Why wouldn’t they have the gas-powered generators turned off instead? Oh yeah, that would affect PG&E’s profits...
Those gas generators are maintaining frequency stability of the generating system, inversely compensating for variance of solar and wind production, and preventing a blackout. They are the hot spinning reserve which can ramp up from stand-by to full output in minutes. Suggest Californians actually own the talk and shut them down for a trial run. The nuclear complement will go into emergency stand-by, leaving the turbines’ limited capacity available for reboot of the grid. When the system comes back up three days later, tell us how it all went.
The article doesn’t go much into the California utilities divestment of ownership in coal fired plants over the eastern border, feeding power to the coastal cities. A kind of hypocrisy similar to electric car owners bragging of zero emissions-—emissions displaced to the source of generation.
California was long claiming only 1% coal based generation-—the plants in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah kept the emissions in other states-—and of course no coal burning was visible to the PGE customer whom believes it all comes from solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear in that order.