California solar power plants recently hit a new electricity output record for electricity from utility-scale solar power plants. It hit 4.813 gigawatts of output on August 15 at 12:03pm.
The data comes from CAISO, which only tracks utility-scale output. It can’t track behind-the-meter rooftop output, which had the potential to add another 2.6 gigawatts.
To put things in better perspective, utility-scale solar power (from PV & CSP) produced about 5.1% of California’s electricity demand in July and 6.4% of California’s electricity demand in June.
Of course, these records will be broken year after year, often several times a year, as solar power is growing fast in the Golden State. Nonetheless, bringing attention to the growth through new records is a good way to wake more people up to the cost competitiveness of solar power, as well as California’s leadership installing solar power.
For more details on the California solar market, check out this report.
Image Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Sacramento District
What helps to make this cool to me is that it is happening almost two months after the solstice when you would expect to see the record outputs.