I wonder what would Tesla owners do during fire-induced blackouts. With wrong combination of returning from long drive to homes without power, and fire hazard warnings, people owning only electrical cars could become trapped really bad. Unfortunately, Teslas are a part of a problem for now, being power hogs .
Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
41–50 of 357 posts
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level. Serious question, why is the answer to this not a slightly-but-not-much-more-polite version of "That's ridiculous, be quiet." and moving forward?
Because the representatives with authority will get voted out by these folks. You have to dance around them, or find technical mitigations to the silliness (substation facades, suboptimal siting, more expensive underground transmission, etc). It's why you're seeing a rapid uptake in battery storage by consumers in California; it's a hack around regulatory and utility failures (and you get a federal tax credit if it c…
At what point is it ok to throw in the towel and say "this is just a city/state reaping what they sow". Sure there's people who want to do things right but as evidenced by a result they're a small enough minority that their voice doesn't matter. It's not like there's lobbyists from BigWildfire(TM) distorting things. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#43I think I can say that our entire neighborhood is up in arms about what's going on with SCE in general. In the last few months people have received bills that amount to 10 to 20 times their usual bill.
In our case, with a 13 kW solar array, our usual bill is in the order of $15 per month and has been so for years. Last month our bill was $350 and the prior month $184. We have been sending excess energy to SCE for years. I built a larger system than normal in preparation for electric vehicles. Which means that, at times, we send as much as 6 kW or so back. None of that mattered.
What complicates everything is that we were auto-magically signed-up for CPA (Clean Power Alliance). Which is, as far as I am concerned, a government run scam (sorry if this offends anyone). By "we" I mean, most of our neighborhood and town.
What makes this a mess is that SCE can't talk about CPA rates and CPA can't talk about SCE billing. One, in theory, provides the electricity and the other charges you for the transport and some fees. If you have ever tried to make sense out of one of these bills you know exactly what I am talking about. I have spent hours on the phone will SCE billing people and they can't tell me how some of it is actually calculated, even managers don't know.
https://cleanpoweralliance.org/
What makes it even worse is that the rate comparison tools and calculators available before the transition to CPA+SCE evaporated after the transition. The SCE website has been a mess for about two years and not having access to rate comparison tools makes it even worse. Billing and data clarity is obfuscated, to say the least.
Some of us are now in the process of opting out of CPA just to that we can talk to a single point of contact and actually discuss the bill. With CPA in the loop it is impossible because CPA and SCE point fingers at each other and consumers are left in the middle wondering what the heck happened.
Even beyond that, SCE told everyone that they had "grandfathered rates". This are the TOU-D-A and TOU-D-B rates from a few years ago. One of the things that changed radically with respect to that time is that some of the costs per kWh have more than tripled. When inquiring about how this could happen with "grandfathered rates" we were told that the rate schedule was grandfathered not the cost per kWh. In other words, the demarcation times between "On peak", "Off peak" and "Super off peak" remain fixed but your cost per kWh changes.
This is the most dishonest use of the term "grandfathered" I have seen in my life. This might not make sense to readers outside of the US. Here, the term refers to a condition being protected from future changes. Anyone who heard that term pretty much assumed their costs were locked in, not just the times for each rate. From my perspective this was a swindle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause
Frankly, this is about as anti-consumer as one can get. The average person isn't equipped to run through even the simplest electrical power calculations, they just don't understand. Add to this the complexities of tiered and time-of-day systems, varying rates and costs of transport, energy vs. power calculations, area under the power curve (which is what you pay for), difficulty in understanding energy utilization, etc. and you have the makings for a public that is powerless against this complexity.
I am quite comfortable with mathematics and complex financial modelling and still had to devote hours to getting enough answers from SCE to attempt to create a model in Excel in order to understand what happened during the last few months, not just for us but also our neighbors. Even with that, the decision had to be made to opt-out of CPA because the math is simply too complex and nebulous. Not to mention that I have better things to do with my life.
The decisions people like myself made a few years back --in my case the 13 kW system-- were based on promises made --a contract-- with SCE. Never in my life I would have thought that a system of this size would result in us having to pay for electricity. And so here we are. If this continues the ROI will be negative forever and the size of the system would either have to increase by 50% or more or batteries will have to be added in order to manage consumption at lower rate-per-kWh times of the day (which can change at the will of SCE).
I am literally working on this as we speak, so the pain and aggravation is fresh and real. At some point legal action might become the only recourse, I don't know. My neighbors are absolutely livid, unlike me (I engineered, bought and installed my own system), they ended-up with a range of leasing and other arrangements from a number of different vendors. The typical systems these vendors install are based on the rate structure at the time of system installation and only seek to achieve a baseline cost structure between lease payments and electricity purchase beyond generation. As rates and billing complexity changed, some of these folks are finding out that their 3.5 kW system is now almost useless and their electricity costs are going off the rails. The trouble is, they will have to pay on these leases for years and years.
This is a mess.
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plausible, but then why is it happening in California and not in similarly NIMBYist states? Electromagnetism obsessives live all over the nation.
My impression is that california uniquely empowers individuals to obstruct projects with myriad legal mechanisms that are easy to initiate but expensive to fight.
[deleted]
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How does line-sag lead to increased resistance? My understanding is that the mean-free-path of conduction electrons in even OFHC copper is quite short -- scattering on impurities is the dominant loss mechanism, not the boundaries of the conductor. Is the theory advanced above that the morphology of the wire matters, or is there another mechanism at work?
The resistance is not constant and is in fact a function of temperature [0]. Line sag is a proxy measurement for line temperature, since things expand as they heat up. From [1], most materials have positive alpha coefficients so the resistance increases with temperature.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_con...
1. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-current/chp...
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#46Having looked at the graphs on the CAISO website, I think they had a supply problem and the New York Times is being a little disingenuous here. You can bring up the renewables graph for the 14th here (change the date): http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx At 6 PM, they had about 5.2 GW of solar still coming in. That rapidly and predictably dropped to zero over the next hour and a half. If my rough maths is correct that alone would be enough to wipe out almost the entire 12 percent operating reserve. There's also a really interesting graph of demand vs net demand minus solar and wind on the other page; you can see that total demand flattens out near the top, but net demand - which is what the grid operator has to find generating capacity to fill - continues to ramp up aggressively right up until the peak.
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#47Every year you hear about horrible heat waves and fires in California but I'm here to tell you from my first-hand experience that This Time It's Different. I've lived on the SF peninsula for 10 years. We bought a brand new spec house. It was built without air conditioning. The developer said we wouldn't need it. We installed it anyway because we came from LA and a house in California without A/C did not fit into our worldview.
For the first few years, we rarely used the A/C. Then one year we had a Horrible Heat Wave that lasted two or three days. The A/C ran more or less continuously during that time, but managed to mostly keep up. And it always cooled off at night.
In subsequent years we had period recurrences of 2-3 day heat events that caused our A/C to run quite a lot but still keep up. This latest heat event has seen the A/C running three days now with no relief forecast until Thursday. Worse, it's not cooling off much at night the way it always used to. For the first time in ten years we are having to run the A/C at night instead of opening windows in order to sleep.
Frankly, the trend scares the living shit out of me. The speed at which these changes are manifesting themselves in our little microclimate is just mind-boggling.
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#48The 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?
> What reasoning is holding us up? People turn their lights on when the sun goes down, and efficient energy storage is the holy grail. Also fun back of the napkin math with overestimates, if we have a totally efficient Li+ battery with 0.25 kWh/kg energy density, and converted all the world's 40 billion kg of lithium in the crust and oceans to batteries, we'd get roughly 10 TWh of energy storage capacity. Which is en…
According to [1], a standard 2 Ah 18650 Li-ion cell has something like 0.6 grams of lithium. (2.0 Ah * 4.2 V / 0.0006 kg of lithium) works out to 14 kWh/kg or 560 TWh of capacity.
That one battery chemistry alone would be enough to power the entire world for a week. Once you eliminate nonessential industrial power consumption - aka bring your own power storage or shut down machinery with the sun - the amount of lithium we'd need to store to make a transition to solar/wind feasible would be far smaller than global reserves.
Edit: as noted by phillipkglass, this math is moot
[1] https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/archive/is_lithium_ion_t...
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How does line-sag lead to increased resistance? My understanding is that the mean-free-path of conduction electrons in even OFHC copper is quite short -- scattering on impurities is the dominant loss mechanism, not the boundaries of the conductor. Is the theory advanced above that the morphology of the wire matters, or is there another mechanism at work?
My thought was that the gauge of the wire goes down as it sags. The same weight of wire across a longer distance.
Maybe I’m wrong and this kind of wire stretching doesn’t impact resistance?
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#50I wonder what would Tesla owners do during fire-induced blackouts. With wrong combination of returning from long drive to homes without power, and fire hazard warnings, people owning only electrical cars could become trapped really bad. Unfortunately, Teslas are a part of a problem for now, being power hogs .
Most Tesla owners I know keep their cars at 80-90% charge every single day since they have a charger at home. That's enough range to get you 4-5 hours away from any would be wildfires.