2 ms·

Gas turbines are on-demand enough. There's a bunch of stuff grids can do at shorter timescales to deal with variations in demand that don't involve actual batte

by twic 6y ago

Gas turbines are on-demand enough. There's a bunch of stuff grids can do at shorter timescales to deal with variations in demand that don't involve actual batteries. There used to be a great article on Wikipedia how about this is done in the UK, but it was deleted. Notionally, it was merged into the main article about the National Grid, but all the interesting content was discarded when that happened. I think the worry was that the article was unsourced - it was pretty clearly just a Grid engineer who sit down and bashed it out one day. Anyway, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Control_of_the_National_Grid_(Great_Britain)&oldid=680713385 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Control_of_the_Na...

dpierce9 6y ago
Neat reference. I agree with you on CTs. The original poster suggested two things: solar is not responsive to demand and that coal plants are responsive. My response is intended to be narrow to those points: coal plants don’t really produce on an instantaneous demand signal any more than solar or wind. Coal produces at some amount and then ramp up or down based on a longer-horizon demand signal (e.g., a 5-min Grid solution). Wind and solar can’t ramp up but they can dispatch down on the same signals. My other point is that solar generally matches peak demand pretty well so you don’t need a ton of demand responsiveness (given that electricity demand is already inelastic).
novok 6y ago
Wikipedia needs a section of their website where people like grid engineers can bash out original sources like that that dont want to maintain their own personal page. Call it wikisource and instead of deleting just move it to there.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  The other half of that problem is finding a way for a grid engineer writing such a page to prove that they really are a grid engineer. Perhaps a tweet from their employer linking to and endorsing the wikisource page would suffice.

by twic 6y ago

dpierce9 6y ago

Neat reference. I agree with you on CTs. The original poster suggested two things: solar is not responsive to demand and that coal plants are responsive. My response is intended to be narrow to those points: coal plants don’t really produce on an instantaneous demand signal any more than solar or wind. Coal produces at some amount and then ramp up or down based on a longer-horizon demand signal (e.g., a 5-min Grid solution). Wind and solar can’t ramp up but they can dispatch down on the same signals. My other point is that solar generally matches peak demand pretty well so you don’t need a ton of demand responsiveness (given that electricity demand is already inelastic).

novok 6y ago

Wikipedia needs a section of their website where people like grid engineers can bash out original sources like that that dont want to maintain their own personal page. Call it wikisource and instead of deleting just move it to there.

dane-pgp 6y ago
The other half of that problem is finding a way for a grid engineer writing such a page to prove that they really are a grid engineer. Perhaps a tweet from their employer linking to and endorsing the wikisource page would suffice.