California invested heavily in using solar power—and it’s been a roaring success. However, a piece in the Los Angeles Times hints that perhaps the state has been a bit too successful: California has been consistently making too much renewable energy that state has to toss. As a result, it sometimes pays other states, like Arizona, to take their excess energy.
When those states need more electricity than they are producing, they pay California for the power. But California has excess power on a growing number of days when neighboring states don’t need it, so California has to pay them to take it. CAISO [the California System Operator] calls that “negative pricing.”
As California gets better at creating more renewable energy with less money and less work, the surplus has been growing. This creates many more “negative pricing” sales, which accounted for 18% of all power sales in January and February of this year compared to only 2.8% for all of 2014.
For now, it looks like “negative pricing” for excess power is here to stay. This is due, in part, to utility companies who keep downplaying and creating doubt in the power of solar and wind energy. Even as California’s power output grew, utility companies were able to convince lawmakers to keep investing in natural gas plants. Now as the state consistently creates too much power, it’s clear that renewable energy is capable of powering California.
California has so much surplus electricity that existing power plants run, on average, at slightly less than one-third of capacity. And some plants are being closed decades earlier than planned.