Is there any place I can find out (online, I hope), how my local power company generates my electricity? What percentages come from fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydroelectric? Recently I heard that L.A. gets some of its power from Glen Canyon Dam, but I know that can’t be much of the total.
I’ve poked around all over the Los Angeles DWP site, but couldn’t find the answer.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/electricity/index.html
Electricity in the west is a huge interconnected web. But this gives you a good Idea of where California electricity comes from.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/html/energysources.html
Electricity (2005)
Source
In-State 78.33%
Natural Gas 37.71%
Nuclear 14.47%
Large Hydro 17.03%
Coal* 20.07%
Renewable 10.73%
Imports 21.67%
PNW 7.04%
DSW 14.63%
Electricity is like the internet. The sources and destinations of where everything is going aren’t clearly definable. All of the U.S. and some of the rest of North America is on one giant electrical web. The power plants closest to you may have some relevance but isn’t that cut and dried and how everything plays out. As they say, electrons are electrons.
You may be interested in the subject of power generation credits. They are like an economy of their own and consist partly of companies that use dirtier power subsidizing alternative sources of power. Again, it is a giant web so this isn’t crazy or artificial. Even some very small electricity producers (like homeowners with excess solar power) can feed into the grid and take it back out as needed based on a credit system.
As well as the home hobbyist/environmentalist generating his own power for the grid and getting credits for it, our local power company also has a scheme where you can volunteer to pay a few bucks extra on your quarterly bill, and they’ll spend the money on developing environmentally friendly electricity sources. Of course, even assuming they will honestly act on this, there’s no way of knowing that your electricity is coming from those sources, just that somebody’s is.
LA has its own power generating plants, which is going to skew its numbers a bit from the statewide California numbers posted by gazpacho.
From here: Los Angeles Department of Water and Power - Wikipedia
Are the numbers really skewed? It is a large interconnected web of power. They are on the grid and they sell their power to non LA customers when they have excess capacity which is most of the time.
Did California ever have a power generating surplus? It’s such a resource intensive state, or was anyway.
The “grid” isn’t really a grid the way most folks seem to think it is. People treat it as this huge web that pretty much blankets the entire US and acts as a great big infinite bus electrically. The reality is that the grid is just a bunch of independent power systems that happen to have a limited number of interconnects here and there so that power can be shuffled from one area to another.
For any individual system, the numbers will be different than for the state average. It’s not all getting dumped into one big bucket. There’s lots and lots of smaller buckets all over the place, and when one bucket doesn’t have enough in it, then other buckets that have surplus dump into it.
Let’s take a fairly simple example. Suppose we have 3 power systems, operated by companies A, B, and C. Company A doesn’t quite have enough generating power, so it has a shortage. B has exactly what it needs, no more, no less. C has a surplus. If it was truly all one big grid, then C would shove its surplus onto the grid and A would take from the grid to make up its shortage. In reality, A and C aren’t connected to each other, but A, B, and C are all tied together. So, A buys from B, but B doesn’t have enough to supply what A needs plus its own needs, so B buys from C to make up the difference. The end result is that the surplus generated by C gets transferred to A, but it’s not as simple as if it all went onto a single huge grid.
What happens if the link between B and C breaks? Then B, which had enough power on its own, now is in trouble because it’s supplying not only itself, but is also shoving some power to A to make up for A’s surplus. B can’t supply enough power for A and B both, so B goes down. A doesn’t have enough power now, so A goes down too. This is basically the cascade failure that plagues the northeast every now and then.
Incidentally, a lot of the power problems in California aren’t due to there not being enough power, they are due to arguments between the bean counters on who pays for what and how electricity gets from one place to another. So even though A has a shortage and C has a surplus, if all of the agreements aren’t in place, B won’t transfer the power between A and C. A ends up without enough power, even though C has enough to make up the difference, and some of A’s customers start experiencing rolling brownouts and blackouts.
Most systems in the southwest and northeast both are generally loaded to capacity during peak times (hot summer days, when air conditioners run all the time). At any other time of the year, these systems easily generate a surplus.