'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage
houstonchronicle.com
houstonchronicle.com
There have been many occasions where the cost of power in Texas has gone negative. (see: https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/understanding-negative-pr... )
For this to happen there are a lot of factors that come into play but it indicates a downward price pressure on generation that is not going to go away. Storage and transmission are going to be the largest costs for the system going forward. These "ride through" upgrades make sense in the near term (generation side) but in the long term become just another cost that in theory could be put on the storage portion of the system (not in place yet).
Texas cutting itself off from the national grid, is now at the bleeding edge of renewables. 20 Years ago, that sentence would have gotten you laughed out of the state.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/california-battery-storage-increas...
They can be things like pumping water up a hill and releasing it to spin a turbine or using rocks storing heat.
The storage capacity can be added, it’s just don’t going to be banks of lead or lithium batteries
Is be really curious how the math works out with regards to how much water would be required for say 3 days of use in LA. That may even be an over estimate of storage needs given how few rainy days they get.
As just one example, iron-air batteries:
> The CEC is supporting this project through its Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) program, a fund dedicated to accelerating the implementation of non-lithium technologies offering 8+ hours of energy storage. Form Energy will use the grant funds to develop and operate the project, and PG&E will provide land and an interconnection point at the substation site.
https://formenergy.com/form-energy-awarded-30m-grant-from-th...
Stationary storage is a different ballgame, with different trade-offs
i.e. you can trade density for cycle count or cost
It's a measure that makes perfect sense for conventional electricity production: 10,000MW of aggregated coal generation can hypothetically produce 10,000MW more-or-less indefinitely, as long as it keeps being fed things like fuel, water, and maintanence.
But it doesn't make any sense at all, by itself, for energy storage: A net 10,000MW battery might be able to produce 10,000MW, but for how long can that output be sustained? Unlike a group of coal plants, it absolutely cannot do this indefinitely; at some point, that battery will become completely discharged.
It takes at least two figures to describe a working bucket of energy (whether that bucket is Lithium cells or pumped storage or whatever): The capacity (megawatt-hours is a fine figure here, and units like Joules also work), and the maximum input/output (and plain megawatts works fine for this part). Using only one figure doesn't really describe anything at all.
I don't know when or why we stopped doing this, but it's misinformative in a way that leads to a bad generalized understanding of the these concepts with the populace that is actually paying for all of this stuff.
But that's still a different case than a battery, wherein: Even if everything is going right, using energy from a battery must eventually cause it to become depleted.
It's never like a coal plant that (ideally) consumes fuel at one end, and spits out electricity at the other end as a continuous process. A battery, in this context, can be in a charging or a discharging state, but it can never be in both of those states at the same time -- using a battery is not at all a continuous process.
I don't care how long my UPS will actually last as long the holdover time is long enough to cover the time it takes to deal with all of the foreseeable problems in starting up the backup generator.
Perhaps most-obviously: Consumers who are suddenly running on grid-scale batteries have no idea that this is a thing that is happening. There's no signal for them to shut their stuff off -- automated, or not.
It's a whole different paradigm than your UPS under your desk is: With your UPS, your system(s) receive a signal that things are running on local battery, and you've elected to configure things to use that signal to order an automated shutdown.
But, again: That doesn't happen with the grid-scale batteries under discussion -- at all. You're comparing apples to dildos here.
(Which is not to say that grid-scale batteries offer new opportunities for power cuts, because the opposite of that is true. It is instead just to say that unknowingly using grid-scale batteries is nothing like monitoring a local UPS is.)
The setup you described there wasn't the situation I was describing at all.
I was describing a situation where there is utility power, a UPS, and a standby generator. When the utility power goes out, the generator has to start, stabilize, and only then can the load be transferred off the battery.
The requirement is that the UPS meet this current power demand for longer than the generator start up and transfer time (the "holdover time" I was speaking about in the previous post.)
For things like frequency response the holdover time is a fixed requirement. ERCOT requires all energy storage resources be able to maintain output for 15 minutes.
It comes from idiots who can not math being allowed to participate in our society. We should correct this error.
Grid scale batteries are used primarily for real time demand management, and therefore their most relevant property is how much immediate power they can output and for how long. If they were only described in terms of energy (i.e MWh) without separating the power and time components, then it wouldn't be clear how much immediate value they could provide to the grid.
It's analogous to how in an EV the max horsepower is determined in large part by the power output rating of the battery, but the range is related to the the energy capacity.
You listed two properties there.
Only one of these two properties is present in a figure that is solitarily presented as "10,000 megawatts."
We can tell this because only one property is presented.
And because it is a very-clearly ambiguous and singularly-useless instance of a unit that sees frequently-erroneous use, we do not know if this singular figure relates to "how much" or if it relates to "how long."
It probably relates to one of them, I'd suppose.
However... we do know that it cannot relate to both things, as-presented. The singular property presented can't even be extrapolated to relate to both things.
Both things aren't equally important.
The energy capacity of the battery isn't provided for the same reason that coal plants don't specify the size of their coal piles or hydro plants don't specify the potential energy storage capacity of their reservoirs.
Power is the most relevant property to the real time operation of the grid, and the specification of power (and not energy). The grid operators need to know how much power a battery (or other generation source) can provide, and for how long. That tuple <power, duration> what any dispatchable energy source ultimately bids onto the real-time electricity markets.
The energy storage capacity of a battery is a function of what energy market it is designed to fit into.
For example, a battery that primarily functions in the frequency regulation market (modulation of supply and demand every few seconds) doesn't need a lot of storage capacity, but needs high power output. In contrast, a battery that shifts supply over the course of a single day might need more capacity (4 hours).
From the grid operator's perspective, the storage capacity is an implementation detail of the particular power source, or at least a secondary consideration.
Sure do! They definitely need all both of those things! One thing, by itself, is definitely not enough information! Agreed. Absolutely!
But only one of those figures was presented here, and this here [waves arms around] is the context of the discussion.
And one figure is fewer than two figures, would you not agree?
When a generation provider bids supply onto the grid, it doesn't tell the operator what the maximum storage capacity of its equipment is, it tells the ISO how much power it can output for a given time frame (or alternatively how much energy it can deliver during a timeframe).
That is different that the total energy storage capacity of the battery itself, which is what I think you asked for.
The grid operator usually pays more attention to the former when it comes to day to day grid stabilization, and especially so for batteries, because batteries today don't do long term energy storage.
For ERCOT this is fixed as a hard requirement so there's no point in specifying the time-- it's all going to be the same. For example:
> Fast Frequency Response (FFR) – subset of RRS
> – Must be capable of sustaining its required response for at least 15 minutes (if necessary)
I see people use Watts and Watt-hours and mix them interchangeably all the time. Even people who absolutely know better than to do that.
But the two units mean very different things, and either unit can be used to describe one aspect of a battery.
Wouldn't surprise me if there is a bunch of finkie dinkie technically driven accounting stuff around how fast and how deep a charge and discharge cycle they're willing to do vs price. Not to mention adding supply effects the price as well.
The current PGE rates basically redline a whole portion of the state.
Gray Davis got run out of town on the back of Enron's nonsense. The fact that there is abject lack of fall out from the current pricing is, outrageous.
When I left CA my off-peak cost was more expensive per kWh than my on-peak cost here in Phoenix. And that on-peak is for 3 hours per day.
If I asked you to generate power for -$15/MWh, you would refuse to do it because it would cost you money. 0 > -15.
The utilities not charging negative time-of-rates is a separate decision.
That said, investing more in the infrastructure is something that seems to have been put on hold/not addressed appropriately in the past in Texas so the Houston Chronicle running a story to bring this to the forefront doesn't rub me the wrong way either.
> Ryan Quint, a former NERC engineer who was the primary author on nearly all of the organization’s reports on the issue, is now a consultant working with Clearway Energy, one of the developers. In comments to ERCOT, Quint wrote that nearly 90% of the resources can address their issues with commercially reasonable fixes such as software upgrades, including the vast majority of solar issues in both of the Odessa events.
So just a little software is holding Texas back? Well that's gotta be inexpensive! What could software cost these days -- surely a couple 100k engineers and a month or two?
(the above line is a joke)
In all seriousness though, I do wonder if the unreasonable distribution of talented engineers to... trivial (but profitable) pursuits negatively effects some more nuts-and-bolts industries like this.
One solution is to tax ad engineers and subsidize essential ones, or allow utilities to raise the prices enough to pay for this competitive workforce.
For software enabling a $150B industry, you would think it would at least run reliably. That there aren't objects that are aware that they are roads (just lines, arcs, and spirals) makes it laughably bad. The cost of this waste is tragic.
That takes vision (which isn't always there), but also time. Perhaps also recognition in the regulatory ecosystem that this is needed, so that the business case (ie, build it and they will pay for it) is there.
They are getting paid tons to do it and it’s been coming online for years.
[1] looking for the shorthand for the original link that started the discussion, thinking that 'TFA' is correct, is this in the HN FAQ?
It appears (not an expert) that Texas leads the country by such a margin in renewables that increasing battery storage an order of magnitude in 3 years was sort of a drop in the bucket.
Look at the revenue: it's 6% (now 12%) from energy arb and 58% (now 34%) from RRS-PFR (primary frequency response). Fully discharging and charging a battery is expensive from a lifecycle perspective (I think, I would love a reference), and if you can get paid a lot of money to charge/discharge by 5%, or not to do anything at all but sit charged (ECRS), you'd take that before damaging your expensive installation.
There isn't a lot of generation like this, primarily because getting a thermal generator to scale up or down is expensive, even for the nimblest of combined cycle plants.
Seems like this is 'really short term' (under 1h) and in the realm of frequency stabilization (short peaks)...?
Grid balancing storage is already being built out and operated in left leaning California, and already contributes significantly to supply during the evening demand ramp.
If that tax goes into effect, Texas will have far more energy production than it needs, possibly causing an energy-market crash in that state. I don't know, but it almost seems intentional. Texas can consume up to 8900 megawatts in the summer, average around 6500 MW, and crypto operations consuming up to 2500 MW.
There is a lot to think about.
It's not about targeting Texas.
It's because the economic value returned to society (in GDP, jobs, etc) from the energy consumed by crypto is less than for energy consuming activities like manufacturing, especially considering the environmental cost of generating that power (which won't all be renewable for a while).
This electricity-hungry onshore manufacturing boom is being boosted by legislation like Biden's CHIPS act, which is a big thing in Texas, and is being heavily promoted by Texas's governor:
https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/business/Texas_CHIPS_Act...
Also, HR 7178 CHIPS for America Act was the first recent CHIPS Act, and it was under Trump and Republicans. If you read the wiki page, they completely omit how this all happened.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/7178...
Democrats abandoned the first bill because it was a Republican bill, then side loaded it into a Supreme Court Funding bill. Democrats literally copied the bill, added a bunch of language for Unions, subsidies and then called it their own. They removed the tax credit provision, and literally handed them money when they are already profitable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act
Biden claimed credit for finally signing the bill, after subsidies and other hiring requirements were added to it. Also of note, all of these agreements are non-binding.
Micron signed a deal today. They are going to do like most, dig a hole and take the money and leave.
TSMC has completely stalled. There are not enough educated to workers on the project, and Biden's demands are creating a number of problems. They are going to stall until after the election, and if Trump loses, pull out completely.
As for the electrical issues in Texas, I live here, and we do not have electrical issues. My power has been off once in 10 years and that was during the cold weather in 2021. I have friends I play PUBG/COD with in California and their power is out all the time. I do not understand why people complain about power in Texas. If you drive across the state we have more solar and wind farms than anyone. That includes nations.
Biden promised a lot of things and did not deliver. He was supposed to decriminalize marijuana, didn't happen. He promised to reduce my healthcare costs, it didn't happen. They have more than doubled in 24 months.
I was onboard for immigrants, but after my sisters daughter was killed by one, which has destroyed our family, I am against it.
The amount of misinformation flowing right now is more than when Trump was in office.
I am voting for RFK. He seems like the lesser of all evils. As for Texas, Democrats here are not like Democrats everywhere else. We are libertarian hippies. Quit boxing us in all together.
This same group is under investigation for fraud. It couldn't be because Berkshire Hathaway, one of the largest donors to Democrats, is trying to take over the Texas energy market.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-12/warren-bu...
https://energyandpolicy.org/utility-industry-contributions-p...
Every dime has gone to counties aligned with Democrats. Harris County received the award, and they have steered that money to TEPRI. Electricity is already incredibly inexpensive in Texas compared to other states, why flood Houston with solar panels?
https://www.choosetexaspower.org/electricity-rates/houston/
It couldn't be you want Texans to pay more is it? I mean they pay almost half what California pays.
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration...
https://www.aol.com/news/harris-county-selected-solar-grant-...
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/20...
You have no idea what you're talking about. NONE.
Warren Buffett bought controlling interest in Occidental.
This is power move by Democrats. This has nothing to do with any of what you stated.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/14/buffetts-berkshire-buys-more...
And how far backward Texas is with respect to the grid.
When the big freeze went through, ERCOT didn't have the ability to actually cut manufacturing plants off. They could only manipulate the price. They had to get on the phone and request that various manufacturing facilities voluntarily shut themselves down.
In addition, part of the problem with the big freeze was that there isn't sufficient granularity in the grid. You couldn't cut off enough people because the grid chunks were also connected to hospitals, fire stations, etc. None of this has changed. Thus, you couldn't do rolling blackouts with enough demand slack to actually allow you to roll them.
On top of that, it is not at all clear that Texas has a plan to restart the grid from scratch if it actually needs a full reboot.
None of this is new. The Federal government documented all this 10 years before the big freeze. Everybody documented it after. Nothing has changed.
> Texas cutting itself off from the national grid, is now at the bleeding edge of renewables.
Texas cutting itself off from the main grid is also why the grid is at the mercy of renewables.
Side note: one of the driving forces for Texas' renewables push was that T. Boone Pickens was trying to monopolize water rights and was using renewables as way to get them.
* ERCOT (Texas) has more renewables generation than every other ISO, including CAISO (California)
* ERCOT is setting new renewables records almost every month, as new renewables sites come online.
Source: https://www.gridstatus.io/home
For example, on April 22 at local noon, CAISO was generating 72% of its total capacity from solar with 18GW. ERCOT was generating 63% from solar+wind roughly split 50/50. Solar was at 30% at 13GW.
You're right that ERCOT uses a lot of natural gas (and infact today, April 28th looks to be anomalously high), but it definitely has very very meaningful amounts of renewable generation.
Interesting read: Inverters don’t have spinning mass like turbines that can deal with fluctuations in the grid (simplified) (as we learned from Grady’s Practical Engineering) and they follow the grid, but can’t build a grid. But we also learned from him that modern inverters can actually build a grid and behave like a “mechanical generator”.
So as I understand it, a lot of existing renewable suppliers have to do some retrofitting, which is probably expensive, so now we are here.
Australia went through this very same propaganda when a once in 100 year lightning storm caused a big grid interconnect failure, and a large part of an entire state was without power for weeks [1]
The Politicians at the time spun it as being caused by evil renewables, and the damage was done. A huge percentage of the population still believes that renewables cause power outages, cause prices to go up, and are the work of the devil.
Talk about putting a spin on something to ensure the legacy providers keeps making a profit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout
"State utility regulators shot down efforts by ERCOT to impose new rules on large-scale battery sites, siding with operators who decried the grid operator’s rules as costly and discriminatory. The unanimous decision by the Public Utility Commission of Texas came after five months... It was touched off by a report from the grid operator intended to show grid-level batteries were unreliable without stricter rules. Texas battery operators, seven of which wrote letters ahead of the meeting opposing all or parts of the proposal, weren’t the only ones not buying it..."
https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/battery-ercot-c...
Even the impressive images of a downed giant 'giraffe' transmission tower[0] wasn't enough to convince those who wanted the anti-renewable narrative to be true. Apparently 20 towers collapsed in total.
Surely a more decentralised grid (a grid of micro-grids?), more easily facilitated by smaller and more distributed generation (including rooftop solar and home batteries), would mitigate such events? Too complicated and nuanced a concept for your average outrage-consumer and too long-lasting a project for your average politician to take credit for.
[0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-28/sa-statewide-blackout... (top article image)
I'm also sure the sun rising is a tad more reliable than a coal plant.. at least for another few billion years.
1. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#Utilit...
Carbon seems extremely important no doubt, but I've never personally bought the idea that the health of the entire planet can be boiled down to a single, analytical metric. I've also yet to be convinced that, even if it truly is all about carbon, we understand the problem so completely that we know how to intervene precisely without breaking anything else or causing unexpected side effects.
We've seen a noticeable increase in ocean temperatures in the last year or two and I've seen compelling data pointing to it being caused by ultra-low sulfur emissions regulations in marine shipping. People thought they were doing the right thing, they just didn't account for the cooling effects of sulfur in the atmosphere. We could easily do the same with global interventions in the carbon cycle.
I'd much rather see us leaning into a reduction in interventions wholesale. Its much harder to break things when you just stop causing so much damage.
It’s not the health of the entire planet that’s at stake. It’s the habitability of the inhabited parts of the planet for humans. The earth will be just fine.
We've leaned extremely analytical in modern times but doing so puts us at serious risk of missing the forest for the trees. We have a habit of trying to quantify everything and missing the fact that doing so loses context and greatly increases the risk of over confidence in our ability to understand and intervene with a complex system.
Nuclear subs, nukes, aircraft carriers, etc. need a nuclear industry.
The military's needs are not quite as straightforward as "take plutonium put it in a box". They need nuclear engineers, parts for PWRs, etc.
This is why the US government pushes nuclear power heavily in spite of it 5xing the cost of civilian electricity.
If nuclear is going to ever succeed economically it would have to be via Small Modular Reactors that can be built en mass rather than bespoke power plants. And even there, the price pressure from renewables is making that debatable.
An irony here is that nuclear promised energy that was "too cheap to measure" but renewables are actually delivering on that.
Nuclear? Why would you want to slow down decarbonization and make the process more expensive? It's almost as if your words of focus on decarbonization are lies.
Just wondering, did you read the article? The problem it describes with inverters is just one out of an array of problems with renewables (leaving aside hydro). Cost overruns due to electrical grid incompatibility, hardware instability, operation in bad weather conditions (almost certainly a fact of life in the near future), unprofitability, reliance on China for critical parts of the solar power supply chain...the problems with renewables are endless.
Nuclear? Proven technology that's expensive mostly because it's over-regulated beyond all rationality, and because the US foolishly neglected its large-scale manufacturing capabilities and let them atrophy and move offshore. The supply shocks that were felt in the US and Canada because they had to wait for masks from China when the pandemic started, should make this blindingly obvious.
You'll also note that every country not controlled by the insane anti-science green lobby is seriously looking at, and many are building, nuclear power plants as fast as they can. UAE, South Korea, China, India, Bangladesh just to name a few.
> your words of focus on decarbonization are lies.
Am I living in a parallel reality to you, because in my reality France and Ontario, Canada are examples of two regions which achieved deep decarbonization. Guess what they have in common? Most of their power comes from nuclear energy. Guess what happened to German carbon emissions after they shut down their nuclear plants and started up their coal-fired plants? Shocker! Carbon emissions went up.
But sure, good luck in your parallel world where actual demonstrated decarbonization is nothing but lies.
The issues you list with renewables are relatively benign. Inverters? Do you really want to argue electronic devices don't improve and cheapen dramatically over time? Grid compatibility? Nuclear needs a grid too. "Hardware instability"? Like, when a GW+ of capacity suddenly drops off the grid and you have to be ready for that? That's a chronic problem of nuclear. China? I thought they were the go-to party to point to to show nuclear wasn't dead.
Nuclear is proven in the sense it has a proven propensity for massive cost overruns. Renewable projects typically come in within 10% of projected cost (at least before overall inflation picked up, but that's affecting everything.)
Lots of countries are "looking at" nuclear. Looking is cheap, building is not. Experience with nuclear is showing that building more reactors is a tragic, often hideously expensive mistake. Even in China, nuclear is experiencing considerable friction compared to their renewable rollout.
That places like France and Ontario achieved deep decarbonization in the now distant past matters little. Nuclear was competitive with or cheaper than solar and wind back then. Now, it's not, because solar and wind (and storage) have improved so much. You can't go home again; you can't revert to an imagined happy nuclear childhood either. France is finding this out.
The notion that an "anti-science green lobby" is holding back nuclear is risible nonsense. This is a go-to conspiracy theory nuclear fans use to avoid the reality. Nuclear is being held back by its own failure to compete. Look at what has happened with costs for new nuclear construction: in the US, in the UK, in France, in Finland, even in the UAE and China (where costs have been high relative to renewable options.) This despite favorable sentiment toward nuclear in the places where they're still trying.
Carbon emissions in Germany have gone down even with the nuclear phaseout, btw. I'm sure you can find a year somewhere when they went up, but that's akin to the argument of climate change deniers looking at statistical blips and saying global warming has ended.
You yourself are living in a fantasyland where you desperately have to grasp at mental straws to protect yourself from the reality of nuclear's failure. This self deception will rapidly become impossible to sustain in the near future as renewables and storage continue their rampage to domination of the world energy system. Their prices continue to crash, and by the time the world is renewable powered their demonstrated experience effects will likely make them far cheaper than nuclear could ever hope to be. Solar, for example, will likely fall to under $0.01/kWh in the sunniest locations.
No, I am arguing that people are not taking into account issues with the existing technologies and their capabilities, and instead thoughtlessly rolling out renewables onto the grid, putting people at real risk. You do understand what 'immediate catastrophic grid failure' means, right?
> Nuclear needs a grid too.
It's the same grid we already have! It was designed for baseload generation which is exactly what nuclear gives you! No costly grid upgrades required!
> when a GW+ of capacity suddenly drops off the grid and you have to be ready for that? That's a chronic problem of nuclear.
The 'sudden drop' is exactly what is avoided by nuclear's steady power generation.
> Renewable projects typically come in within 10% of projected cost
Until you factor in the massive upgrades that will be needed to the grid, the ecological toll of vast solar panel arrays and wind farms, the vast mining requirements for all the minerals needed for these devices, and the end-of-life (20 to 30 years) recycling and disposal costs. Then the picture is not so pretty!
> That places like France and Ontario achieved deep decarbonization in the now distant past matters little.
Yeah, facts don't matter and only unproven ideologically driven technologies matter.
> solar and wind (and storage) have improved so much.
Yes, they have improved so much that Texas is at risk of catastrophic grid collapse. Facts have an inconvenient way of intruding on fantasy!
> Look at what has happened with costs for new nuclear construction
What did happen with costs? UAE has successfully launched their NPP and is planning to build more. Not all costs are money sinks–these NPPs will generate clean power for decades, maybe even a century. They will produce minimal waste that will be safely sequestered and/or reused, and they will have very little ecological footprint. A nuclear power plant is one of the best investments you can make for the future.
> self deception will rapidly become impossible to sustain in the near future as renewables and storage continue their rampage to domination of the world energy system
Sure, in the future everything will be perfect and all of the problems that people have pointed out will magically go away. And I'm living in fantasy land ;-)