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Not sure I'd call california the 4th biggest economy in an article about electricity. If you pretend it were a country it would come in somewhere around the 30th mark on usage give or take...similar to like Sweden
That would make it the 30TH largest consumer of energy.
It doesn’t change the fact that at a little over $4 Tn, it has the 4th largest GDP in the world, just ahead of Japan.
Seems a weird thing to highlight - the battery output at a single moment in time. If you could coordinate it properly, I would guess that there is enough capacity that you could meet 100% of power needs, if only for a moment.
Would make more sense if you reported what fraction of the entire night energy demand was offset by batteries. Which eye-balling it, still appears to be a healthy amount.
The early evening time frame is actually pretty important. Demand doesn't fall until later in the evening, but solar supply drops out.
Before large battery capacity, this demand had to be satisfied with (expensive) peaker plants and imports. Looking at the graph from that one day, there's still a big jump in supply from natural gas until overall demand falls, but imports come on gradually.
Of course, this graph is only from one day; but if this is normal and especially as more batteries go online, it may significantly reduce the use of gas peaker plants and should reduce the cost of early evening electricity. Although, if you still need those plants for grid stability in rare events, using them less regularly will likely increase cost to use them when needed.
The peaks are the dirtiest and most costly parts of the generation.
That's why solar in air conditioned areas was such a boon. And now batteries are combining with solar to take down the next dirty/expensive peak (and you can already see them start to address the morning peak).