California Is Now The Top US Net Importer Of Electricity

Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

California’s imports were the largest in the United States last
year when 25 percent of California’s total electricity
supply was imported, the Energy Information Administration
(EIA)�said on
Monday.  

Last year, California’s net electricity imports were the
largest in the country at 70.8 million megawatt-hours
(MWh), followed by Ohio, Massachusetts, Virginia, and
Tennessee, EIA data showed.

In California’s case, the state’s utilities partly own and
import power from several power plants in Arizona and Utah.
California’s electricity imports also include hydroelectric power
from the Pacific Northwest, mostly across high-voltage transmission
lines from Oregon to the Los Angeles area.

This summer, amid the great West heatwave, the largest
U.S. solar state, California, was grappling
with power issues and struggling to keep its electricity grid
stable as demand exceeds supply.

California energy consumers were warned of rolling outages as
there was insufficient energy to meet the high demand during the
heatwave in August. In California, where solar power
supplies more
than 20 percent of electricity as per the Solar Energy
Industries Association (SEIA), August’s rolling outages were the
worst such outages since the 2000-2001
energy crisis in the state.    

According to 2019 data from
the California Energy Commission, the state imported 30.68 percent
of its renewables-generated electricity supply and 69.32 percent of
non-renewables supply.

While California was the biggest net importer of electricity in
the U.S. last year, the largest net exporter of electricity
was Pennsylvania, with 70.5 million MWh of exports, or
24 percent of total supply, EIA data showed.

Pennsylvania’s electricity generation was the third-largest in
the United States in 2019, behind Texas and Florida. Natural
gas-fired and nuclear power plants produced most of Pennsylvania’s
electricity generation in 2019, at 43 percent and 36 percent,
respectively. Pennsylvania ranks second in the U.S., after
Illinois, in terms of nuclear power generating capacity.