Timing of Devon switchoff ‘could not be worse’, says board, as members face an estimated £2m in lost revenue
I keep telling people, production isn’t the problem in most national grids. The issue is distribution. Power plants operate on-demand. That means when you flip on your light switch, some power plant somewhere has to spin just a little bit more faster to account for you turning on the light. And when you turn it off, it has to spin just a little bit slower.
There’s no buffer for the in-between. We have the same issue with water pipes. The pumps pump the water out at some fixed rate and everyone uses the water at some variable rate. The difference is that with water we have something that acts as a buffer, we call them water towers. So when someone shuts off their sink, instead of pumping a little slower, we just send the excess water to a tower. And when demand goes up, instead of pumping faster, we just empty the tower.
Electricity has something similar, they’re called batteries. And every national grid of developed countries has been in need of them since the 1970s. But we just keep doing neat little tricks with averaging to prevent investment in grid batteries. So this is going to continue to be an issue until nations start biting the bullet on this issue. More solar panels is great, but that’s not the major problem at the moment.
And don’t get me started with transmission lines.
Sorry, I’m gonna have to hear about the transmission lines
I’m wondering, would hydraulic accumulators be a viable option? I’ve heard the scarcity of lithium cited as a reason to hold off on expanding the grid, and I’ve been wondering if maybe there’s a solution in old tech rather than new. But idk if lithium scarcity is actually an issue in this regard or just pointed to as a scapegoat.
We can indeed use things like pump storage and gravity batteries, but we don’t really have to. The next element down on the periodic chat from lithium can be used in place of lithium at half the energy density. Which to save you time, it’s sodium, which can be found in salt, which we have quite a bit of on the planet.
Sodium ion batteries were slightly researched but lithium got the money because it has twice the energy density (amount of energy you can store per kilogram). However, for giant batteries that never have to move, sodium ion batteries are ideal for grid storage.
Thanks for your insight! It’s super interesting to me, but there’s a lot of noise in the discourse that’s kinda stopped me from looking into it.
Somehow, only China uses HVDC transmission, with much lower losses over 1000km, and the lines can be buried. I got you started.
I would think capacitors would be better than batteries are grid scale? Particularly for the buffering you mention.
Capacitors don’t hold energy for long.
They’re essentially the same thing on the scale of a national grid. Battery banks can turn on the juice in microseconds.
grid buffering does not need that. It’s literally guys looking at demand and phoning around to turn up or down generation.
Fun fact: this was the first in a series of events that caused the Chernobyl explosion.
Oh yeah, it’s massive overkill for the conventional grid. It’s just one of the things I see people say when trying to get people to accept that battery banks can make a renewable-only grid viable here in Australia.
Very insightful. At grid scale the line between them just blurs because of how they’re ultimately used. But there are some differences and ultimately a grid scale pack would be both packed in one. With caps taking the blows to smooth into the chemical storage of the battery behind it or head right back out before a need to store in the chemical behind the cap.
The entire rate of adoption of green technology is waiting on grid upgrades. There is something like 70GW’s worth of solar for corporate buildings on a waiting list for the grid connectivity to be upgraded. The ability to transfer the power is a big problem currently. We badly need more investment in the grid capacity to speed this up because we are increasingly wasting renewable energy. Wind and Solar are both being curtailed badly by various bottlenecks which can’t transfer all the production while other areas are running on gas.
This is what happens when you sell off publicly-owned electricity generation and distribution. The ghost of Thatcher kicks the UK in the face once again.
Isn’t „elasticity“ the only argument in favour of gas-powered power plants? If they are soooooo elastic, why can’t they lower production from them instead of turning off solar? Oh, wait - so gas-powered power plants have no upsides? Who knew???
I’m not an expert but maybe the grid is not uniform in the whole country and you can’t simply inject more power in one place and less in another for everything to even out nicely? You know what I mean? Maybe it matters where the power plant is, not just how much power it generates? But I don’t know, just thinking.
I think you are partially right. It depends on the power grid and the connections between certain regions. Even if this was the case - it still proves that gas power plants have basically no upsides and there are other, better ways that can work the same way without making us dependent on imported fossil fuels.
Yes, there are other ways but the grid is built to rely on gas turbines for regulation and you can’t change that in a year. Even in countries that invest heavily in solar there are issues with expanding the grid fast enough.
last night i watched a video about plug in solar and it appears that the rules say that when you lose mains power (power cut), your system must also terminate and shut down. I didn’t realise this was the case, and thought i could get a small battery to power my home in a power cut (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
When I soon™ get the chance to put up solar, my plan is to have a separate breaker box on an interlock that can only be solar or grid power. So to start I don’t need a huge investment in panels or batteries, and slowly add capacity and demand while always having a grid backup if needed
I have generator that automatically kicks on when my power goes out. It shuts down the grid connection before it does so to avoid feeding power back to the grid. You just need something similar that would cut off the grid when the power goes out and switch to your battery.
You can do this physically. I requested octopus energy install an isolator switch before my distribution box, as my house is old enough to send the power directly into the home, before those external boxes with the earth, isolator and meter were implemented.
Unplug from the wall and you’re good to go. Otherwise you’re back feeding and could injure a worker.
Yes the video did explain the reasons ext, but is there nothing i can stick to my consumer unit or outside unit to stop export? How do backup generators work then?
For a whole home system there needs to be an auto shutoff. It isolates the house.
You would need to install something like a “break then make” switch that isolates the house from the main line before feeding power back from your local source(s)
That’s a safety feature so a breaker actually cuts the power supply to your home/room/whatever when it’s turned off.
That is insane and makes me wonder if it’s stupid as well, are they not capable of monitoring the lines voltage and shutting down if required on demand instead of the entire summer?
That’s such a fuckup I can’t believe it
The article suggests the problem is that rooftop solar has taken off to the point that it may overload the grid if the community solar farm continues generating also. Does this mean there is no kill switch so-to-speak on the rooftop generation? This bothers me.
Sounds like they’re one Carrington Event shy of a major disaster where everything gets fried, since the best defence against that would be to kill the grid altogether until it passes. But if they are unable to do so—if these rooftops keep the voltage up no matter what—everything that’s plugged into the wall could get blown out.
My parents had a property that survived a hurricane. But when the local utility tried to restore power, there was a big surge. When they got back to assess damages, they were surprised to find the neighbours (who had their key) using the fridge because it was apparently the only one on the street that still functioned. They had unplugged it before leaving.
So, not exactly the same situation, but it illustrates the point that utilities really need to stay on top this sort of thing.
