101–110 of 154 posts
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Unfortunately, you can't simply hand-feed 100 coal into all the Spanish thermal plants and then plop down two more to be on the safe side until you've fixed supply...
but sorta you can, that's not the hard part it's that in Factorio there are no problems with phase synchronization, and the devices, consumers, producers, so the machines don't get damaged from a lot of abrupt starting/stopping. still, it's strange that operators and grid controllers have to do the restart manually.
Oh man, this reminds me of factorio. When you miscalculate your power needs and your generators eat up the fuel that isn't being produced enough. I've had to make a bootstrapping mechanisms and power switches for some of my powerplants to ensure I can get it back up in case it goes down and I can then re-enable my factory bit by bit.
It's even worse in satisfactory imo, because the game is build around your fabs consuming wildly varying amounts of power throughout their production cycle... And after a power loss, they'll not only need the initial burst (can be handled via batteries) but will also now all be synchronized to have their power spikes at exactly the same moment. Dyson sphere program is the by far most forgiving in that regard. You can…
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ASML says 1.3 MW for a single system. So off by three orders of magnitude. https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2024/a-sustainability-m...
Thanks for sharing the link! 1.3MW really isn’t that high of a load though. Thats a very straightforward load to be able to support via diesel generators. As an example, a typical large datacenter uses an order of magnitude more power, yet stays online following a grid outage.
There are thousands of tools. Material handling robots, compressors, HVAC, pumps, an entire data center within the factory, etc.
How do energy intensive processes like aluminium smelters or window glass producers preven their machines from self destruction ?
Can't answer for aluminium, but I can answer for window glass: One of our plants was threatened by massive flooding 2021, threatening the float glass oven (which doesn't float itself despite the name). It was closed off with insulation, turned off, and everyone hoped for the best and no steam explosion. In the end, only the cellars with the control equipment flooded and it could be gradually (as the control cabinets…
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The groundwork for the blackout will inevitably come back to a buildout and reliance of renewable sources that do not have spinning mass that can do frequency synchronization. There are costly means to compensate for the lack of spinning baseload but actually building these devices have been neglected, to no ones surprise.
I've always wondered why we can't just have a "master" power station transmit a 50Hz signal modulated at, say, 50MHz. Then all the other station simply sync to that, including small scale such as domestic PV etc. Then depending on how out-of-sync a given station is with the signal, they ramp production up or down accordingly. Is the problem here that there is inadequate or slow feedback to the supply side regarding l…
It's not about getting the generator to spin at 50hz, it's about getting it to spin at 50hz under dynamic load. Most generators are mostly fixed speed I think for the sake of efficiency, so the mechanism the grid has to regulate the frequency of power is largely by controlling the number of generators running at any given time, and how much of the grid is connected to them. Ramping up and down based on the current observed frequency of the grid is exactly how this all works. However it's more complicated because what if two or more power stations see a low frequency grid and decide to ramp up more generators? Well now the grid frequency is too high. If they them respond to that by ramping down, it'll go too low. Rinse and repeat and you get undesirable frequency oscillation, so there needs to be more communication across the grid than just responding to the locally observed frequency.
Connect a stopped, or sufficiently out of phase generator to a full scale power grid and the puny thousands of pounds of metal that make up a generator are going to get ripped apart by the sheer inertia of the power grid forcing it to match speed and phase in an instant. This is also a problem when attempting to connect two isolated grids, of they're too out of phase with each other, catastrophic physical damage will occur.
What caused it? Nowadays when anything like this happens in the EU, I immediately wonder if it was Russian saboteurs. They have certainly been destroying infrastructure here, eg. undersea internet and power cables.
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Again, this appears to be a problem of coordination. An inverter doesn't have to: -react immediately -use its full capacity all the time
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of both how a grid in blackout mode appears to a lonely inverter and what means of coordinating inverters that are available to said inverter. Imagine you're trying to coordinate a choir of ten million singers that are scattered across a radius of a thousand kilometer, that all sing into their individual Ham radio. And you need it to come out in a perfect unison that sounds goo…
We had something similar happen in Tunisia in 2002. The reliance on diesel turbines meant a very long rebooting process. As a result, the government invested heavily in installing gas turbines all over the country. When we had another blackout event in 2018(?), it only took an hour or so to get things back again.
I imagine a lot of sunshine in Tunisia (not too familiar with your country) , is there a big transition to solar?
The downside is that the choice was made to focus on smaller 10-20 MW projects, with the occasional 100+ MW installation.
Hence, despite new projects entering service every couple months solar only accounts for less than 3% of electricity production nationwide.
I operate a microgrid facility in Hispaniola and have wonderfully cooperative users backed by a separately powered communications and control system. Even for us, a facility serving a small neighborhood and farm, a black start must be performed as a careful choreography of systems and loads…and we can just pick up a radio and tell people to turn the main breaker of their house on or off, and to leave their AC units off until we finish bringing everything up. In 12 years we’ve only had to do it twice, but even for us it’s a tedious process.