part of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. Making synthetic kerosene for jet engines is one of the top contenders for long-distance air travel in a post-fossil fuel world, IMO.

AIUI, there has been excess solar at peak, but batteries have growing very fast. That might have caused a big change even in a year.

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