Since when has the power grid been reliable to that level? Where I live we have outages long enough that my UPS is tripped once or twice a month! The article talked about voltage dips of milliseconds causing a problem. Heck, the power dips for milliseconds about 120 times a second.
Clearly another example of a tech journalist not having a clue about the topic being written.
I can hardly wait!
What was the question? Are you sure you don't mean Thorazine?
How about wind? Wind actually picks up at night so there are complementing peaks.
Those sound like great ideas. How far have you gotten with it? ;)
Except when it doesn't. Maybe people could just get used to their power being intermittent. Smart grid, central cutback control over almost everything but minimal lighting and electric toothbrushes.
There is no debating with you. There isn't any point it trying to educate you. It's useless.
+2
...but there is a lot of Pu out there, free for the taking, too.
No wonder you're a lefty. You're stupid!
That's only one problem; the infrastructure has to be doubled. Above
10% or so, the entire system stability goes to hell. It's probably less because our system is on the verge now (*way* underbuilt).
is mainstream and coal, gas and nuclear are a thing of the past.
gment your photovoltaic system, I'd say the time would be around sunset.
You could recharge your electric car during the day, when you were parked n ear your work-place. You'd need a work-place charging system that billed yo u for the current drawn by your car, but there's nothing particularly diffi cult about setting that up - it's just small scale remote metering...
You developed remote meters at one point - how come you didn't think of tha t for yourself?
It's called pumped storage :-)
It's a crappy article. The issues with widespread solar or wind installations are:
- Wind and solar are generally non-dispatchable (ie: you can't schedule the wind to blow or the sun to shine when you want it to).
- Most wind and solar installations have minimal to zero H (mechanical inertia). The H of conventional power plants provides stored energy so that when there is a sudden increase or decrease in demand, the system doesn't crash.
- Many early grid codes for wind or solar connections mandated a "get off the grid if there are any problems" approach. While this was OK for low levels of penetration, with increasingly higher amounts of solar or wind generation, one little hiccup can cause half your connected generation to go away. Grid connection codes are being revised to address this.
- Inverter connected solar and induction or DFIG wind turbines supply limited fault current into network faults (sounds like a good idea). However, this results in fault current contributions being a non-linear function of fault type and location and totally screws up protective relay coordination in the area.
--- If that's the political ramification of stupidity, then I suggest your avowed stance of being firmly planted on the right is a ruse.
Someone has pointed out here many times that this is not true of all solar, just photo-voltaic. That said, they use energy storage for non-wind or solar power generation. Idling power plants only saves the fuel cost, there is still a large expensive power facility that is not being used at full capacity. Hence the power company bills commercial customers for their *peak* usage during the day.
Really, the huge turning blades of a windmill don't provide energy storage? That surprises me.
What hiccups?
Sounds like an engineering problem. Is this unsolvable? Or is the grid just not optimized for these alternative energy sources and will be modified as these sources grow?
There is a big difference between "a few milliseconds" mentioned in the article, and "a few hundred milliseconds". A power glitch of several hundred milliseconds can cause a lot of problems (unless you have UPS's, batteries, capacitors, etc., on the critical parts) - it is the glitch of merely a few milliseconds that I objected to.
Of course, there is always the problem that whenever you have a compact, convenient way to store large amounts of energy, you also have a rather dangerous item.
Rather than having massive storage at the generation sites, it would make more sense to have reasonable storage at the user site (sort of like the electric car solution, except we need something realistic, practical, long-lasting, and cheap).
Thorium fission is the answer to safe, reliable, economic, compact power generation for the near future (until hydrogen fusion becomes practical, in 50 years time).
Sounds like an answer to many problems here:
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
Hey, I *like* being crazy.
So take more Thorazine. It causes psychosis. :(
(See especially the supporting documents section,
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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