3 ms·
Inverters can easily replace physical inertia, it just requires technology developed within the past 30 years, and most grid folks haven't thought about new tec
by epistasis 2y ago
Inverters can easily replace physical inertia, it just requires technology developed within the past 30 years, and most grid folks haven't thought about new technology for far longer than that.
As more and more intermittent renewables get pushed onto grids, they become more reliable. Most outages are from single points of failure from large generators or transmission. Dealing with highly distributed renewables means that grid ops get used to acting fast, and there's greater redundancy instead of so many SPOF. Kind of how cloud services got reliable by expecting there to be failure and designing it into the system.
Storage is advancing super quickly, is super fast to deploy, and can replace a lot of more expensive things like transmission upgrades.
We have all the tech to replace fossil fuels on the grid with the above. The only question is the final cost. It's likely to be far far lower than using existing "hard" energy, because by the time we can deploy 50 TWhs of storage, it will have gotten so cheap. We don't know when costs will stabilize, but they have a loooong distance to fall.
And we have all sorts of other technologies that will make all this far cheaper: enhanced geothermal, enhanced geothermal with temporal storage based on injection pressure and release, iron air batteries, flow batteries, thermal storage for industrial process heat, etc. etc. etc.
For every area of the energy economy, there are two to three solutions that look promising. Fusion and fission look promising for none. That's not to say that they can't have some serious innovation and start dropping their costs, but nobody currently operating in the field has demonstrated a path. Yet.
- katbyte 2y agoWhat new technology changes things to not require spinning turbines?
- sanderjd 2y agoMassive improvements to battery technology.
- katbyte 2y agoThat’s a non answer - what improvement
- epistasis 2y agoIt is an answer, in that batteries were used for frequency regulation far before they were used for energy arbitrage. But the real innovation is communication networks and IC control of the inverter. It's completely possible to create a waveform that modulates and responds to variation in frequency in the same way a large spinning mass would. And if reactive power is for some reason not enough, synchronous condensers are very old technology to solve that.
- epistasis 2y agoIntegrated circuits, basically. The term if "grid forming inverter" and the standards are somewhat new. I'm not an expert, but here is one standard, I don't know if it has been adopted or if others are preferred: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/Specs%20for%20GFM%20IBRs%20Version%201.pdf#page5 https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/Specs%20f...
- katbyte 2y agoAnd they have been used where? Everything I can find suggests they are theoretical, not in use even on micro grids yet, and many have huge concerns about them being able to support a grid on their own. Also the technology required has been around for decades it’s not new and no one’s done it yet. So again what’s changed because it seems like for now there is no “I have a grid and need something now” solution it’s a “maybe one day”
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> As more and more intermittent renewables get pushed onto grids, they become more reliable This is called grid firming, and it’s massively expensive.
- epistasis 2y agoI don't think that's the same thing, but what expenses are you thinking of specifically? The German grid for example got much more reliable with additional solar.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoGrids were designed to operate in tight tolerances. Cycling power levels up and down a lot, while handling the frequency variation lots of renewables inputs bring, wears down the grid without protective measures. Those measures are called firming [1]. Not sure what Germany did (or plans to do—you can run an unfirmed grid until stuff starts failing for several years). [1] https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/applications/grid-firming https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/applications/grid-firmin...
- lukan 2y agoIf every (second) house would have a powerwall, wouldn't that make the grid stable?
- pstrateman 2y agoA powerwall is $12k installed. That's about 5 years worth of power bills for most people.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> every (second) house would have a powerwall, wouldn't that make the grid stable? At 131mm American households [1] and $11.5k per PoweWall [2] that’s over $750bn at 50% loading. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-households-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-househo... [2] https://www.thisoldhouse.com/solar-alternative-energy/reviews/tesla-powerwall-cost https://www.thisoldhouse.com/solar-alternative-energy/review...