[M T]

Self-sufficiency is great, until your cogen facility goes down because a rat fried in the transformer.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/P...962896.php

Moreover, the cogen plant ran on natural gas, so if Stanford wanted to be carbon neutral, it needed to get its power from off campus.

You had me going...  That article is from 1996.  I thought it was about Sunday's outage (Stanford Daily indicates the outage was from 7:30-10:15AM) and almost forwarded on.

At the Califorrnia ISO site, you can use the drop-down menus  on the graphs to see historic usage.  When California hit 51.456GW demand on 9/6/22, the state operators supplied from 14.861GW to 26.453GW (min to max on that day) from natural gas, plus 9GW of "Imports" at both those times, which is (on average, not necessarily at peak usage, 20-45% carbon-based), plus about 2.2GW from batteries (charged when supply was about 40% natural gas)).  So California was using the equivalent of about 30GW of electricity from carbon-based fuel (local+imported) at that peak, and no less than about 18GW of electricity from carbon-based fuel at any point in that day. I read that the Governor's office was calling around to get companies to turn on such cogen plants to feed back into the grid, or at least to reduce load.   It is clearly better to use the state's power when roughly 1/3 of it is renewable, rather than to use 100% natural gas.  But when the heat wave hits, having the cogen would help the state cover its demand.

[M T]

Self-sufficiency is great, until your cogen facility goes down because a rat fried in the transformer.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/P...962896.php

Moreover, the cogen plant ran on natural gas, so if Stanford wanted to be carbon neutral, it needed to get its power from off campus.

You had me going...  That article is from 1996.  I thought it was about Sunday's outage (Stanford Daily indicates the outage was from 7:30-10:15AM) and almost forwarded on.

At the Califorrnia ISO site, you can use the drop-down menus  on the graphs to see historic usage.  When California hit 51.456GW demand on 9/6/22, the state operators supplied from 14.861GW to 26.453GW (min to max on that day) from natural gas, plus 9GW of "Imports" at both those times, which is (on average, not necessarily at peak usage, 20-45% carbon-based), plus about 2.2GW from batteries (charged when supply was about 40% natural gas)).  So California was using the equivalent of about 30GW of electricity from carbon-based fuel (local+imported) at that peak, and no less than about 18GW of electricity from carbon-based fuel at any point in that day. I read that the Governor's office was calling around to get companies to turn on such cogen plants to feed back into the grid, or at least to reduce load.   It is clearly better to use the state's power when roughly 1/3 of it is renewable, rather than to use 100% natural gas.  But when the heat wave hits, having the cogen would help the state cover its demand.