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I've worked as a quant for a power company and had more data than god about what was happening in a continent wide grid. The instabilities in the grid are cause

I've worked as a quant for a power company and had more data than god about what was happening in a continent wide grid. The instabilities in the grid are caused by renewables turning on and off at the drop of a hat the whole network over. That's on top of the complete lack of any stable base load at night that comes with renewables. I then build a continent wide physics based electrical network simulation down to the individual house. There is no way to keep the networks stable in the coming decades with more and more intermittent sources coming in. Large heavy spinning shafts are the only thing that's kept us from catastrophic failures and pretty much no one knows or cares. We're betting civilization on pixie dust and unicorn farts.

ggm 2y ago
South Australia is going to find out. Synchronous condensers have been a thing since forever, batteries are moving into that space. Sure they started in FCAS but they now bid for some of the inertia stuff too. SA is of course connected to the Australian east coast grid and are securing supply from them, but they got islanded in a big storm, the gas fallback generators didn't work and they lost the grid. Now, they have built out for wind, solar and battery. They haven't had a significant fail yet. Those gas generators who failed, and who failed to do black start are in court over their contract. Building out and running more syncons seems like a low bar. I appreciate you work in the field. but, so do a bunch of people in the grid forming world who think it's entirely feasible to move beyond the base load model. Maybe they are all smoking pixie dust, but I think it's not clear you're right and they're wrong, because BOTH OF YOU have fucktonnes of experience and skin in the game, past and present. As a random asker (ie me), why is your input here better than the people doing the planning for the Australian east coast grid? https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-framework/2024/quantifying-synthetic-inertia-from-gfm-bess.pdf?la=en https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-fr... https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/ElectraNet%20-%20System%20Strength%20Economic%20Evaluation%20Report%20-%2018%20February%202018.PDF https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/ElectraNet%20-%20System%...

ggm 2y ago

South Australia is going to find out. Synchronous condensers have been a thing since forever, batteries are moving into that space. Sure they started in FCAS but they now bid for some of the inertia stuff too. SA is of course connected to the Australian east coast grid and are securing supply from them, but they got islanded in a big storm, the gas fallback generators didn't work and they lost the grid. Now, they have built out for wind, solar and battery. They haven't had a significant fail yet. Those gas generators who failed, and who failed to do black start are in court over their contract. Building out and running more syncons seems like a low bar. I appreciate you work in the field. but, so do a bunch of people in the grid forming world who think it's entirely feasible to move beyond the base load model. Maybe they are all smoking pixie dust, but I think it's not clear you're right and they're wrong, because BOTH OF YOU have fucktonnes of experience and skin in the game, past and present. As a random asker (ie me), why is your input here better than the people doing the planning for the Australian east coast grid? https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-framework/2024/quantifying-synthetic-inertia-from-gfm-bess.pdf?la=en https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-fr... https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/ElectraNet%20-%20System%20Strength%20Economic%20Evaluation%20Report%20-%2018%20February%202018.PDF https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/ElectraNet%20-%20System%...