Also, I heard that Texas was the best place to build things (cf. Abundance by Thompson & Klein)
I'm sorry. Did I say bribe? I of course meant campaign donation?
Essentially, we were replicating the process that the ISOs used internally. The users of this product were all former ISO employees. The goal was to speed up the process of determining whether transmission costs were going to ruin a project before any money was spent. ISOs take months to do their analysis. The users told me that they were usually looking for $0 transmission upgrades on $50m+ projects.
The grid and contingency files from the ISOs were under confidentiality agreements. This rubbed me the wrong way from a competition point of view. We also had data about projects slated to be built which could take away capacity from our projects.
I could see a SaaS in doing this sort of analysis. It's probably bureaucratic between reselling TARA, NDAs, and maybe legal issues if the analysis was wrong. I have doubts about the market, most of the money is in big projects at big companies that are already doing this sort of thing.
[1] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-softw...
They should be requiring batteries with solar as well.
His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
It's a significantly bad thing if something as straightforward as buying and plugging in solar panels requires special knowledge to not get screwed over.
> His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
Oh come on.
And it's even plausible that ERCOT currently can't handle additional PV in whatever area the Roby parcel was in without adding BESS, although the person you're responding to has no idea if that's true or not, since neither they nor I knows where that is.
The conclusion in the post:
> Run five projects through the process simultaneously. Most will fail for reasons you cannot predict. With five, one might succeed. And switching to batteries instead of solar. Or at least solar plus storage.
Okay, how small of a connection would they have to restrict him to for me to be correct?
> BESS, simple curtailment at peak hours, or angle diversity would solve the problem.
That much extra curtailment is a major problem. That much extra angle diversity hurts output. Batteries are a workaround for not being able to properly hook up the panels.
I did my calculation already. It said that a 1/3 drop in hookup for panels that were already hookup-constrained is not a proper hookup.
Straightforward math.
He was doing it for the tax credits. Without the tax credits, this project wouldn't have come close to making sense.
Absolutely untrue. Solar and wind can always just be disconnected at any moment. Wind resources are also a huge inertia source- windmill blades are massive grid stabilizers.
Renewable tech does not have a big coal fire they need to keep at a constant temperature. How about instead of requiring batteries with solar, we require coal plants to have sufficient bypass cooling that they don't need the load of a grid connection to stay cool.
Renewables are a boogeyman. The reality is simply that they are always able to undercut any fossil plant and they don't like that. It has fuck all to do with grid stability.
In California the companies also systematically under-invest in capacity and maintenance, so the up-front cost of any project, even single home solar can get unpredictable fast.
At least Dr Pepper comes from Texas. There’s that to like. Everything else just always seems upside down absurd.
Predictably, all of those projects dropped out of the interconnection queue / process
Take the many quotes in this article, which all sound like ChatGPT. Obviously, none of those people said those words, or even anything all that like what they supposedly said, because that's not what real people sound like.
If the author is willing to silently do that (which could be uncharitably described as "lying"), why should I trust anything else, like the numbers, or the factual claims?
Did any of this actually happen? (I note that there's not a single external link or fact that an ignorant layman like myself could quickly and easily verify, including the Astral Codex Ten part.)
Incidentally, there are a lot of typos in the titles in https://7goldfish.com/ .
> This is a much better read than I expected.
Hm...
Lots of seemingly little things that are necessary to get something off the ground.
stego-tech•2h ago
All of this results in good intentions being squandered because too many entrenched entities would lose too much hypothetical value on a balance sheet to just do something better for everyone.
Calwestjobs•2h ago
solo solar plant are very weird edge case which was viable only because people with 20 years of schooling could not understand why is solar important, (after multiple oil crises ) so govs invested in this nonsense to speed up adoption. not because it was sensical thing. to open eyes to people that solar is working.
build solar as part of your corps supply chain. dollars are not goal, dollars are means for better life, stronger communities, better republic.
"Failure of the state to prioritize energy sufficiency over hypothetical mineral rights. "
where is battery ? so no this is not about energy self sufficiency, this is just pure only money endeavor. soft power here is not sane. also with battery you can get order of magnitude higher profit AND higher UTILITY, so there are multiple bad things in that endeavor.
Calwestjobs•2h ago
there is insanely huge gap in peoples perception of reality, schooling failed many.
less energy i need, less energy we need to capture (new word for generate), transmit, curtail, store,.... my heat pump is smaller then heat pump in costcos meat refrigerator, so smaller device is easier, quicker to manufacture, less people, cars , cubic feet to store, transport,.... and all this effect from on freaking house.
or hurricane, tornado, flood disables grid in my area, my house will stay livable for 3 days until i have to put on sweater... or today, there is heat wave predicted, at least 10 people will die today,... why?
Spivak•22m ago
My neighbors who heat their houses with wood (in an area where you absolutely don't have to—we have gas and electric at extremely reasonable prices), both have the nice high efficiency stoves to take advantage of the Biden tax credit and it seems to work just fine for them. Cords of wood around here aren't free but damn close to it.
Source: I'm considering a wood stove for my garage for working in the winter and they both talked my ear off about their experiences.
jay_kyburz•51m ago
People here in Australia expect feed in tariff to drop to nothing in the next few years, but electric prices are still climbing.
Our new government has promised battery subsidies as well, so I expect batteries to take off. There is a lot of money to be saved by time shifting all that sun that is wasted during the day until the evening when you get home.