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'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

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Re: 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

#51

Post by cranky908canuck »

danans wrote: post #46
cranky908canuck wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That observation isn't (politically) right leaning, at least not in the American context. Grid balancing storage is already being built out and operated in left leaning California, and already contributes significantly to supply during the evening demand ramp.

Agreed, I made my comment based on the notion that there's a 'left-leaning-smell' to renewables (at least in TX), so a 'right-leaning' answer that maybe pulls (it/them/?) toward the centre would make sense.

Re: 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

#52

Post by icegreentea2 »

chris222 wrote: post #3
zer00eyz wrote: post #2

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-pr... ) For this to happen there are a lot of factors that come into play but it indicates a downward…

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

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?

Re: 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

#53

Post by ssl-3 »

pixl97 wrote: post #47
ssl-3 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Why, sure. It would be good to know how long a conventional generator can keep running when everything around it has gone wrong. For coal, for instance, that might be represented by the mass of the piles of coal that are normally on-hand -- or by the electricity (in MW-h, say) those piles of coal should be able to produce. Having this information close by would seem to be a good thing for an organization like ERCOT, so as to be factored into their emergency playbook.

But that's still a different case than a battery, wherein: Even if everything is going right, using energy from a battery must eventually cause it to become depleted.

It's never like a coal plant that (ideally) consumes fuel at one end, and spits out electricity at the other end as a continuous process. A battery, in this context, can be in a charging or a discharging state, but it can never be in both of those states at the same time -- using a battery is not at all a continuous process.

Re: 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

#54

Post by onthecanposting »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #8
zer00eyz wrote: post #2

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-pr... ) For this to happen there are a lot of factors that come into play but it indicates a downward…

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 ve…

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.

Re: 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

#55

Post by bsder »

zer00eyz wrote: post #2

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-pr... ) For this to happen there are a lot of factors that come into play but it indicates a downward…

> 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.

Re: 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

#56

Post by Gibbon1 »

seattle_spring wrote: post #29
ssl-3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"10,000 megawatts" is not a measure of storage capacity.

Don't they pretty obviously mean "10,000 MWh"? Or am I missing something

Best I can guess is batteries are rated by name plate power. And raw capacity is about 3-4 times that.

Wouldn't surprise me if there is a bunch of finkie dinkie technically driven accounting stuff around how fast and how deep a charge and discharge cycle they're willing to do vs price. Not to mention adding supply effects the price as well.

Re: 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

#57

Post by BLKNSLVR »

grecy wrote: post #4

Australia went through this very same propaganda when a once in 100 year lightning storm caused a big grid interconnect failure, and a large part of an entire state was without power for weeks [1] The Politicians at the time spun it as being caused by evil renewables, and the damage was done. A huge percentage of the population still believes that renewables cause power outages, cause prices to go up, and are the wor…

As a resident of that state it was frustrating to see the media and political narratives both untruthful and in alignment.

Even the impressive images of a downed giant 'giraffe' transmission tower[0] wasn't enough to convince those who wanted the anti-renewable narrative to be true. Apparently 20 towers collapsed in total.

Surely a more decentralised grid (a grid of micro-grids?), more easily facilitated by smaller and more distributed generation (including rooftop solar and home batteries), would mitigate such events? Too complicated and nuanced a concept for your average outrage-consumer and too long-lasting a project for your average politician to take credit for.

[0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-28/sa-statewide-blackout... (top article image)

Re: 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

#58

Post by RecycledEle »

hirsin wrote: post #23
ssl-3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"10,000 megawatts" is not a measure of storage capacity.

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.

> I think it stems from someone reusing a column to represent both storage and power across generators and batteries.

It comes from idiots who can not math being allowed to participate in our society. We should correct this error.

Re: 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

#59

Post by [deleted] »

_heimdall wrote: post #41
the_gastropod wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never personally bought the idea that the health of the entire planet It’s not the health of the entire planet that’s at stake. It’s the habitability of the inhabited parts of the planet for humans . The earth will be just fine.

Sure, I'd still stand by my statement making that substitution. I don't think the ecosystem humans specifically depend on can be boiled down to a single metric. We've leaned extremely analytical in modern times but doing so puts us at serious risk of missing the forest for the trees. We have a habit of trying to quantify everything and missing the fact that doing so loses context and greatly increases the risk of ove…

[deleted]

Re: 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

#60

Post by danans »

hirsin wrote: post #23
ssl-3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"10,000 megawatts" is not a measure of storage capacity.

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.

> For some reason grid storage reporting always seems to use a power metric instead of storage metric

Grid scale batteries are used primarily for real time demand management, and therefore their most relevant property is how much immediate power they can output and for how long. If they were only described in terms of energy (i.e MWh) without separating the power and time components, then it wouldn't be clear how much immediate value they could provide to the grid.

It's analogous to how in an EV the max horsepower is determined in large part by the power output rating of the battery, but the range is related to the the energy capacity.

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