This sounds like a good reason to have a lot of batteries.
Texas was the leading state in new grid battery installs for the last few years.
Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
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Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#32This almost seems like a straw man to me. Isn't the much larger problem the actual increased energy usage and making sure that all of this massive extra cost doesn't just get dumped on consumers? I am a huge proponent of AI actually, but very suspicious that "financiers" are suddenly creating what amounts to an energy tax by finding legal ways to sneak extra fees or rates into our electricity bills to cover build out…
Texas is the standing proof that "making sure that all of this massive extra cost doesn't just get dumped on consumers" is not a problem. Texas has the most load, the most marginal load added every year, and the cheapest retail power. Load grew 15% in the 5 years to 2024, and retail prices fell by 1¢.
Do t they also have like the most solar?
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're large enough your connection to the grid is a negotiation with an engineering team. The utility will force you to put equipment to correct for power factor ( massive capacitor bank), resistive load, etc. The utility also charges commercial users for apparent power (includes reactive power, or that sloshes around setting up a steady state), as opposed to just real power charged to residential users. EDIT: in…
That’s interesting. For the rest of us I guess it’s just the law if large numbers that our air conditioners don’t cycle off at the same time
Pretty much. Except the law of large numbers breaks down in correlated events.
Like a black out.
What really hurts is are all the rotating machines, especially the one-phase ones (fridge, AC, blower). Those have transients that last several cycles and are electrical shorts until the back emf is setup.
Utilities will try to roll the power back on in sections to avoid instability, starting with hospitals and those near hydro plants.
But you can help put by turning off your stuff during the blackout and when the light come back on walking around the house to turn them back on.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Texas is the standing proof that "making sure that all of this massive extra cost doesn't just get dumped on consumers" is not a problem. Texas has the most load, the most marginal load added every year, and the cheapest retail power. Load grew 15% in the 5 years to 2024, and retail prices fell by 1¢.
Do t they also have like the most solar?
Maybe in absolute terms? I haven't checked in a while. In terms of fraction of energy from solar Texas is still far behind California.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#35This almost seems like a straw man to me. Isn't the much larger problem the actual increased energy usage and making sure that all of this massive extra cost doesn't just get dumped on consumers? I am a huge proponent of AI actually, but very suspicious that "financiers" are suddenly creating what amounts to an energy tax by finding legal ways to sneak extra fees or rates into our electricity bills to cover build out…
Texas is the standing proof that "making sure that all of this massive extra cost doesn't just get dumped on consumers" is not a problem. Texas has the most load, the most marginal load added every year, and the cheapest retail power. Load grew 15% in the 5 years to 2024, and retail prices fell by 1¢.
I don’t think that is true.
https://www.electricchoice.com/historical-electricity-pricin...
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#36I’m curious how this works for other large consumers. Do they have some kind of artificial load that lets them gradually reduce consumption instead of doing it all at once?
No. I imagine they are less sensitive and generally stay online and are only de-energized if the utility has an outage
But they can have their own internal fault and have to shutdown.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#37For those who dont know why this is important: The loads are slowing down the generators that are burning a well metered amount of fuel to stay at 60Hz. This is a delicate balance since the phase angle must also be spot on. If a generator and the local line disagree on f, phase or V, you have a short circuit. If you lose a large amount of load, your generator will spin up with the excess fuel until the control system…
Would demanding that large spikey users of energy like data centers implement some sort of demand ramping/isolation from the grid in the form of a massive capacitor bank or flywheel generator between them and the grid help reduce the risk here?
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#38For those who dont know why this is important: The loads are slowing down the generators that are burning a well metered amount of fuel to stay at 60Hz. This is a delicate balance since the phase angle must also be spot on. If a generator and the local line disagree on f, phase or V, you have a short circuit. If you lose a large amount of load, your generator will spin up with the excess fuel until the control system…
Some of us in Texas are all too familiar with the problem of balancing load with generation, the risk of a cascade failure causing a slow restart.
During winter storm Uri, they did a duty cycle where we only had power available for ~6-12 hours at a time on the days it was available. This was apparently to avoid that very problem.
So far as I know, the obvious mitigations like winterizing NG generation and/or peering with neighbor grids have not been performed.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#39This almost seems like a straw man to me. Isn't the much larger problem the actual increased energy usage and making sure that all of this massive extra cost doesn't just get dumped on consumers? I am a huge proponent of AI actually, but very suspicious that "financiers" are suddenly creating what amounts to an energy tax by finding legal ways to sneak extra fees or rates into our electricity bills to cover build out…
Solar and wind would make it worse.
What matters is peak capacity. Using the grid as a free battery for when your intermittent sources of energy go away against your fairly constant loads only makes the grid weaker overall. The best part of these huge predictable load centers is utilization factor.
Storage of some sort would probably help some, but overall the best type of load for a grid is predictable constant usage. Bonus points if it can reasonably be part of a load shedding/demand response program.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#40For those who dont know why this is important: The loads are slowing down the generators that are burning a well metered amount of fuel to stay at 60Hz. This is a delicate balance since the phase angle must also be spot on. If a generator and the local line disagree on f, phase or V, you have a short circuit. If you lose a large amount of load, your generator will spin up with the excess fuel until the control system…
10+ MW voltage-source converters that can't do up to around 80% of their nominal capacity as mostly-reactive apparent power with stabilizing synthetic inertia scaled as desired/specified are a mostly software issue, stemming from lack of regulatory pressure incentivizing the engineering complexity of that.
Though if you want to do a smoothing action on real power flux you'll have to colocate battery capacity with the converter. Which to be clear is fairly cheap to do as long as you get compensated for the substantial frequency stabilization capacity this represents. I'm talking like 15~120 minutes at converter nominal AC power of battery capacity.
The first 10~20% of reactive power are almost free from the converter electronics, btw....