The California Duck Curve isn’t confined to California
The California Duck Curve is causing concern among California’s utilities, who wonder whether they will be able to ramp generation up quickly enough to meet evening peak demand when all the new solar capacity California plans to add over the next few years comes on line. As the title of this post notes, however, the California Duck Curve isn’t unique to California. It’s present everywhere to a greater or lesser extent regardless of the shape of the daily load curve, and in many places it’s a more serious problem than it is in California.
From the Institute for Energy Reasearch:
(The California Duck Curve) provides a scenario of a sunny day where distributed photovoltaic generation pulls down non-solar electricity demand to extremely low levels at midday when the sun is at its hottest and distributed photovoltaic generation is at a high. That is, the state’s non-solar generating capacities must reduce their production to inefficient lows when the energy supply at the “belly” of the duck from solar distributed generation is at its highest. Later in the day when solar generation is declining and California residents are coming home from work and turning on their appliances, electricity demand ramps up dramatically, which requires flexible generation capacity to come on-line very quickly to meet it. The California ISO is worried that the “neck” of the duck curve could overwhelm the state’s available generating capacity.
Figure 1 shows the duck curve. It clearly illustrates the problem California’s utilities face. Adding more solar generation increases ramp rates leading up to the evening demand peak that coincides with the setting Sun, and if enough is added California’s load-following capacity could find itself unable to ramp up quickly enough to keep the air conditioners running. Could this happen?
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