Since 2012, CAISO has used “The Duck Curve” to graphically illustrate the impact of renewables on available power supplies. This 2016 version summarized historical and expected trends from 2012 through 2020 for a typical spring day.
The renewables deployment forecast embodied in the 2016 version of The Duck Curve has been quite prescient, as demonstrated by the following graph that summarizes average hourly power production by resource type for the month of April 2019. While the hour-to-hour changes in CAISO’s Duck Curve are steeper than the changes in my graph, the former uses