Hacker News Reader

Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

This comment is Dunning-Kruger effect in action…

Believe it or not, but maintaining an electricity grid is a massive undertaking, and the people in charge of it knows the topic much better than you do.

The problem isn't a market problem, it's a physics problem: having a synchronized grid of AC current with many producers over a wide area is a real challenge, even when the underlying issue is resolved it takes a lot of time to add the power plants (or renewable equivalent) to the grid because they must be synchronized.

View on HN

The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.

Also, nobody in the field disagrees that in the more distributed grid we are seeing today, more endpoint communication and control could lead to more resilience. Whether pricing signals are the best path is a more open question, but they certainly appear to be a feasible option.

> The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.

No it doesn't. The fact that it's being said in a comment full of nonsense tells me that they don't have “above-average understanding”. They probably have read something, once, and now thinks they are an expert, that's literally what Dunning-Kruger is about.

They seem to believe that the equilibrium of supply and demand is all that matters, when it's just one piece of the puzzle and among the easiest to manage. Large, nation-scale, failures like this one are very unlikely to be caused by a lack of supply alone and markets are nowhere near fast enough to help preventing these.

Having such interdependent grids seems like a market or political problem not a physics problem to me.

Interdependent grids are usually good: they allow you to average out the effect of a single power station failure over a much larger area, and to amortize prices from a wider area of suppliers.

Sure but if you can't cut off failing parts in a sane way it seems like a liability.

Like, what can you do, use some 1000 of MW to melt iron rods or something to give the power stations time to slow down? Free wheels?

What the heck are you talking about?

Don't you realize that the smaller the grid, the more important the instantaneous load variations can be in relative term and the harder it is to keep things running smoothly? It's not a theoretical concern, it's why electric networks on islands are much harder to work with and much more prone to collapse than bigger networks.

I think the point I am trying to make is that the risk for big area outtakes are lower with more figurative islands.

It is not. The bigger the network, the more stable it is, that's why countries keep interconnecting with each other despite political tensions between them (no pun intended).

The reason why we interconnect grids has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with physics, politics can sometimes lead to disconnections (like how the Baltic states disconnected from the Russian grid earlier this year) but it comes with great cost and involves careful planning (the fact that the Baltic states remained connected for almost three years after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine should give you an hint of how challenging it was).

The bigger the grid, the more efficient and resilient it is (and managing electric grids on islands is a nightmare), but it comes with a significant complexity and means restarting from zero is harder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com