Fuck you ERCOT. Your failure to manage the grid has nothing to do with renewable energy.
Seriously, the only question to ask here is “do you mean MORE grid failure or LESS grid failure, you fucking grid failures”
The core issue is:
But inverter-based resources such as wind, solar and batteries — especially the oldest ones — may sometimes not be able to ride through the disturbance and could “trip” offline and disconnect from the grid.
Article then discusses disagreements on hardware upgrades to mitigate.
Anyone have additional context? Is this generally an issue? Is this hard to mitigate?
So basically the “conventional” generation methods use a Big Thing spinning at a specific speed to generate AC power. Solar and wind spit out DC which has to be converted to AC and also synchronize to the rest of the grid.
Hydroelectric, nuclear, coal, methane, all use a big-ass turbine at exactly 60.00 Hz to supply the grid. This is fairly easy to sync, since a change to load or supply will slightly change the physical rotation of the generators. If the load increases, it will draw down the speed of the turbines as it pulls on it harder. When the load is more than the generators can supply, or changes too quickly, it can cause a breaker to flip to prevent damage to the equipment.
With DC generators, the inverter connected to the grid works differently. It has to sense the frequency changes and react based on “external” factors. Right now there aren’t really widespread protocols to signal this type of grid conditions to solar/wind farms, so they have to be a bit more careful and preemptively disconnect to prevent damaging the inverters.
So it’s an entirely solvable problem. It just requires the industry (and ERCOT) to be proactive…
Barely an inconvenience, if you want alternative energy to succeed. ERCOT is just looking for an excuse to raise rates and blame solar\wind for the inevitable grid failures.
South Australia had a blackout a few years back because the grid standards were lax on how they should be configured, so the manufacturers had set the defaults overly conservatively.
It’s a learning moment but should be a solved problem.
Any grid stability issues can also be resolved by constructing more synchronous condensers.
Relevant Practical Engineering:
It’s a longer watch but worth it IMO. Grady does excellent work.
Yeah, let’s all listen to the guy who fell down and skinned his knee just because it got below 30 degrees (actually this killed some people). I’m sure he has a lot to tell us about everything that wasn’t his fault.
As opposed to now, where nothing ever goes wrong.
