Solar in California surpassed natural gas in the first five months of 2026

Posted by martinpw 3 hours ago

Comments

Comment by epistasis 3 hours ago

Solar only increased a little bit, but imports went way up to push down natural gas.

California imported electricity is cleaner on average than internally generated electricity: lots of hydro and nuclear from neighbors, and the big one of the new SunZia massive wind farm. So directly displacing natural gas with imports is 100% win from a climate angle.

Comment by OkayPhysicist 3 hours ago

Does "imported" in this context include places like Linden Ranch, Washington, which is home to a wind farm fully operated by Los Angeles Department of Water and Power?

Comment by dmoy 2 hours ago

Yes

CA only produces like 70% of the electricity it uses, they get power all the way from Canada not just WA

Comment by bryanlarsen 2 hours ago

Reading off those hard to read graphs, it looks like both solar and imports are up about 3GW in 2025? Why do you say imports increased so much more than solar?

Comment by epistasis 2 hours ago

I could be misreading, but looking at the first graph, 2024-2025 had a fairly big jump in average GWh from solar. But 2025-2026 has a not very big jump? Very easy to misread, though.

Same with the very bottom set of three plots. Between 2025-2026, there's not much change in solar that I can see, but there's a huge change in night-time and morning imports, which depresses natural gas a ton.

Nighttime generation from SunZia would be a likely cause; at least in California night time wind is stronger than day time, usually, I wonder if New Mexico is the same.

Comment by bryanlarsen 2 hours ago

The 2026 solar graph doesn't include summer. California produced solar power at about the same rate in January through May this year as it did January through December last year.

Comment by epistasis 1 hour ago

Summer is excluded from all years in the bottom and top graphs, the ones I was referring to.

Comment by 2 hours ago

Comment by toomuchtodo 3 hours ago

Solar and battery projects in the CAISO interconnect queue:

https://www.interconnection.fyi/?market=CAISO&status=Active&...

Comment by ck2 3 hours ago

Meanwhile guess who just gave ANOTHER BILLION to MORE wind farms not to finish building

* https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...

The insanity of it all. Do we survive this decade? Are you SURE?

Comment by toomuchtodo 3 hours ago

Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges - https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15062026/trump-administra... - June 15th, 2026

> Do we survive this decade? Are you SURE?

Yes. We simply took our foot of the accelerator pedal for a bit. Regrettable, but that is all. Hopefully a lesson has been learned, but perhaps not. Humans are tricky.

Comment by josefritzishere 2 hours ago

That particular human is not tricky, sort of the core problem.

Comment by toomuchtodo 2 hours ago

I was referring to voters.