11 ms·

battery storage

55 points by MilnerRoute 2y ago

zer00eyz 2y ago
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-prices-in-the-texas-electricity-market/ 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 2y ago
  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 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=60822
  - MilnerRoute 2y ago
    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-increasing-rapidly-230621296.html https://ca.news.yahoo.com/california-battery-storage-increas...
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        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
        kemiller 2y ago
        California is already planning a giant off-river reservoir that will be dependent on pumping to fill. If it could be set up to kick in instead of curtailment it could be a win win.
        nradov 2y ago
        The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) makes it extremely difficult to build new pumped storage facilities. It's possible in principle but will take many years to get through the construction permits and inevitable lawsuits.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        California isn't exactly known for water management practices, though sure there are storage systems that use kinetic potential as a battery. In theory that can be used at very large scales, if the water and elevation is available for use. Is be really curious how the math works out with regards to how much water would be required for say 3 days of use in LA. That may even be an over estimate of storage needs given how few rainy days they get.
  - zer00eyz 2y ago
    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.
    - s0rce 2y ago
      Isn't most of the PGE charge transmission not generation?
      - sidewndr46 2y ago
        in most of US the cost of residential power is almost entirely in the delivery, not the generation. If folks knew how much they were being fleeced they'd lose their minds.
    - WirelessGigabit 2y ago
      SoCal Edison isn't any better. When I left CA my off-peak cost was more expensive per kWh than my on-peak cost here in Phoenix. And that on-peak is for 3 hours per day.
  - singhrac 2y ago
    Curtailment is often a decision of the generator (I don’t know CAISO specifics but I would be surprised if it wasn’t ultimately a generator decision). If I asked you to generate power for -$15/MWh, you would refuse to do it because it would cost you money. 0 > -15. The utilities not charging negative time-of-rates is a separate decision.
  - icegreentea2 2y ago
    Your link claims that curtailment is largely due to congestion - "when power lines don’t have enough capacity to deliver available energy". Dropping prices will not help with that?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hardwaresofton 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
  - onthecanposting 2y ago
    To your last point, Bentley software is standard for most DOTs for highway design. All their offerings are rife with quality issues to the point that I have never run their software without some spooky behavior requiring a reset or flushing the ProjectWise cache. For software enabling a $150B industry, you would think it would at least run reliably. That there aren't objects that are aware that they are roads (just lines, arcs, and spirals) makes it laughably bad. The cost of this waste is tragic.
- cranky908canuck 2y ago
  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.
  - singhrac 2y ago
    There’s plenty of battery being deployed for ancillary services in Texas (frequency response, 30 minute, etc). They are getting paid tons to do it and it’s been coming online for years.
    - cranky908canuck 2y ago
      This doesn't seem to be getting the exposure it deserves --- please give links, I'd like to see! You seem to be implying that "the featured article" [1] is not giving that exposure (which is my sense as well). [1] looking for the shorthand for the original link that started the discussion, thinking that 'TFA' is correct, is this in the HN FAQ?
      - 0xBDB 2y ago
        https://www.utilitydive.com/news/battery-storage-texas-reliability-grid-benefits/695982/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/battery-storage-texas-relia... It appears (not an expert) that Texas leads the country by such a margin in renewables that increasing battery storage an order of magnitude in 3 years was sort of a drop in the bucket.
        cranky908canuck 2y ago
        Could be. The emerging picture (from some observers (including me, but I'm just one opinion) seems to be to build out like heck, then deal with the 'overproduction' using storage and markets. Storage can be things like smart hot water heaters, deferrable loads, local residential batteries, residential EV charging, etc...
- s0rce 2y ago
  Maybe you are talking about something different but isn't price frequently negative across much of the southwest during the day? https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.html
- bsder 2y ago
  > how far forward the Texas grid is when it comes to renewables. And how far backward Texas is with respect to the grid. When the big freeze went through, ERCOT didn't have the ability to actually cut manufacturing plants off. They could only manipulate the price. They had to get on the phone and request that various manufacturing facilities voluntarily shut themselves down. In addition, part of the problem with the big freeze was that there isn't sufficient granularity in the grid. You couldn't cut off enough people because the grid chunks were also connected to hospitals, fire stations, etc. None of this has changed. Thus, you couldn't do rolling blackouts with enough demand slack to actually allow you to roll them. On top of that, it is not at all clear that Texas has a plan to restart the grid from scratch if it actually needs a full reboot. None of this is new. The Federal government documented all this 10 years before the big freeze. Everybody documented it after. Nothing has changed. > Texas cutting itself off from the national grid, is now at the bleeding edge of renewables. Texas cutting itself off from the main grid is also why the grid is at the mercy of renewables. Side note: one of the driving forces for Texas' renewables push was that T. Boone Pickens was trying to monopolize water rights and was using renewables as way to get them.
grecy 2y ago
<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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout
- MilnerRoute 2y ago
  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-contested-regulations-1186-18614035.php https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/battery-ercot-c...
  - grecy 2y ago
    Wondering? It couldn't be more clear!
- boringg 2y ago
  Alberta is the same. The playbooks is the same the players are a bit different. Resistance to change and embedded incentives are the cause. Its tiring to watch us repeat the same things over and over again.
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  As a resident of that state it was frustrating to see the media and political narratives both untruthful and in alignment. Even the impressive images of a downed giant 'giraffe' transmission tower[0] wasn't enough to convince those who wanted the anti-renewable narrative to be true. Apparently 20 towers collapsed in total. Surely a more decentralised grid (a grid of micro-grids?), more easily facilitated by smaller and more distributed generation (including rooftop solar and home batteries), would mitigate such events? Too complicated and nuanced a concept for your average outrage-consumer and too long-lasting a project for your average politician to take credit for. [0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-28/sa-statewide-blackout-anniversary-energy-impacts/100496564 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-28/sa-statewide-blackout... (top article image)
errantmind 2y ago
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 https://www.gridstatus.io/home
- racked 2y ago
  I'm not seeing that at all on gridstatus.io. Although solar capacity is growing, ERCOT mostly and increasingly seems to use natural gas.
  - icegreentea2 2y ago
    ERCOT has way more wind capability (both absolute capacity and percentage) than CAISO. CAISO has more solar as a percentage of capacity, but even then the absolute capacities for solar between CAISO and ERCOT are actually quite similar. For example, on April 22 at local noon, CAISO was generating 72% of its total capacity from solar with 18GW. ERCOT was generating 63% from solar+wind roughly split 50/50. Solar was at 30% at 13GW. You're right that ERCOT uses a lot of natural gas (and infact today, April 28th looks to be anomalously high), but it definitely has very very meaningful amounts of renewable generation.
louwrentius 2y ago
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 2y ago
  I wonder what the expense of adding things like flywheel type storage to renewable grids is?
  - wmf 2y ago
    Storage appears to be paying for itself so people are installing it as fast as they can.
  - louwrentius 2y ago
    I’m not convinced it’s economical or required.
yawaramin 2y ago
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 2y ago
  I am in favour of nuclear but a politically unpalatable solution is useless for decarbonisation.
  - yawaramin 2y ago
    It's only politically unpalatable until we, the people, make it palatable to our politicians.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  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.
  - the_gastropod 2y ago
    > I've never personally bought the idea that the health of the entire planet It’s not the health of the entire planet that’s at stake. It’s the habitability of the inhabited parts of the planet for humans. The earth will be just fine.
sholladay 2y ago
We have got to stop using alternating current. HVDC to the home is clearly the future. Isn’t anyone working on this?
- reverendjames 2y ago
  No and no.
  - sholladay 2y ago
    Thanks for clearing that up.
beepbooptheory 2y ago
Grain of salt but there is some bad precedent here with the state's messaging on these matters [1] This is from 2021, which if not catastropic, was pretty bad. But it's ok, because Texas residents will be paying off the losses there for the next 25 years [2]! 1. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#Utility_prices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#Utilit...
kkfx 2y ago
Now imaging a future with a smart grid, meaning all programmable loads piloted following supply and demand, ah, yup, it's incompatible with a private ownership of the grid....

55 points by MilnerRoute 2y ago

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-prices-in-the-texas-electricity-market/ 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 2y ago
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 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=60822
- MilnerRoute 2y ago
  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-increasing-rapidly-230621296.html https://ca.news.yahoo.com/california-battery-storage-increas...
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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
      - kemiller 2y ago
        California is already planning a giant off-river reservoir that will be dependent on pumping to fill. If it could be set up to kick in instead of curtailment it could be a win win.
      - nradov 2y ago
        The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) makes it extremely difficult to build new pumped storage facilities. It's possible in principle but will take many years to get through the construction permits and inevitable lawsuits.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        California isn't exactly known for water management practices, though sure there are storage systems that use kinetic potential as a battery. In theory that can be used at very large scales, if the water and elevation is available for use. Is be really curious how the math works out with regards to how much water would be required for say 3 days of use in LA. That may even be an over estimate of storage needs given how few rainy days they get.
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  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.
  - s0rce 2y ago
    Isn't most of the PGE charge transmission not generation?
    - sidewndr46 2y ago
      in most of US the cost of residential power is almost entirely in the delivery, not the generation. If folks knew how much they were being fleeced they'd lose their minds.
  - WirelessGigabit 2y ago
    SoCal Edison isn't any better. When I left CA my off-peak cost was more expensive per kWh than my on-peak cost here in Phoenix. And that on-peak is for 3 hours per day.
- singhrac 2y ago
  Curtailment is often a decision of the generator (I don’t know CAISO specifics but I would be surprised if it wasn’t ultimately a generator decision). If I asked you to generate power for -$15/MWh, you would refuse to do it because it would cost you money. 0 > -15. The utilities not charging negative time-of-rates is a separate decision.
- icegreentea2 2y ago
  Your link claims that curtailment is largely due to congestion - "when power lines don’t have enough capacity to deliver available energy". Dropping prices will not help with that?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hardwaresofton 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
- onthecanposting 2y ago
  To your last point, Bentley software is standard for most DOTs for highway design. All their offerings are rife with quality issues to the point that I have never run their software without some spooky behavior requiring a reset or flushing the ProjectWise cache. For software enabling a $150B industry, you would think it would at least run reliably. That there aren't objects that are aware that they are roads (just lines, arcs, and spirals) makes it laughably bad. The cost of this waste is tragic.
cranky908canuck 2y ago
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.
- singhrac 2y ago
  There’s plenty of battery being deployed for ancillary services in Texas (frequency response, 30 minute, etc). They are getting paid tons to do it and it’s been coming online for years.
  - cranky908canuck 2y ago
    This doesn't seem to be getting the exposure it deserves --- please give links, I'd like to see! You seem to be implying that "the featured article" [1] is not giving that exposure (which is my sense as well). [1] looking for the shorthand for the original link that started the discussion, thinking that 'TFA' is correct, is this in the HN FAQ?
    - 0xBDB 2y ago
      https://www.utilitydive.com/news/battery-storage-texas-reliability-grid-benefits/695982/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/battery-storage-texas-relia... It appears (not an expert) that Texas leads the country by such a margin in renewables that increasing battery storage an order of magnitude in 3 years was sort of a drop in the bucket.
      - cranky908canuck 2y ago
        Could be. The emerging picture (from some observers (including me, but I'm just one opinion) seems to be to build out like heck, then deal with the 'overproduction' using storage and markets. Storage can be things like smart hot water heaters, deferrable loads, local residential batteries, residential EV charging, etc...
s0rce 2y ago
Maybe you are talking about something different but isn't price frequently negative across much of the southwest during the day? https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.html
bsder 2y ago
> how far forward the Texas grid is when it comes to renewables. And how far backward Texas is with respect to the grid. When the big freeze went through, ERCOT didn't have the ability to actually cut manufacturing plants off. They could only manipulate the price. They had to get on the phone and request that various manufacturing facilities voluntarily shut themselves down. In addition, part of the problem with the big freeze was that there isn't sufficient granularity in the grid. You couldn't cut off enough people because the grid chunks were also connected to hospitals, fire stations, etc. None of this has changed. Thus, you couldn't do rolling blackouts with enough demand slack to actually allow you to roll them. On top of that, it is not at all clear that Texas has a plan to restart the grid from scratch if it actually needs a full reboot. None of this is new. The Federal government documented all this 10 years before the big freeze. Everybody documented it after. Nothing has changed. > Texas cutting itself off from the national grid, is now at the bleeding edge of renewables. Texas cutting itself off from the main grid is also why the grid is at the mercy of renewables. Side note: one of the driving forces for Texas' renewables push was that T. Boone Pickens was trying to monopolize water rights and was using renewables as way to get them.

grecy 2y ago

<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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout

MilnerRoute 2y ago
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-contested-regulations-1186-18614035.php https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/battery-ercot-c...
- grecy 2y ago
  Wondering? It couldn't be more clear!
boringg 2y ago
Alberta is the same. The playbooks is the same the players are a bit different. Resistance to change and embedded incentives are the cause. Its tiring to watch us repeat the same things over and over again.
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
As a resident of that state it was frustrating to see the media and political narratives both untruthful and in alignment. Even the impressive images of a downed giant 'giraffe' transmission tower[0] wasn't enough to convince those who wanted the anti-renewable narrative to be true. Apparently 20 towers collapsed in total. Surely a more decentralised grid (a grid of micro-grids?), more easily facilitated by smaller and more distributed generation (including rooftop solar and home batteries), would mitigate such events? Too complicated and nuanced a concept for your average outrage-consumer and too long-lasting a project for your average politician to take credit for. [0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-28/sa-statewide-blackout-anniversary-energy-impacts/100496564 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-28/sa-statewide-blackout... (top article image)

errantmind 2y ago

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 https://www.gridstatus.io/home

racked 2y ago
I'm not seeing that at all on gridstatus.io. Although solar capacity is growing, ERCOT mostly and increasingly seems to use natural gas.
- icegreentea2 2y ago
  ERCOT has way more wind capability (both absolute capacity and percentage) than CAISO. CAISO has more solar as a percentage of capacity, but even then the absolute capacities for solar between CAISO and ERCOT are actually quite similar. For example, on April 22 at local noon, CAISO was generating 72% of its total capacity from solar with 18GW. ERCOT was generating 63% from solar+wind roughly split 50/50. Solar was at 30% at 13GW. You're right that ERCOT uses a lot of natural gas (and infact today, April 28th looks to be anomalously high), but it definitely has very very meaningful amounts of renewable generation.

louwrentius 2y ago

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 2y ago
I wonder what the expense of adding things like flywheel type storage to renewable grids is?
- wmf 2y ago
  Storage appears to be paying for itself so people are installing it as fast as they can.
- louwrentius 2y ago
  I’m not convinced it’s economical or required.

yawaramin 2y ago

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 2y ago
I am in favour of nuclear but a politically unpalatable solution is useless for decarbonisation.
- yawaramin 2y ago
  It's only politically unpalatable until we, the people, make it palatable to our politicians.
_heimdall 2y ago
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.
- the_gastropod 2y ago
  > I've never personally bought the idea that the health of the entire planet It’s not the health of the entire planet that’s at stake. It’s the habitability of the inhabited parts of the planet for humans. The earth will be just fine.

sholladay 2y ago

We have got to stop using alternating current. HVDC to the home is clearly the future. Isn’t anyone working on this?

reverendjames 2y ago
No and no.
- sholladay 2y ago
  Thanks for clearing that up.

beepbooptheory 2y ago

Grain of salt but there is some bad precedent here with the state's messaging on these matters [1] This is from 2021, which if not catastropic, was pretty bad. But it's ok, because Texas residents will be paying off the losses there for the next 25 years [2]! 1. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#Utility_prices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#Utilit...

kkfx 2y ago

Now imaging a future with a smart grid, meaning all programmable loads piloted following supply and demand, ah, yup, it's incompatible with a private ownership of the grid....