I don't know where you live in California. But up here in Sacramento, a cloudy day in summer is about as rare as finding a $20 bill on the street. And even if it IS cloudy, it's the kind of fine, wispy, high level cloudiness that still allows LOTS of sunshine to reach the ground. In fact, at least from May to September, inland Northern California is the most consistently sunny place on the planet.
Norcal winters are another matter, and can be quite rainy and gloomy. But then again, you'll have PLENTY of rain and wind.
What we perceive as sunny does not directly correlate to solar panel performance. I've seen desert solar farm performance data on apparently clear days that fluctuated throughout the cycle when one would think it should be a flat 100%. Right now in winter, reservoir levels are high, but when summer rolls around and levels are low and there's an unplanned generator maintenance outage coupled with a major wind farm windless condition (it happens) - rolling blackouts may happen. We just squeaked by without a CAISO stage 3 alert last year due to an unusually mild summer.
Remember, all that hot day, windy, full reservoir generator power produced must be used or sold -
right now! At this point in battery technology, we can't store enough electrical energy (unlike natural gas) in reserve for high demand periods. In the post deregulated California, the fossil fuel spinning reserve power plants are long gone. And, not enough gas turbine (or other) "peaker" plants exist to fill the gap. Also, we still import 30% of our power from out-of-state, and transport failures are not uncommon (If you remember the path 15 "overload" several years back, where So Cal had excess power but couldn't get it to a low reserve Nor Cal due to a capacity bottleneck). Bottom line (IMHO) is that in addition to higher costs (non-nuclear), "green power", has increased the potential for unplanned power outages due environmental dependencies, and unfortunately as in many things, California will be the guinea pig in this experiment. :shakehead
Sorry for dragging this thread off-topic...
