Earlier quoted context omitted.
More recent renewable inverters (solar PV and wind) and battery storage both have grid forming power control support. Term of art is "synthetic inertia" and makes spinning baseload obsolete. This has been shown under real world conditions most notably in South Australia with the Tesla Megapack based Hornsdale Power Reserve, which stepped in to maintain grid inertia when a coal plant exploded in 2021. For a more robus…
Batteries on the grid are really more for load smoothing; demand/supply peak flattening and transient spikes. They're really too expensive to do what someone would think of as "storage". Our recent govt installation is reported at $1.6bn for 2000MWh, which is incredibly expensive, and can't scale to run the grid, simply smooth load/demand diurnal curves.
Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"
141–150 of 154 posts
Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is the power consumed by the light source for one photo tool on one line. There are thousands of tools. Material handling robots, compressors, HVAC, pumps, an entire data center within the factory, etc.
From source article…
> For example, a lot of that 1.3 MW went into cooling the system and handling the hydrogen flow used to prevent contamination build up.
Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Batteries on the grid are really more for load smoothing; demand/supply peak flattening and transient spikes. They're really too expensive to do what someone would think of as "storage". Our recent govt installation is reported at $1.6bn for 2000MWh, which is incredibly expensive, and can't scale to run the grid, simply smooth load/demand diurnal curves.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624308 https://www.vox.com/climate/408381/energy-transition-renewab... | https://archive.today/sZFxF https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-... https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
The $1.6bn for 2000MWh is the current price, so that includes all recent drops.
I'm not saying "at some point" batteries won't be viable as grid "storage", I'm just saying today they aren't.
Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624308 https://www.vox.com/climate/408381/energy-transition-renewab... | https://archive.today/sZFxF https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-... https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
The $1.6bn for 2000MWh is the current price, so that includes all recent drops. I'm not saying "at some point" batteries won't be viable as grid "storage", I'm just saying today they aren't.
I'm really not sure about that. There is a recent "renovation" of a pumped storage site in Germany for more than 300EUR per kWh of storage capacity. Unfortunately I cannot find the original "Bürgerinformationen"-slides again. And it is a local, probably heavily politics-influenced provider, so maybe a lot of that is political landscaping. But I haven't been able to find a lot of anything with respect to storage prices beyond batteries. And I was really surprised that this renovation is the same order of magnitude than a battery installation.
You are still correct in the sense that storage is still incredibly expensive per hour of demand stored, but batteries may very well already be the cheapest option out there
Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
The $1.6bn for 2000MWh is the current price, so that includes all recent drops. I'm not saying "at some point" batteries won't be viable as grid "storage", I'm just saying today they aren't.
I'm really not sure about that. There is a recent "renovation" of a pumped storage site in Germany for more than 300EUR per kWh of storage capacity. Unfortunately I cannot find the original "Bürgerinformationen"-slides again. And it is a local, probably heavily politics-influenced provider, so maybe a lot of that is political landscaping. But I haven't been able to find a lot of anything with respect to storage price…
German has no height. For their 11m pumped storage a battery may come close. But for the mountainous countries around hydro storage is much more effective and cheaper. They do have up to 1000m and more.
And they are terribly effective to hold the peaks and spikes. Austria and Switzerland are getting rich selling their peak capacity to the big countries nearby.
Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why would you need a spinning mass when you have an inverter which can produce a range of frequencies and outputs and it all boils down to coordination? Looking at power generation reports it's the plants relying on inertia (like nuclear) which were disconnected and haven't been reconnected since: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES/72h/hourly
Inverters overheat, you need to protect them from insects and dust, and they don't last long. The typical expensive IGBT lasts for 6 years. Of course they are much better, but you need the protect them.
Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spain and Portugal had to deny a fake social viral that said power was out across most of Europe and the Russians were cutting undersea cables. On the upside, more people at all levels are going to be more prepared if it happens again.
Most people I spoke to around Maresme area yesterday believed someone incompetent made a mistake somewhere, and that was the reason. Some people jokingly suggested cyber attack/Russian probes, but afaik no one took those seriously.
There was actually a Russian cyber attack on the previous friday, pinging some German city government sites to death. Dresden, Nuremberg and one other. But this was essentially kids play, compared to a nationwide power blackout. A cyber attack to bring down a nation's grid would be high sci-fi. This would need lots of explosives and expensive physical interventions. Russia didn't manage in Ukraine eg.
Solar flares or temperature anomalies are much easier explanations. https://en.meteorologiaenred.com/What-is-induced-atmospheric...
Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not my area of expertise, but I think this is wrong? Modern PV inverters used in rooftop solar could easily start frequency synchronization autonomously, but are regulated to not do that autonomously in (at least) parts of the EU. More importantly, according to the REE, PV played a mayor role in the current and successful black start.
How? If the power is out, do you imagine that all the load that is out there disappears too? If I'm in a blackout and put my multimeter into the grid socket, will the measurement be something that my local inverter can drive an AC load through with no problems? And if that's not possible, how do we get an AC wave out to my 5000 local solar panel neighbors? And if we don't get any carrier wave to synch it to, then how…
There's a bunch of sources if you search for "grid-forming", "islanding events", "auto-synchronization" and similar terms in combination with PV inverters.
Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm really not sure about that. There is a recent "renovation" of a pumped storage site in Germany for more than 300EUR per kWh of storage capacity. Unfortunately I cannot find the original "Bürgerinformationen"-slides again. And it is a local, probably heavily politics-influenced provider, so maybe a lot of that is political landscaping. But I haven't been able to find a lot of anything with respect to storage price…
German has no height. For their 11m pumped storage a battery may come close. But for the mountainous countries around hydro storage is much more effective and cheaper. They do have up to 1000m and more. And they are terribly effective to hold the peaks and spikes. Austria and Switzerland are getting rich selling their peak capacity to the big countries nearby.
Do you have some sources to their actual pricing? Some while ago I tried and came up blank. I assume your statements to be correct, because otherwise what would be the point of discussion, but I haven't been able to find any hard(ish) data
Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
German has no height. For their 11m pumped storage a battery may come close. But for the mountainous countries around hydro storage is much more effective and cheaper. They do have up to 1000m and more. And they are terribly effective to hold the peaks and spikes. Austria and Switzerland are getting rich selling their peak capacity to the big countries nearby.
Do you have some sources to their actual pricing? Some while ago I tried and came up blank. I assume your statements to be correct, because otherwise what would be the point of discussion, but I haven't been able to find any hard(ish) data
My source is a manager from a local energy company