I'm no expert, but is there any storage system that is practical that can store the amount of energy we'd need to have most (all) electricity come from renewables?
I have no idea if it’s feasible to fill longer-term gaps during extended cloudy/windless days and nights using that alone, though. Other than that, there are already large-scale battery plants deployed in some cities.
Another approach is to control the demand side: When air conditioning or heating with electricity, minutes usually don’t matter, and dropping/providing extra load at very short notice should be feasible in a smart grid.
So the more you use them, the more energy you need in the first place, so you try not to use them too much. And the worst thing for a capital intensive business is to not get used much. Even with the arbitrage advantage, it takes a long time to pay it off. The grid may pay a "retainer" to sweeten the deal but you can't just build more and expect them all to get that benefit.
It's similar to the problem that "use excess energy to electrolyse water into hydrogen" has: no-one running a multi-billion electrolyser really wants to run it a few hours a day only when the grid is oversupplied. And in top of that, risk being cut off at the knees decades before breakeven if someone comes along with a cheaper/more profitable way to deal with the oversupply.
In the meantime, load sharing is used to distribute power across a power grid for cases where one area has more power and another area needs power. For instance, wind may die out in one area but over larger areas there are usually still areas with wind. It’s harder with solar, of course.
Not necessarily enough wind to be useful. If you look at graphs of wind turbine output across entire large power grids, you see 4:1 variations in a day over the PJM and CAISO regions.
That's irrelevant to this blackout, anyway. This blackout occurred during a period when supply far exceeded demand.
It’s highly unlikely to be abnormally cloudy/calm over the whole of Europe, for example, so Europe’s large grid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...) can be used to move electricity from where there’s excess energy from solar or wind to where there’s a deficit.
That requires large capacity connections, though that aren’t everywhere yet.I understand electricity was restored in the south of France much more rapidly last week than in Spain and Portugal because it’s much better connected to the rest of Europe.
This is a political problem, having Mitteleuropa depend on power from Putin is apparently OK, but on lazy southerners is verboten. Hopefully this blackout changes that (but I'm not holding my breath).
If you look at the European road and rail networks, you’ll find France and Spain aren’t well-connected, either.
It's quite possible -- over the previous 30 years we've never had an hour where there was no wind & sun anywhere in Europe. So we could theoretically solve it without storage, but that would require an insane amount of overbuild and interconnect. Imagine supplying all of Europe's electricity needs with just wind power from the south shore of Ireland.
Adding a few days worth of storage reduces the interconnect & overbuild needs dramatically, putting 99.99% carbon free within the realm of the possible.
Sure... but my expectation is that that 90% solution would include an unreasonable amount of storage (assuming you want most/all renewables). I guess was my point.
> It's quite possible -- over the previous 30 years we've never had an hour where there was no wind & sun anywhere in Europe.
But "some" wind or sun is not enough to support the whole grid.
In that scenario 90% is very easy to hit. A couple of hours worth of storage, maybe.
> But "some" wind or sun is not enough to support the whole grid.
The less there is, the more you have to over build to compensate. Doesn't make it impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_redox_flow_battery
Its commercially available right now as well.
Its not as efficient as lithium or as energy dense, but that doesnt matter if you're putting them in wind/solar farms.
However the lead time is going to be an issue: Need 7500 Tesla Megapacks and thats 4‑5 months of combined annual capacity for Tesla. Currently there is a 18 to 24 month backlog. Then there is 6-9 month installation time.
So 3 years to fix this, min.
It's a shame that these renewable energy transitions are managed so poorly. This was a predictable outcome and it's negligence that they went ahead with switching so much of the grid to renewable without accounting for the needed for stability. It hurts the mission of switching to renewable energy.
I'm looking at whole-house battery backup for a little construction projct underway here. This is a boom market at the moment, and there are many other manufacturers in production.
I can only assume this is also the case for industrial scale storage...
These have commercial products already I believe. I'm not sure if they have any installed yet. They have moved from vanadium batteries.
Does HN know about their agenda's, biases, blind spots. Not necessarily to shoot them down, just to be aware of them.
This not useful. More data is required.
This unusual situation points to a perfect storm of poor grid management and inadequate connections of solar facilities to the grid, as well as other unknown faults. In my opinion, there is a good chance ..."
We don't really know, I don't really know, but I'm going to write a long post about it.
We haven't yet seen the sequence of breaker trip events. We haven't yet seen the graphs of power flows at tie points, and of frequency and voltage error.
The closest thing to a useful fact visible from Google seems to be: "The network lost 15 gigawatts of electricity generation in five seconds at around 1033 GMT, the Energy Ministry said on Monday evening, without explaining the reason for the loss." That's not a cause. Losing 15GW all at once, more power than any one plant generates, indicates some previous event had caused breaker trips somewhere. No indication of the previous event.
We do know this wasn't a supply shortage. There was plenty of generating capacity online.
Here's an analysis of the US Northeast blackout of 2003.[1] Until we start to see that level of detail, it's just blithering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
Classic scifi might be a time traveller trying to get home, or someone opening an interdimensional gateway, or maybe an AI becoming conscious and needing the power to ascend.
I don't agree. You do not need a thorough root cause analysis to acknowledge the fact that a) some invariants in the system were violated, b) some of the people accountable are already making claims that fly in the face of reason.
Also, Spain has a regrettable track record of covering up the responsibilities of state institutions in major disasters.
This part didn't make sense to me.
The rotating machinery of hydroelectric, or nuclear's steam generators, produce the frequency of AC in synchronization with their mechanical rotation, but the inverters converting solar's DC into AC are making a purely synthesized waveform under control of high speed digital electronics.
I would think they should be the most able to modify the AC sine wave they are generating.
Maybe someone can comment and correct my logic...
> Grid-following inverters operate only if they can “see” an existing voltage and frequency on the grid that they can synchronize to. They rely on controls that sense the frequency of the voltage waveform and lock onto that signal, usually by means of a technology called a phase-locked loop. So if the grid goes down, these inverters will stop injecting power because there is no voltage to follow. A key point here is that grid-following inverters do not deliver any inertia.
For photovoltaics and wind, grid-forming inverters are not yet commercially available at the size and scale needed for large grids, but they are now being developed by GE Vernova, Enphase, and Solectria......
I'll do some reading on "grid forming".
The beauty of it is the electronics can be connected and controlled much better with each other too, so more optimized control algorithms for supply and demand balancing is possible. Bad thing is, this will incentivize to solve problems by over the air updates. As we know software reliability has gotten so much worse, which makes it more prone to bugs being pushed. Obe should expect weird outages due to someone pushing something buggy.
In theory, it seems like you could instrument a photovoltaic array to carry some "inertia" with the right control system.
If you need to feed power, you run some power point tracking algorithm, and if you need to consume power, you just overbias the cells and heat them up.
If some critical mass of PV micro-inverters exceeds the traditional generators, they'll push so hard that the grid itself will change phase, and blackouts are the result.
One possible solution might be to use a better oscillator in the micro-inverter and limit the rate of phase shift. Unfortunately, the grids of the world have been moving in the opposite direction and now allow more drift than in the past, so where do you draw the line?
https://medium.com/@brandonvar/power-grid-stability-issues-a...
That's a thundering herd problem: where all invertors have the same set-points and they all are synchonised to push in the same direction at once.
In networks, thundering herd problems are fixed by given each sender different random delays.
For power networks we could choose statistical methods to get individual solar generators to lead or lag so that the frequency becomes an aggregate vote.
Given that part of the blackout was due to large amounts of solar going offline at the same time, it's possible that all invertors with common software were tripped at the same set-point.
So trip conditions also need to be randomly fuzzy. E.g. if frequency drops below 49Hz +/- random spread of 0.5Hz.
Although it's difficult to match financial incentives against random variations (individual generators are incentivised to power outside of boundaries to keep getting paid, and a trip event can be expensive - due to restart costs).
Electricity market design is hard because the design needs to be resilient to perverse incentives.
People with PV arrays want to make money by selling power into the grid. Perhaps if they were a little less greedy, they could back off the phase difference if they detect the grid phase drifting from too much "pushing." After all, they can't sell any power at all while the grid is down.
same as inverter in electric car providing power to motors.
or inverter providing power to coils in your loudspeaker/ headphones.
inverter can adjust phase, voltage, frequency. it can means it is job of inverter to provide that in normal operation. that is why it is there in first place.
> Current evidence therefore points to a problem in the synchronisation of the grid. All sources feeding power into the grid must be synchronised at the same frequency, 50 Hertz. To facilitate this synchronisation, stable base-load power is required, which is normally provided by nuclear and other large gas and hydroelectric facilities. These sources act as a natural buffer against disturbances
So:
- price is negative, so solar automatically disconnects not to pay for providing electricity
- nuclear is overloaded at unexpected time, it also disconnect due to safety.
Seems like a bug in accounting software for solar power plants. It disconnected too many power plants too quickly! I bet like 40% of solar plants are using the same software for managing connectivity.
"However, variable renewable sources, such as solar photovoltaic, do not have this capability. They generate direct current which is converted to alternating current at 50 Hertz, but they cannot react automatically to frequency variations. "
Nonsense. Go to any solar installer and ask him about this capability. or go to your roofs PV inverters manual and look up section about inputting "grid parameters".
Writer is either total ignorant or bad actor.
https://theconversation.com/profiles/j-guillermo-sanchez-leo...
Plus from manual, most AC inverters have parasitic power factor on AC side. Some part of power inverter sends to grid, can be out of sync junk!
Large spinning turbines with generator, are capable of absorbing out of sync junk to huge extend. But that may put turbine out of phase slightly.
Current power grid was build around huge wheels spinning at the very same frequency.
There has been unusually heavy rain in Spain for an unusual length of time now, and reservoirs are well beyond average capacity.[1]
I wonder if this anomalous situation has anything to do with the blackout. Maybe the inability to continue pumping water led to the shutdown of the solar, maybe for economic reasons as is suggested in some other comment?
Yippie Yah Hoo, Yippie Yah Yay!
Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TPOj4CTGKs if you don't get it ;-)
VagabundoP•9mo ago
therein•9mo ago
Edit: Downvote this if it will help you remember when they do it soon. But by downvoting you are hereby agreeing to not to act like you are surprised when it happens.
anthk•9mo ago