Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
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Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#2Wasn't this the B plot of the second Batman movie from the early 90s?
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#3as someone who apprenticed as a lineman briefly, this isnt at all unexpected. Just because you have generating capacity, does not always mean you have capacity in the duty cycle for your transmission infrastructure.
Many substations are older, and were never designed to handle high duty and load during climate-change driven weather events. These substations suffer from underreporting as they often dont have remote monitoring capability beyond whats detected at the line. Operators tend to baby these stations intentionally as their failure could spark massive outages across the grid (again, due to older design considerations)
Now this part might get a little political, but these substations/transfer depots/etc... arent just old because the outage would hit a lot of customers at once, but because NIMBY groups frequently oppose building or augmenting existing substations. Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level.
its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#4The sooner we switch to solar and grid battery storage, the better. There should be no excuse whatsoever not to do that now.
What reasoning is holding us up?
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#5The sooner we switch to solar and grid battery storage, the better. There should be no excuse whatsoever not to do that now. What reasoning is holding us up?
Time and money.
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#6The sooner we switch to solar and grid battery storage, the better. There should be no excuse whatsoever not to do that now. What reasoning is holding us up?
Grid scale battery storage only became practical in the last few years. Now there are a lot of projects under way but they'll take time between approval and completion. One notable example from last week:
"Vistra approved to build a grid battery bigger than all utility-scale battery storage in the US combined"
The past month has been littered with news of exceptionally large battery storage developments, yet none in the world can compare to the news that Vistra’s permit to expand an energy storage system under construction at its natural gas-fired Moss Landing generation station in Monterey County, California to 1,500 MW/6,000 MWh has been approved.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/08/13/vistra-approved-to-bu...
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#7The sooner we switch to solar and grid battery storage, the better. There should be no excuse whatsoever not to do that now. What reasoning is holding us up?
Time and money.
I doubt it: Musk installed 129MWh battery plant in Australia that already saved the consumers over $100M.
There must be another reason.
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8082841/Elon...
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#8The sooner we switch to solar and grid battery storage, the better. There should be no excuse whatsoever not to do that now. What reasoning is holding us up?
Grid scale battery storage only became practical in the last few years. Now there are a lot of projects under way but they'll take time between approval and completion. One notable example from last week: "Vistra approved to build a grid battery bigger than all utility-scale battery storage in the US combined" The past month has been littered with news of exceptionally large battery storage developments, yet none in…
Does not have to be one giant storage plant. The installation could be decentralized:
[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-02-tesla-australia-homes-power.ht...
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#9as someone who apprenticed as a lineman briefly, this isnt at all unexpected. Just because you have generating capacity, does not always mean you have capacity in the duty cycle for your transmission infrastructure. Many substations are older, and were never designed to handle high duty and load during climate-change driven weather events. These substations suffer from underreporting as they often dont have remote mo…
Not just substations, but the conductors themselves. The more current you run through a line on a hot, non-breezy and sunny day, the more it sags. Which leads to more resistance, which leads to hotter lines, more sagging. It’s a positive feedback cycle.