Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.
They should be requiring batteries with solar as well.
His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
They should be requiring batteries with solar as well.
His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
Absolutely untrue. Solar and wind can always just be disconnected at any moment. Wind resources are also a huge inertia source- windmill blades are massive grid stabilizers.
Renewable tech does not have a big coal fire they need to keep at a constant temperature. How about instead of requiring batteries with solar, we require coal plants to have sufficient bypass cooling that they don't need the load of a grid connection to stay cool.
Renewables are a boogeyman. The reality is simply that they are always able to undercut any fossil plant and they don't like that. It has fuck all to do with grid stability.
You are propagating some decades old ideas which don’t hold anymore.
> Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.
The project was intentionally limited in scale as to be a "learning project" for me and the whole team. I'm also sort of ok with the idea that it failed, though super frustrated with the entire underlying incentive structure changing so much that we can't use anything we learned to try a second time.
Batteries were intentionally excluded because of the additional complexity overhead they added, and because the way the interconnection rules are written it would have put us into a different MW class which would have dramatically increased a number of other bureaucracy issues.
You are ABSOLUTELY INCORRECT that we would have had a net negative value to the Texas grid without batteries. Batteries are valuable, and increasingly so, but so is raw power (even at mid sun). This is reflected nicely in the hourly price charts, which at this point I'm super familiar with.
btw, it was really challenging to find a way to contact you, lol (out of this way) btw2, we are based in Argentina :). Let us meet Mr R!
It's a significantly bad thing if something as straightforward as buying and plugging in solar panels requires special knowledge to not get screwed over.
> His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
Oh come on.
And it's even plausible that ERCOT currently can't handle additional PV in whatever area the Roby parcel was in without adding BESS, although the person you're responding to has no idea if that's true or not, since neither they nor I knows where that is.
The conclusion in the post:
> Run five projects through the process simultaneously. Most will fail for reasons you cannot predict. With five, one might succeed. And switching to batteries instead of solar. Or at least solar plus storage.
Okay, how small of a connection would they have to restrict him to for me to be correct?
> BESS, simple curtailment at peak hours, or angle diversity would solve the problem.
That much extra curtailment is a major problem. That much extra angle diversity hurts output. Batteries are a workaround for not being able to properly hook up the panels.
Onsite BESS permits you to not only get by with a smaller hookup but also sell your energy at times when people are willing to pay for it.
I did my calculation already. It said that a 1/3 drop in hookup for panels that were already hookup-constrained is not a proper hookup.
Straightforward math.
He was doing it for the tax credits. Without the tax credits, this project wouldn't have come close to making sense.
That doesn't make pure solar installs bad. Pure solar installs are net positive.