Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California Says Brace for Blackouts as Heat Wave Drives Record Power Use

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 40 posts

Re: California Says Brace for Blackouts as Heat Wave Drives Record Power Use

#31

Post by hedora »

elzbardico wrote: post #25
hedora wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorted: I charged my car this afternoon (the amber alert signs have been warning about this all day), while we were (as a state) overproducing electricity, and set the thermostat on the house up 4 degrees 30 minutes ago. Now, the solar I overbuilt to charge the car is dumping electricity on to the grid. It'd be completely sorted, except that I can't tell the house battery (which I bought as a backup and to time-shift…

You’re just displacing baseload generation by overgenerating at a time of the day when demand is minimal. You’re actually one of the roots of the problem

Today, we used normal amounts (for us - AC was on instead of car charging) of power until 10am, then exported power till 5pm (the car was elsewhere, importing power to charge). For the rest of the demand emergency, we had zero gross import and export. We're back to using power over night.

The next obvious thing to fix is that the battery software can't be told to avoid charging during the morning demand spike. (This would have started lowering our energy usage at 7:15 AM and let us flip to exporting power at 8:15 instead of 10am. The same thing happens every day.)

Overnight baseload generation is still an issue, but at least there is an obvious path to smoothing the morning / evening spikes. We'd need a house battery with about 1.5x the car battery's capacity to get through the night while also charging the car overnight.

Re: California Says Brace for Blackouts as Heat Wave Drives Record Power Use

#32

Post by HereIGoAgain »

Too bad they spent ~60 years doing everything in their power to not allow new power plants and generally kowtowing to green and eco lunatics.

The coming water ones are going to be the ones that hurt. Only had most of a century to look at and work on other, long term truly sustainable option, like desalination etc. Also see the last part of above ^

Re: California Says Brace for Blackouts as Heat Wave Drives Record Power Use

#33

Post by Schroedingersat »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #6
nxm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice of you to be able to afford solar panels and be home and have job flexibility to charge when you want. Not everyone is so privileged, so it still needs to be sorted

Solar panels also cannot support apartment buildings, since the ratio of roof to living space is far too low. Batteries would also be impractical to install in apartments, where space is at a premium. One of the tradeoffs to building dense is that it makes it harder to decentralize the grid.

Heating and cooling are the primary energy use and decrease faster than roof area increases for low rise apartments.

Average apartment size is about 80m^2 so in a 3 story building that's about 30m^2 each or roughly 5kWh/day. 200W doesn't allow you to be wasteful, but it's plenty for a 1-2 bedroom apartment. Hybrid cells with slightly better efficiency and low light tolerance would get you to 10kWh/d

Tokyo is around 7000 people per km^2. A 2 bedroom apartment can happily house two or three people, so with a reasonable amount of roof area per apartment you have 80-90% of your area available for not-housing.

High density just means not dedicating a freestanding house worth of land area per resident to force them into cars, it doesn't need to mean highrise.

Even with manila levels of density you can still get lighting, climate control (if well insulated), a washing machine, a few entertainment devices at 10-20W and basic cooking (nothing for the ground level commercial or infrastructure though) with about half your area left for not-housing. So that's some level of semi-decentralisation even in the worst case.

Mid-winter in high latitudes you might struggle without long term storage, but it's not unsolvable.

Batteries take up approximately 0 space. If the better part of a month's worth of energy can fit in a car it's fine.

Re: California Says Brace for Blackouts as Heat Wave Drives Record Power Use

#34

Post by dijonman2 »

Salgat wrote: post #20
matt_attack wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll note that 40kW is only about 53HP, not a very large engine for a car. It's approximately the power of two commercial lawn mowers.

40KW is a shitload considering a typical central AC system uses around 5KW. Imagine running 8 in parallel.

My A/C is 10kw running, with 18kw tankless water heater. You oversize generators when drawing lots of current from switch mode power supplies as harmonics confuse the AVR. Aka tankless water heater.

I have a home lab, full rack. Around 4kw including a dedicated A/C.

I have excess power and will run an extension cord to neighbors if needed.

I’d also want capacity to charge an EV should I get one.

Price between 22kw and 40kw was negligible relative to total project cost. The only downside is I have to turn on everything in the house twice a year to exercise it and avoid wet stacking.

Final note is that in order to use an automatic transfer switch you must have sufficient capacity for connected loads. A smaller generator would have forced me to install a second sub panel for loads I want to run during an emergency.

Re: California Says Brace for Blackouts as Heat Wave Drives Record Power Use

#35

Post by dijonman2 »

hadlock wrote: post #19
matt_attack wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll note that 40kW is only about 53HP, not a very large engine for a car. It's approximately the power of two commercial lawn mowers.

Yes but you can't really buy generators with more than 22kw and even that is plenty to run the AC for a 5500 sq ft home with plenty of breathing room to run the electric washer/dryer

You can buy many, many generators above 22kw. Probably not many gasoline engines but tons of diesel and propane/natural gas fueled gensets.

Re: California Says Brace for Blackouts as Heat Wave Drives Record Power Use

#36

Post by hadlock »

dijonman2 wrote: post #35
hadlock wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but you can't really buy generators with more than 22kw and even that is plenty to run the AC for a 5500 sq ft home with plenty of breathing room to run the electric washer/dryer

You can buy many, many generators above 22kw. Probably not many gasoline engines but tons of diesel and propane/natural gas fueled gensets.

Oh of course you can buy generators that will run the utility circuit of a nuclear power plant, they need to come from somewhere. Somebody will sell you one. I have not personally seen a residential generator larger than 22.5kw when searching for homes in hurricane country. This is in response to a guy saying he has a giant 30+kw generator for his home, which would be... extremely unusual unless he was also running an off grid welding shop or something equally unlikely

Re: California Says Brace for Blackouts as Heat Wave Drives Record Power Use

#37

Post by Salgat »

dijonman2 wrote: post #34
Salgat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40KW is a shitload considering a typical central AC system uses around 5KW. Imagine running 8 in parallel.

My A/C is 10kw running, with 18kw tankless water heater. You oversize generators when drawing lots of current from switch mode power supplies as harmonics confuse the AVR. Aka tankless water heater. I have a home lab, full rack. Around 4kw including a dedicated A/C. I have excess power and will run an extension cord to neighbors if needed. I’d also want capacity to charge an EV should I get one. Price between 22kw an…

I have no doubt you have those power requirements, I'm just responding to the guy whos acting like "it's not that much power" when it certainly is.

Re: California Says Brace for Blackouts as Heat Wave Drives Record Power Use

#38

Post by subsubzero »

I remember the heat wave of 2006 in California, it got above 110 near san jose where I lived at the time, and we had no power disruptions of any kind. It kind of shows you how far the state of California has fallen into dysfunction, Oh and Governor Newsom and his cronies are also trying to kill off green power - California's nuclear reactors. And he thinks banning gas cars in 13 years is a goo idea with a electrical grid that can't even power the electric cars we have today.

2006 heat wave - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_North_American_heat_wave

Re: California Says Brace for Blackouts as Heat Wave Drives Record Power Use

#40

Post by eliben »

erentz wrote: post #22
eliben wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the official CalISO twitter account is lying, this could be a local issue for specific substations etc. With the weather there could be transformers overheating and failing, for example. In a large state, power goes out _somewhere_ quite often. The bag of tricks CalISO has to lower demand at peak is fascinating - for example, there are large consumers with significant generation resources (like emergency gener…

Seems to have been directed by CAISO for both Palo Alto and Alameda: https://twitter.com/nukebarbarian/status/1567358316174622720

Thanks. Interesting, indeed. Maybe they're using different terminology; otherwise it's not clear how both Caiso and these local utilities can be truthful at the same time.
Post reply on HN