Eclipse October 2023 | Hacker News Reader

Eclipse October 2023

gridstatus.io

118 pointscwal3722 comments

I am one of the people who built this page and the Grid Status site. Cool to see this posted!

Ultimately, the solar eclipse this weekend came and went without any noticeable impact for consumers of electricity. In my opinion, this is a very notable feat.

A well-planned and executed response by grid operators to a predictable eclipse bodes well for a future where events like a particularly cloudy day, blizzard conditions across a large area, or widespread hail damage to solar farms could reduce generation by similar MW values in the middle of the day.

As the grid becomes a more dynamic and volatile place, making operational and investment decisions based on data is more important than ever before.

If this sort of stuff interests you be sure to check out our other dashboards: https://www.gridstatus.io/home

Sort of related: the map at the top of this post understates the size of the shadow. One thing I did after the eclipse was look at the GOES images which show the shadow moving over the earth. It's huge and very cool to see:

Here are a few sequential images:

https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/2...

(I'm sure there is a better way)

Cool to see it like that, but I think the exposure/dynamic range of the photo makes it look darker than it really is. The path of annularity is what's shown in the map on the page. The path of the partial eclipse is much larger but not as dark.

I was in Louisville, Ky which the last photo shows as black. But in reality we didn't even notice a change in brightness (it was cloudy).

Dammit, I clicked thinking Eclipse was releasing an update to their IDE :).

I'm surprised to learn California has a few GW of batteries. Are these grid scale storage or people's houses feeding back into the grid?

Everything in that fuel mix is grid scale on the transmission network, not the distribution system that residential batteries are on. Looking at the records[0] page, maximum battery charging is approaching 4.5 GW in CAISO, so they're really trucking along in adding them to the grid. Wouldn't be surprised if they get passed by ERCOT over the next couple of years though, just tremendously easier to interconnect and build a facility in Texas.

[0] https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Bat...

I work for a company, that is implementing MWh storage on the grid, we have two very large scale storage projects set to interconnect in Southern California in the coming days.

There are more in the pipeline.

Grid scale battery storage is arriving, and I am thrilled to see it.

The new NEM 3.0 deal makes having a battery pretty much a necessity.

When's the next one? How big does an eclipse need to be to start wreaking havoc on the grid? Or is that a "never" situation still?

There will be an eclipse across the midwestern US up through parts of New England in 2024- you can show its path if you click "2024" in the "Track path of eclipse" widget near the bottom of the page.

Like someone else said, 2024 has a "total eclipse", but its path is more central, largely avoiding the solar-heavy west. It will still hit Texas (ERCOT), but since the date is early April the grid conditions should be relaxed enough that it will be another event where some planning should mitigate potential issues.

The next eclipse that would hit in the summer (which would have tighter conditions and more reliance on solar to serve demand) won't be until August 2044. Who knows exactly what the grid will look like by then, but you will certainly see a massive dip in solar generation.

I doubt that a total eclipse would actually have much more effect than an annular eclipse - in an annular eclipse like the one a few days ago the sun is still very nearly covered.

The 2044 total eclipse is the next one in summer in the contiguous US; I wonder if some sooner ones will also be interesting for this question. (I don't know enough about the worldwide geographic distribution of solar power to pick out candidates.)

Here's the list for the next 10 years. There will be a partial lunar eclipse next Saturday.

https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/list.html

There's a partial lunar eclipse next week, October 28th https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/lunar/2023-october-28

Unrelated but what’s the spike in Texas’ real time price around 6pm about? California also spikes around this time but is more spread out.

This is typically the highest energy usage throughout the day (getting home from work, cooking, doing laundry, turning up the heat, etc.)

This also coincides with the setting of the sun, so the net load (total load less wind and solar) spikes at 6-7pm every day.

Right and the net load chart shows that, but the spike is only for a short time then goes back down even as net load is elevated. This is what I don’t understand. In comparison the California price remains elevated throughout the spike in net load.

Coincidentally, and since we are on Hacker News: What happened with the Eclipse IDE? I never heard anybody within the last 10 years to use it. Nowadays Visual Studio Code seems to be the hot shit of the generation. SCNR.

It's still around, I believe quite a lot of specialist software is built on top of Eclipse. But, I think when Android Studio went from Eclipse to IntelliJ, it lost its last real big use case. The wiki page lists a few tools, the most known one to me is DBeaver (https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver)

Am I the only one slightly disappointed not to be reading about a new release of the Eclipse IDE (www.eclipse.org) with some major improvements ? :-\

surely you mean a new Twilight book/movie. /s

how come solar is not listed in the two "fuel mix" stacked diagrams?

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