All the data is public. It isn’t as pretty as you may want to think… or it might not be as bad as you had suspected. California routinely throws away a percent or two of fully paid for solar energy. Really. On typical spring Sundays, it is astounding. The data in the animation below is actual data from the folks that operate the California grid.
If you’re trying to keep fossil carbon out of the air or trying to manage your electric bill so you can pay for food, this is a problem. But the solution is pathetically simple (we’ll get to the how a bit later). But until we all wrap our collective brains around the how today’s power grid works, we’re not going [affordably, at least] figure out how to kick our collective addiction to fossil fuel.
That’s the bad new. The good news is if you have a few minutes, you too, can wrap your brain around how our grid works. Don’t worry, it won’t be painful.
As I find time for this project I’ll be adding some human-friendly riffs to this post. For now, just know that if you can drive a car and balance a checkbook, you can completely grok the grid. Then you can rock the world.