[HN Gopher] 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas ...
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'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas
solar/wind/battery storage
Author : MilnerRoute
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-04-28 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.houstonchronicle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.houstonchronicle.com)
| zer00eyz wrote:
| If you're reading this and the cost prohibitive part of this
| story doesn't make sense you have to understand how far forward
| the Texas grid is when it comes to renewables.
|
| There have been many occasions where the cost of power in Texas
| has gone negative. (see:
| https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/understanding-negative-pr... )
|
| For this to happen there are a lot of factors that come into play
| but it indicates a downward price pressure on generation that is
| not going to go away. Storage and transmission are going to be
| the largest costs for the system going forward. These "ride
| through" upgrades make sense in the near term (generation side)
| but in the long term become just another cost that in theory
| could be put on the storage portion of the system (not in place
| yet).
|
| Texas cutting itself off from the national grid, is now at the
| bleeding edge of renewables. 20 Years ago, that sentence would
| have gotten you laughed out of the state.
| chris222 wrote:
| California is also going negative quite often now. Instead of
| dropping prices and encouraging usage during those times they
| curtail. The utility model is completely broken.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=60822
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| Or, California just needs to increase its battery storage
| capacity some more. (This week they announced storage systems
| now already have over 10,000 megawatts in capacity -- "about
| 20% of the 52,000 megawatts the state says is needed to meet
| its climate goals.")
|
| https://ca.news.yahoo.com/california-battery-storage-
| increas...
| _heimdall wrote:
| That will be a tough game to chase long term as batteries
| need to be removed and replaced regularly. Assuming the
| storage capacity needs continue to grow, CA would need to
| replace larger and larger stocks of batteries on the scale
| of 5-15 years depending on what kind of warranty the
| battery manufacturers are providing.
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| Batteries don't have to be the traditional ones we use
| and think of.
|
| They can be things like pumping water up a hill and
| releasing it to spin a turbine or using rocks storing
| heat.
|
| The storage capacity can be added, it's just don't going
| to be banks of lead or lithium batteries
| h0l0cube wrote:
| And for lithium batteries, maintaining an overcapacity
| drastically increases the lifetime by reducing the depth
| of the cycle. e.g., you get vastly more cycles at %50 DoD
| vs %80. This would increase the lifespan to be many
| decades
| ssl-3 wrote:
| "10,000 megawatts" is not a measure of storage capacity.
| hirsin wrote:
| For some reason grid storage reporting always seems to
| use a power metric instead of storage metric, which makes
| no sense to me. I've seen this in a half dozen stories,
| and found that even the government reports do this. I
| think it stems from someone reusing a column to represent
| both storage and power across generators and batteries.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| As A CA resident living under the thumb of PGE I have to say
| that nothing shocks me any more.
|
| The current PGE rates basically redline a whole portion of
| the state.
|
| Gray Davis got run out of town on the back of Enron's
| nonsense. The fact that there is abject lack of fall out from
| the current pricing is, outrageous.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| The overwhelming sentiment is still negative towards Texas and
| it's energy management decisions from many people who you'd
| assume cared the most about efficient energy generation and
| it's effects on the earth. It turns out Texas is ahead in a lot
| of trends that are related to efficient energy usage, but for
| mostly practical reasons in combination with a willingness to
| try something new -- and people seem to have a very "not like
| that???" attitude.
|
| That said, investing more in the infrastructure is something
| that seems to have been put on hold/not addressed appropriately
| in the past in Texas so the Houston Chronicle running a story
| to bring this to the forefront doesn't rub me the wrong way
| either.
|
| > Ryan Quint, a former NERC engineer who was the primary author
| on nearly all of the organization's reports on the issue, is
| now a consultant working with Clearway Energy, one of the
| developers. In comments to ERCOT, Quint wrote that nearly 90%
| of the resources can address their issues with commercially
| reasonable fixes such as software upgrades, including the vast
| majority of solar issues in both of the Odessa events.
|
| So just a little software is holding Texas back? Well that's
| gotta be inexpensive! What could software cost these days --
| surely a couple 100k engineers and a month or two?
|
| (the above line is a joke)
|
| In all seriousness though, I do wonder if the unreasonable
| distribution of talented engineers to... trivial (but
| profitable) pursuits negatively effects some more nuts-and-
| bolts industries like this.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's true that technology helping sell more cheetos probably
| puts upward price pressures on engineering in essential
| industries.
|
| One solution is to tax ad engineers and subsidize essential
| ones, or allow utilities to raise the prices enough to pay
| for this competitive workforce.
| cranky908canuck wrote:
| So this is where the right leaning (and quite reasonable, in
| the long term) observation should be: there's a business
| opportunity to build and deploy storage capacity with grid
| stabilization the top feature.
|
| That takes vision (which isn't always there), but also time.
| Perhaps also recognition in the regulatory ecosystem that this
| is needed, so that the business case (ie, build it and they
| will pay for it) is there.
| grecy wrote:
| <Sigh>
|
| Australia went through this very same propaganda when a once in
| 100 year lightning storm caused a big grid interconnect failure,
| and a large part of an entire state was without power for weeks
| [1]
|
| The Politicians at the time spun it as being caused by evil
| renewables, and the damage was done. A huge percentage of the
| population still believes that renewables cause power outages,
| cause prices to go up, and are the work of the devil.
|
| Talk about putting a spin on something to ensure the legacy
| providers keeps making a profit.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| Yeah, I've been wondering if any of this is coming from Texas
| grid operators behaving hostilely toward renewable power?
|
| _" State utility regulators shot down efforts by ERCOT to
| impose new rules on large-scale battery sites, siding with
| operators who decried the grid operator's rules as costly and
| discriminatory. The unanimous decision by the Public Utility
| Commission of Texas came after five months... It was touched
| off by a report from the grid operator intended to show grid-
| level batteries were unreliable without stricter rules. Texas
| battery operators, seven of which wrote letters ahead of the
| meeting opposing all or parts of the proposal, weren't the only
| ones not buying it..."_
|
| https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/battery-ercot-c...
| grecy wrote:
| Wondering? It couldn't be more clear!
| louwrentius wrote:
| When there is a voltage or frequency disturbance on the grid,
| caused by lightning strikes or equipment failures, ERCOT expects
| power generators to "ride through" the disturbances and continue
| producing power. But inverter-based resources such as wind, solar
| and batteries -- especially the oldest ones -- may sometimes not
| be able to ride through the disturbance and could "trip" >
| offline and disconnect from the grid. This could lead to a domino
| effect of other generators tripping offline, which could in a
| worst-case scenario result in the "rapid collapse of part of or
| all the ERCOT system," according to ERCOT. ERCOT has experienced
| a growing number of these inverter-based resource failures,
| particularly in West Texas. In 2021 and again in 2022, more than
| 1,000 megawatts of solar resources tripped offline near Odessa,
| prompting the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC),
| an international regulatory authority, to recommend ERCOT rectify
| the risk.
|
| Interesting read: Inverters don't have spinning mass like
| turbines that can deal with fluctuations in the grid (simplified)
| (as we learned from Grady's Practical Engineering) and they
| follow the grid, but can't build a grid. But we also learned from
| him that modern inverters can actually build a grid and behave
| like a "mechanical generator".
|
| So as I understand it, a lot of existing renewable suppliers have
| to do some retrofitting, which is probably expensive, so now we
| are here.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I wonder what the expense of adding things like flywheel type
| storage to renewable grids is?
| errantmind wrote:
| Some interesting facts:
|
| * ERCOT (Texas) has more renewables generation than every other
| ISO, including CAISO (California)
|
| * ERCOT is setting new renewables records almost every month, as
| new renewables sites come online.
|
| Source: https://www.gridstatus.io/home
| yawaramin wrote:
| There is an unfortunate tunnel vision focus on renewables when
| the real goal should be deep decarbonization. The reason is
| obvious when you realize that people of a certain generation (who
| are in power now) don't like nuclear energy because 'nuclear' was
| the bogeyman while they were growing up. They are dragging the
| rest of us down with them into an era of unstable and unreliable
| power at huge expense.
| 7952 wrote:
| I am in favour of nuclear but a politically unpalatable
| solution is useless for decarbonisation.
| _heimdall wrote:
| That only really holds true if disruptions in the carbon cycle
| are the fundamental root cause.
|
| Carbon seems extremely important no doubt, but I've never
| personally bought the idea that the health of the entire planet
| can be boiled down to a single, analytical metric. I've also
| yet to be convinced that, even if it truly is all about carbon,
| we understand the problem so completely that we know how to
| intervene precisely without breaking anything else or causing
| unexpected side effects.
|
| We've seen a noticeable increase in ocean temperatures in the
| last year or two and I've seen compelling data pointing to it
| being caused by ultra-low sulfur emissions regulations in
| marine shipping. People thought they were doing the right
| thing, they just didn't account for the cooling effects of
| sulfur in the atmosphere. We could easily do the same with
| global interventions in the carbon cycle.
|
| I'd much rather see us leaning into a reduction in
| interventions wholesale. Its much harder to break things when
| you just stop causing so much damage.
| sholladay wrote:
| We have got to stop using alternating current. HVDC to the home
| is clearly the future. Isn't anyone working on this?
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(page generated 2024-04-28 23:01 UTC)