At noon on Sunday, ISO-New England reported that electricity being used in the six states came from these sources:
- Rooftop solar: 5964 MW (estimated, since it’s behind the meter)
- Nuclear: 3361 MW
- Fossil gas: 2331 MW
- Utility solar and wind: 1765 MW
- Hydro: 1027 MW
- Burning waste (wood, trash, landfill methane): 600 MW
- Other (coal, oil, batteries): 6 MW
That means that of 13,801 MW total consumption at that moment, 13,017 MW or 81% was releasing no greenhouse gas at all. Hooray!
An extra note: At 12:30 p.m., the estimated behind-the-meter solar hit 6,079 MW, which is an all-time record for New England. That record gets broken multiple times every spring and is about 30% higher than the record at this time last year.
Sunday is a low usage day and it was cool, breezy and sunny, perfect for wind and solar production. Weekends in spring are usually the high point for percentage of renewables on the New England grid. So this isn’t a pattern that holds up most of the year.
But the accomplishment is still worth celebrating, since not long ago nobody thought the grid could function with this much intermittent power. As offshore wind cranks up and solar keeps being installed, we should be able to better this mark pretty soon.
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I’m confused. Why do they use MW and not MWH.
MW is power
MWH is energy (power integrated over time
I have a 4kw solar system whether it’s a Cloudy or sunny day. But on a sunny day it produces (technically it converts) 20 kWh (0.002 MWH) of energy. On a cloudy day it makes much less
For this article to be clearer we need to know the demand in MWH and the production by source in MWH
Another example: Seabrook nuclear power station, if I recall correctly, is a 1300MW electric (vs about 3000 MW thermal) power plant.
That means if it’s running at its rated output, in 1 hour it will produce 1300 MWH of energy. But what if it’s in coast down (near the end of its fuel cycle) and running at 1000mw – then we get 1000 MWH for an hour of operation.
Going through the sources of energy. How many MWH did the wind turbines provide? Trash to energy? Solar? Etc.
I don’t think it’s a good assumption to use the power plant’s power rating as a proxy for the amount of energy supplied.
This isn’t the power rating, it’s the amount of production entering the grid as measured by ISO-NE over an instantaneous moment (actually a 5-minute period, the shortest that ISO-NE reports). It’s not a measure of total output over an extended period – so MW not MWH.
You’re right that MWH over an extended period, days or weeks, is more useful in terms of understanding the operation of the grid. But this isn’t a deep analysis, it’s a reflection of how the grid is changing. That is important.
Not long ago we were told that the grid would be destabilized any time it was served by more than some small percentage of intermittent sources like solar and wind (5% or 10% or 20% or maybe 30% depending on who was doing the analysis). Now we’re hitting 80% for an hour or two or three and the grid is fine.
The math looks off in the sentence: “That means that of 13,801 MW total consumption at that moment, 13,017 MW or 81% was releasing no greenhouse gas at all.” 81% of 13,801 is 11,179.