California is finally beheading the duck
How California's grid finally flattened the duck curve — and what it teaches us about memorable data visualizations.
This is the last chronicle of the year, and the next chronicle will be on 13th of January. Writing these has been a lovely thing and I am looking forward to getting FFF rolling proper next year. 2024 has, to be honest, been a lot about getting back on the bike for this creator, and I am finally feeling I'm getting warmed up.
As a hint of what is coming, the final video of the year is dropping today, and it is the start of Fun Fun Functions "Dirty D3" series, where you watch my suffering in leaning into the the impossibly large API surface area that is D3.js, bit by bit, step by step, with my unfiltered frustration at every step of the way:
Depending on when you read email, you'll be able to watch it right now, or get notified of the premiere below:
Dirty D3.js Part 1
Dirty D3 won't be the most pedagogical series, or the most succinct, the cleanest, and certainly not the shortest, elegant or terse.
But Dirty D3 will be the weirdest, most vulnerable, most energetic, and most importantly, most sequential course. Course-ish.
Dirty D3 will provide (an) order. There is really no one right sequence to learn all the bajillion hojillion components of D3, but that is an awful optionality, so the course will just decide the order to do it. This is the order that we learn this shit, and thus, it is the right way, because it is the way that we choose.
Hopefully, under 2025, (almost) every week, you'll be learning a little bit of d3.js with me, and at the end of 2027, we'll be renowned world experts, or at least known for having collaboratively created the most stupid course on the matter.
Deeper Dirty D3 (D5?) is the main perk for the upcoming Fun Fun Founders membership
I've been very fortunate be able to run the Dawn of The Data Developer reboot experiment on savings and support from my partner during 2024, but during 2025 the experimental phase ends and I need to actually start making this a job, so prepare for me asking for your financial support in January. It won't be donations though, and I will handsomely rewarding for you - so read on.
In the past, FFF has been very selective with sponsors and only done it when it really, really made sense to promote to the audience. Historically, I've relied mostly on financial support via Patreon, and for the new FFF I've considered a lot of variants for how we clolud do it, and in the end, I landed on using YouTube memberships as the primary audience support mechanism instead of Patreon.
More info is coming up around this next year, it will be a lot more "perky" than the Patreon of former FFF - initially it will give you a lot of e_xtra live streams and member-exclusive material around d3.js.\_
The general content strategy will be that I'll be considering non-d3 material to be the mainstreamy free tier of FFF, while d3.js (especially deeper parts of d3) is, more or less per definition, for the people that are serious about a data visualization career and that also want to support the production of FFF)
Upcoming membership perks: Live streams (d3 support and live episode shoots) + member only Dirty D3 episodes
I aim to have significant amounts of Dirty D3 shot in front of a live stream audience, and in addition, offer monthly support live streams.
These two aforementioned live streams formats will be a perk to YouTube members (more on all that next year) and while I aim to publish 66.6666% of the edited d3.js episodes publicly for free, but the 33.3333% of Dirty D3 episodes that are more deep-divey will be the third main member perk.
The fourth main membership perk will be early-bird pricing and access to _r_eal-life Fun Fun Function events. In the first days of ideation for Dawn of the Data developer, the idea for a D3 and Destress event format was born. An event in the north of Sweden, where we disconnect, ground ourselves, and focus on learning d3 and doing data projects in a beautiful Scandinavian setting with sauna, nature and silence, and meeting other FFF fans for the first time (it's really ridiculous how few of you I've actually met through the years).
D3 and Destress has been a dream of ours for a while now, and during 2025 we will make it happen. The first events will be highly prototypal and only available to a very small group, and first members that sign up will be the first cohort we invite.
California is finally beheading the duck
The new Fun Fun Function is very much gravitating towards the niche of making data more graspable, more evocative, more… transferable.
Visualization is part of this, and interactivity, but also understanding how mnemonics and memetics work. Last week I ran across one of the most shining examples I’ve seen of a mnemonic curve - a plot expressing a mechanic of energy consumption in a memorable way. The Duck curve is a simple, evocative image which gives us a vocabulary to talk about and direct efforts towards a complex matter. The Duck joins the hall of fame of memetic plots, alongside the Hockey Stick, Bell, Bathtub and Elephant Curves.
The Duck Curve | Wikipedia, named for its resemblance to a duck's profile in grid consumption graphs, has been the bane of California's solar ambitions for the last decade (I2M Associates: Why is California Trying To Behead The Duck?). ‘The Duck’ told a simple but frustrating story: solar panels would flood the grid with power during sunny midday hours, only to fall silent just as evening demand peaked, creating a daily pattern that looked remarkably like a duck's belly and neck.
As with many things Solar this year, the trend was broken on June 1st. For 8.7 hours, wind, water, and solar didn't just meet California's demand – they exceeded it. (CleanTechnica: Solar Passes 100% of Power Demand in California!) And unlike in years past, when such abundance would have been a crisis requiring solar panels to be shut down, this excess energy found a home in California's growing network of grid-scale batteries (New York Times - Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricity)
Flashback: Birth of the Duck (2016-2018)
Back in 2016, Vox released a video that would become oddly prophetic. "The 'duck curve' is solar energy's greatest challenge," the title declared, and for good reason. The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) had noticed something peculiar in their grid data: a shape that looked uncannily like a waterfowl's silhouette.
The duck curve is solars greatest challenge
As the California sun climbed high, thousands of solar panels would spring to life, flooding the grid with electricity. This abundance of solar power would create a deep belly-like dip in net demand during midday hours. But as the sun began its descent, just as millions of Californians returned home and switched on their devices, solar generation would plummet. The resulting evening demand spike created a steep neck-like curve that, when combined with the midday dip, traced the unmistakable profile of a duck.
The duck curve caught on as a visualization of a problem statement, representing a serious engineering challenge. Like the (in)famous Hockey Stick, it provided a lighthearted mnemonic at the same time that it gave us a clear antagonistic challenge to a very serious problem. Grid operators needed to rapidly ramp up alternative power sources to match this evening surge, a daily ballet of supply and demand that grew more extreme as more solar panels were installed. The duck was waddling deeper into our power grid, and its neck was getting steeper.
The Hunt Begins: The Battery Solution
The batteries emerged as the perfect apex predator for our duck. The strategy was elegant in its simplicity: catch the solar surplus, store it, then use it to flatten the duck's neck.
Pretty slow-moving for a predator hunting birds, these white large boxes that really only sit around and don’t seem to do much, patiently absorbing the excess solar generation during those deep midday belly hours. But, as evening approached and the duck's neck began to rear up, the batteries, now fat with energy from excess solar power, would strike at the head of the duck, finally halting the previously seemingly unstoppable growth of the duck neck.
But what made this hunt truly remarkable was its scale. This wasn't about picking off a single duck – it was about transforming an entire ecosystem. As battery technology improved and costs plummeted, California's storage capacity grew exponentially. The duck, which had once seemed an immutable feature of the renewable landscape, found itself increasingly cornered by progress.
If you are financially inclined, you might wonder if the duck curve is an arbitrage opportunity, and you’d be right. In California power prices tended to crash around midday, when the state produces more solar power than it needs, especially in the spring when air-conditioning use is low.
Battery costs have plummeted by over 90% in the past decade. In addition to pure cost, modern grid-scale batteries can also cycle (charge and discharge) more times before degrading, handle deeper discharges, and respond to grid needs with almost instant precision.
This gives an innovative power company willing to invest in batteries a trading opportunity - charging up when electricity is plentiful and cheap and then selling power to the grid when electricity supplies are tighter and more expensive. This opportunity becomes even greater if you specialize in becoming among the best among grid operators at orchestrating batteries for better efficiency and durability.
This opportunity was not lost on power entrepreneurs, and California now has 10,000 megawatts of battery power capacity on the grid, enough to power 10 million homes for a few hours, not only during the duck neck hours, but the additional capacity has also proven to help massively when the grid is stressed from heat waves and wildfires.
Watershed moment
On June 1st, 2024 for a record 8.7 hours, wind, water, and solar didn't just meet the state's power demands – they soared past them, peaking at a whoopin’ 136.4% of total demand.
In years past, such abundance would instead have been a crisis. Grid operators would have had to shut down panels, as solar production as solar panels don’t take well to not having anywhere to direct the energy. But this time, California's growing fleet of grid-scale batteries transformed what would once have been a liability into an asset. As CleanTechnica's data shows, solar alone managed to provide 102.1% of demand during peak hours.
The Power of a Pattern
The beheading of California's famous solar power curve teaches us something profound about pattern recognition. The "duck curve" – named when someone at California ISO noticed their grid consumption graphs traced a waterfowl silhouette – did more than just describe a technical challenge. It transformed an abstract grid management problem into something evocatively graspable: "Look, it's a duck!"
While probably just a joke at the time, the duck was suitable as a rallying point. When engineers, policymakers, and investors discussed grid-scale battery deployment, they weren’t talking just in the abstract about megawatt-hours and demand curves – they could refer to "flattening the duck”. The mission became memorable, actionable, almost playful in its framing.
Just like Schrödinger's Cat, the Butterfly Effect, or the Double Helix, the Duck Curve is a narrative device that gives us, as a group, a cognitive handle on a complex system.
The mind loves to find patterns, and sometimes those patterns become tools for understanding and action.
I am very honored that you've graced me with so much of your attention today and this year. Time is the only resource that we all have the same amount of , and attention is the only resource that has that same characteristic, but that is even more scarce, and I very much do not take yours for granted.
I wish you the very best next 2025, see you on the other side!
As always, stay curious 🧐🐒
Mattias Petter Johansson