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Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

blog.gridstatus.io

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Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#111

Post by boringg »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #79

Pretty interesting to see how this stuff is holding up. The market is evolving rapidly currently with absolutely massive amounts of wind, solar, and battery being deployed everywhere. What's odd in Texas is that they are resisting the notion of connecting to the rest of the US grid. This would allow them to import power cheaply when they need to and export power when they have too much of it. My guess is that they ac…

Connecting your grid to other markets for the premise of cheaper energy also puts you in a situation where you no longer control your own destiny. My expectation is that the presumed gains of some cheaper power don't balance the risk on reliability and control.

I don't necessarily buy the argument but I am fairly certain that a big chunk of it.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#112

Post by wiredfool »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #79

Pretty interesting to see how this stuff is holding up. The market is evolving rapidly currently with absolutely massive amounts of wind, solar, and battery being deployed everywhere. What's odd in Texas is that they are resisting the notion of connecting to the rest of the US grid. This would allow them to import power cheaply when they need to and export power when they have too much of it. My guess is that they ac…

I recall from reading the blog, there are definitely issues in Texas with grid capacity between the west where the bulk of the solar is and the east where there is load, and people and other grids. So grid interconnects to other grids wouldn’t necessarily be enough, you have to get the power to the interconnect as well.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#113

Post by herewego »

gruez wrote: post #104
bradknowles wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction, the fat cats who own ERCOT don’t like that. Your regular run of the mill Texan may not care one way or the other, most times. But if they get into a crunch where their electric bills are much higher, I assure you that they will care.

>the fat cats who own ERCOT don’t like that. And who are those? Wikipedia says: >ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation,[11][12] and its members include consumers, electric cooperatives, generators, power marketers, retail electric providers, investor-owned electric utilities (transmission and distribution providers), and municipally owned electric utilities.[13] It's not "owned" by anyone.

You are uninformed. ERCOT is heavily influenced (“owned”) by Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) and market makers that are profit seeking entities. This is true of all ISOs for all intents and purposes. It is the primary reason why the U.S. grid is slow to innovate/change, e.g., implementing distributed generation participation in wholesale markets, etc.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#114

Post by bboygravity »

LUmBULtERA wrote: post #101
bboygravity wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason why Tesla picks 10 years (8 years for car batteries) as a warranty period. Ask yourself: why 8 years and not 10 for cars? Why 10 years and not 15 or 20 years for home batteries? It's not arbitrary. Battery degradation is not linear. It's not like: 10 years = 70%, 20 years = 40%. It's probably closer to 20 years = 20 % capacity left. The decay becomes exponential-like after a relatively linear period…

Tesla and other car makers set their warranties at the mandatory minimums. Why would they offer more when they don't have to and consumers find them long enough and/or other car makers aren't competing on warranty length? That doesn't tell you anything about battery longevity. Edit: Does my MacBook Pro die after 1 year when it's applecare warranty is over?

The mandatory minimums? Got a source of the mandatory minimum for cars (US and/or EU) as well as power walls?

The fact that other car makers aren't competing on warranty length seems to me to prove my point, but you seem to think it doesn't? What I mean is: if battery degradation for cars isn't that bad after 8 years, then why are other brands not offering significantly longer warranties to compete with the Tesla one? Not sure about the competition argument anyway, since Tesla didn't have any competition initially and arguably still doesn't have real competition (depending on what features of the car you value most).

Edit: Does my MacBook Pro die after 1 year when it's applecare warranty is over? --> Pretty close yes IMO. My personal experience is that my laptop and phone battery capacities degrade very fast after 1 year and need to be replace after about 2 years, 3 years if you really really push it and are OK with constantly charging.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#115

Post by bboygravity »

guerby wrote: post #91
bboygravity wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's correct and confirms what I just wrote. Dutch example: 0,12 EUR / kWh assuming 5000 cycles with 0 degradation. Example source: https://www.otovo.nl/blog/kennisbank/lfp-batterijen/ The real number is likely still significantly higher than 0,12 EUR / kWh due to battery capacity (and charge discharge efficiency) going down due to wear over time. It does look like when the price of integrated storage products…

Your computation is off: it's 0.014 EUR/kWh, ten time less and far below kWh market prices about everyhere in the world. As for cycling the industry standard is give the number of cycles to 80% capacity remaining so the battery is far from dead at 5000 cycles. The simple division I used is conservative.

No, it's not. From the link I posted (in Dutch unfortunately, I'll translate the relevant bit):

Small integrated battery:

    3.5 kWh
    Starting at about € 2.100,-
You yourself indicated in your post that integrated batteries (as in: the ones with battery management, that you can actually use to store energy in as opposed to a bunch of lose cells) are more expensive. They are more expensive indeed. I did the calculation. They boil down to 0,12 EUR / kWh in the example above.

The price of cells is not directly relevant, since you can't actually buy cells and just throw them at your house to magically start charging/discharging when you desire.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#116

Post by bboygravity »

baq wrote: post #92
bboygravity wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I wrote "green" is because, Germany actively hypes itself up as being very green and many people believe them because they have such a vast amount of solar and wind installed.

Germany's energy policy is one huge cognitive dissonance at best, gross mismanagement in the base case and a three-decade-long foreign intelligence job at worst.

I completely agree. Keyword: Gerard Schroder for those who are curious about "three-decade-long foreign intelligence job".

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#117

Post by shawabawa3 »

infecto wrote: post #110
jillesvangurp wrote: post #79

Pretty interesting to see how this stuff is holding up. The market is evolving rapidly currently with absolutely massive amounts of wind, solar, and battery being deployed everywhere. What's odd in Texas is that they are resisting the notion of connecting to the rest of the US grid. This would allow them to import power cheaply when they need to and export power when they have too much of it. My guess is that they ac…

I don't believe grid connections are the obvious and easy answer. That would assume those other grids do not have base loads plants themself. There is a massive cost to starting and stopping gas plants that you are also not accounting for. So while yes, there are periods of negative prices, the cost to run that plant 24/7 may be cheaper than turning it on and off and not just cheaper in $ but cheaper in less resource…

> There is a massive cost to starting and stopping gas plants that you are also not accounting for

It's my understanding that basically the entire point of gas power plants is that they are very cheap to stop and start (as opposed to e.g. coal or nuclear), at least, that's the case in the UK - are these plants different in the US?

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#118

Post by herewego »

infecto wrote: post #106
dylan604 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, that is far from the definition of "great". I would say fortunate to not have those string of triple digits, but man, it's not great at all. 100°+ is still miserable, but it's amazing how different 98° feels from 105°. I get Texas hyperbole, but even my feet are firmly planted in reality to not accept "great" in this meaning. Bless your heart! ;-)

Bless your heart for trying to be so witty but in fact coming off foolish. Texas is simply hot and has been for our timelines. You could make the same silly comments about locations that have long and cold winters. Texas is hot we get it, you don't like it but it does not change that this summer has been great, it is a lot cooler than usual. ;-)

He’s saying Texas is hot for humans, which is objectively true. One’s willingness to tolerate it is subjective, but that’s not the point here. Don’t take it so personally.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#119

Post by konschubert »

powerbroker wrote: post #30
mechagodzilla wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texas has quite a bit of utility-scale commercial batteries now.

Unfortunately it these batteries are unable to multiple gigawatts over many hours of excess wind energy. It will be at least a decade before the battery energy storage systems are close to big enough to absorb the oversupply of wind energy that happens a few times a week. Don't get me wrong. The BESS helps with frequency, synchronization and voltage issues. They just do very little to flatten the wind spikes without…

It’s not necessary that the batteries absorb all the oversupply. Curtailment will always be part of an efficient renewables energy system.

The batteries are there to make sure that the prices don’t go crazy on the evening.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#120

Post by herewego »

infecto wrote: post #107
Salgat wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here just north of Austin, PEC implemented one of the most regressive solar programs in the country. Their argument in their study was that they make less money off solar since they can't sell as much power.

Regressive in what manner? Historically a lot of solar buy-back programs were incredibly inflated. Residential solar can be great for the resident but is usually not great for the grid. Paying resi. solar producers greater than market rates always felt foolish to me.

Regressive in that solar programs are not inflated, but do require distribution upgrades to realize their efficiency advantages over centralized power transmission. These distribution upgrades are costly to IOUs because they cut into their margins when the efficiency of distributed generation is considered.

Paying distributed generation export at retail rates or higher (DR, etc) makes plenty of sense because there are significant load, resiliency, and efficiency advantages to homeowners who are supposed to be the ones to benefit most from the grid.

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