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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

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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
    - conradev 3y ago
      That is assuming all batteries are lithium-ion, but the state is going for a larger mix of storage tech. As just one example, iron-air batteries: > The CEC is supporting this project through its Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) program, a fund dedicated to accelerating the implementation of non-lithium technologies offering 8+ hours of energy storage. Form Energy will use the grant funds to develop and operate the project, and PG&E will provide land and an interconnection point at the substation site. https://formenergy.com/form-energy-awarded-30m-grant-from-the-california-energy-commission-to-deploy-first-multi-day-energy-storage-project-in-california/ https://formenergy.com/form-energy-awarded-30m-grant-from-th... Stationary storage is a different ballgame, with different trade-offs i.e. you can trade density for cycle count or cost
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    "10,000 megawatts" is not a measure of storage capacity.
    - hirsin 3y ago
      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.
      - ssl-3 3y ago
        Yep. It's a measure that makes perfect sense for conventional electricity production: 10,000MW of aggregated coal generation can hypothetically produce 10,000MW more-or-less indefinitely, as long as it keeps being fed things like fuel, water, and maintanence. But it doesn't make any sense at all, by itself, for energy storage: A net 10,000MW battery might be able to produce 10,000MW, but for how long can that output be sustained? Unlike a group of coal plants, it absolutely cannot do this indefinitely; at some point, that battery will become completely discharged. It takes at least two figures to describe a working bucket of energy (whether that bucket is Lithium cells or pumped storage or whatever): The capacity (megawatt-hours is a fine figure here, and units like Joules also work), and the maximum input/output (and plain megawatts works fine for this part). Using only one figure doesn't really describe anything at all. I don't know when or why we stopped doing this, but it's misinformative in a way that leads to a bad generalized understanding of the these concepts with the populace that is actually paying for all of this stuff.
        pixl97 3y ago
        I mean during the great texas power outage natural gas plants ran out of fuel because of supply issues that were not typically supply issues it would be more honest if every power plant also listed it's on hand 'fuel battery'. Now I'm sure they may do this with ERCOT, but it's not something typically reported.
- zer00eyz 3y 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 3y ago
    Isn't most of the PGE charge transmission not generation?
    - sidewndr46 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
[deleted]
hardwaresofton 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.

chris222 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  - conradev 3y ago
    That is assuming all batteries are lithium-ion, but the state is going for a larger mix of storage tech. As just one example, iron-air batteries: > The CEC is supporting this project through its Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) program, a fund dedicated to accelerating the implementation of non-lithium technologies offering 8+ hours of energy storage. Form Energy will use the grant funds to develop and operate the project, and PG&E will provide land and an interconnection point at the substation site. https://formenergy.com/form-energy-awarded-30m-grant-from-the-california-energy-commission-to-deploy-first-multi-day-energy-storage-project-in-california/ https://formenergy.com/form-energy-awarded-30m-grant-from-th... Stationary storage is a different ballgame, with different trade-offs i.e. you can trade density for cycle count or cost
- ssl-3 3y ago
  "10,000 megawatts" is not a measure of storage capacity.
  - hirsin 3y ago
    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.
    - ssl-3 3y ago
      Yep. It's a measure that makes perfect sense for conventional electricity production: 10,000MW of aggregated coal generation can hypothetically produce 10,000MW more-or-less indefinitely, as long as it keeps being fed things like fuel, water, and maintanence. But it doesn't make any sense at all, by itself, for energy storage: A net 10,000MW battery might be able to produce 10,000MW, but for how long can that output be sustained? Unlike a group of coal plants, it absolutely cannot do this indefinitely; at some point, that battery will become completely discharged. It takes at least two figures to describe a working bucket of energy (whether that bucket is Lithium cells or pumped storage or whatever): The capacity (megawatt-hours is a fine figure here, and units like Joules also work), and the maximum input/output (and plain megawatts works fine for this part). Using only one figure doesn't really describe anything at all. I don't know when or why we stopped doing this, but it's misinformative in a way that leads to a bad generalized understanding of the these concepts with the populace that is actually paying for all of this stuff.
      - pixl97 3y ago
        I mean during the great texas power outage natural gas plants ran out of fuel because of supply issues that were not typically supply issues it would be more honest if every power plant also listed it's on hand 'fuel battery'. Now I'm sure they may do this with ERCOT, but it's not something typically reported.
zer00eyz 3y 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 3y ago
  Isn't most of the PGE charge transmission not generation?
  - sidewndr46 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago

[deleted]

hardwaresofton 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.