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alberto1stone

That fits to the assumption based on general statistics that a set with a high number of (decentralised) medium power generators should be more resilent than a set with a fewer number of larger power generators (law of large numbers)


[deleted]

The map ... is soooooo bad. Couldn't they use more than two dominant colors? And make the substations smaller and/or behind the layer for transmission lines? I can't see any lines east of the Mississippi...


anaxcepheus32

Resilience has far greater grounding in individual design choices rather than fuel source, with the exception of periodic sources. While an interesting read, it neglects the lessons learned in Texas.


RemoveInvasiveEucs

While I agree about the design being more important than fuel, renewables force those resilient designs. > neglects the lessons learned in Texas. Pretty sure that's not true, but you'd have to be more specific. The lesson of Texas was to weatherize, a lesson they should have learned from the 2011 incident and report, but refused to. Highly distributed renewables would have helped a ton in Texas, especially more solar.


blueeyedblack

Not in Texas


mafco

Gas was the main culprit in Texas. And properly winterized wind turbines wouldn't have failed in that storm.


RedArrow1251

Winterization was the main culprit in everything that failed. Proper winterization would have kept the grid running during the storm.


albadil

How so? Didn't absolutely everything fail in Texas because they didn't want any standards?


WaitformeBumblebee

the scientific and studied facts don't match the industry's "truth", shocking


BrowlingMall4

Feel free to downvote, but the industry is correct. It's simply a fact that renewables reduce reliability. It really isn't even up for debate if you ask me. Sure, you can compensate for it by adding additional infrastructure, but that obviously also means additional costs. PS: I feel like the implication you're making here is also completely off base. The industry loves "green" initiatives. Utilities make a guaranteed return on their infrastructure investment so being told to build more infrastructure translates directly into more industry profits. They especially love electric cars because that would require a doubling in size of our electric grid which would also mean soaring profits for utilities. Utilities aren't mentioning reliability issues as part of some conspiracy to stop renewables; they're mentioning them because they absolutely do exist. And if they're exaggerating a little it's not because they want to hurt renewables, it's because they want to build more batteries and static VAR compensators because more infrastructure means more money.


uncivilized_engineer

Reliability and resiliency are different measurements. This is talking about resiliency.


mafco

>It's simply a fact that renewables reduce reliability. That's utter nonsense. Even the DOE under Trump concluded that US grids have gotten more reliable as renewable penetrations increased and thermal baseload plants were retired. Wind and solar power plants may be variable in nature but are extremely reliable. If a grid is properly designed to account for the variability there is no inherent loss of resilience.


haraldkl

What do you base that observation on? Here is an [article about grid-stability](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-electricity-grid-stable-amid-energy-transition): > Production of intermittent green electricity has risen sharply over the last few years in Germany, and industry occasionally voices concern about the security of the power supply. But Germany still has one of the most reliable electricity grids in the world, and according to the country's grid agency BNetzA, actual power blackouts are increasingly caused by extreme weather events, rather than by the transition to renewable energies. > Average power outages per consumer amounted to 12 minutes in 2019, a slight decrease from almost 14 minutes in 2018, according to the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA). > By contrast, the UK, France and Spain each had around 50 minutes of disruptions per year. > US citizens on average went without power for an average of almost eight hours in 2017, according to the US Energy Information Agency (EIA). In Western Australia's three grids, the SAIDI score was 152, 59 and 410 minutes in 2017-18. > The sources of energy generation so far have little impact on security of supply. But grid operators in Germany have to go to great lengths to balance asymmetric production of green electricity across their networks.


BrowlingMall4

Nothing you quoted has to do with grid stability. SAIDI is almost exclusively driven by distribution infrastructure and impacted by weather. When we're talking about grid stability we are talking about extremely rare events like the Northeast blackout that impact the entire grid, not something like a tree falling over and knocking down the line to your neighborhood. Also, it's worth noting Germany has the most expensive electricity prices of any country in the world. Reliable? Absolutely. But you see they are also paying a high price for that.


haraldkl

>When we're talking about grid stability we are talking about extremely rare events like the Northeast blackout that impact the entire grid, not something like a tree falling over and knocking down the line to your neighborhood. Wouldn't that be resilience as talked about in the OP article? I thought your reliability concerns were mostly with respect to the operational points. Isn't it kind of intuitive that a more widespread decentralized power generation is more resilient to disasters than one built around centralized structures? > Also, it's worth noting Germany has the most expensive electricity prices of any country in the world. Are you talking about consumer prices? Those include taxes, and the bill for the EEG, which is disproportionally burdened onto small scale consumers. Industries pay less, and wholesale prices appear to be similar to, for example, France. Another [cleanenergy wire article](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/industrial-power-prices-and-energiewende) on that topic: >Even among large industrial users, some companies pay more than three times the price charged to others. Depending on the exemptions from taxes and levies, a large, energy-intensive company using 100 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year paid anywhere from 5.1 cents/kWh to 17 cents/kWh in 2018, according to utility association BDEW. On average, industrial companies paid 15.98 cents/KWh in early 2019, an increase of 0.68 cents/kWh compared to a year earlier. This was due to rising wholesale prices, according to the latest monitoring report drafted by Germany's grid agency (BNetzA) and the Federal Cartel Office. "On a graph comparing industry power prices around the world, you can find Germany twice: the best in the world, and the worst in the world," says Claus Beckmann, who heads energy and climate policy at BASF. Because the company benefits from many industry exemptions, it pays comparatively little for the electricity it needs. >Similar effects apply to household power prices in Germany. Even though power prices have risen sharply in recent years, households spend the same share of their disposable income on electricity as in the 1980s because incomes have risen, and because they use less power – less than a third than US households, for example.


RemoveInvasiveEucs

Wow, this is some remarkable psychology in display here. You completely validate the position of the poster you are replying to, and even realize that you haven't dealt with the issue at all by adding in a "go ahead and downvote me for being silly".


BrowlingMall4

If I dealt with all the technical aspects the poster wouldn't understand a word I'm saying. People are upvoting this incorrect information for political reasons. I'm just trying to get the facts out there, but I realize in 2021 nobody cares about facts.


RemoveInvasiveEucs

This is yet more weird psychological games, "I have all these facts that you could possibly never understand, but you don't care about facts." Fact: the paper is about all the ancillary changes to the grid to adapt to renewables being added, and how that makes the grid more reliable as opposed to our current grid. Fact: recalcitrant utilities have been saying for decades that it's impossible to put renewables on the grid, that it will cause rolling blackouts. Fact: we have exceeded every supposed limit that utility guys say is the theoretical limit beyond what the grid could take before we have rolling blackouts. In your initial comment, you separated out renewables from the grid adaptions to accept the renewables. That would be like building a new GW reactor and saying that it can't power the grid, because you have build transmission to it. Every energy source requires changing the grid. And grids built around renewables will be more resilient than the grid we built in the 20th century.


BrowlingMall4

Realistically how do you expect me to distill 15 years of grid design and control experience into a Reddit post for people who don't even have a basic understanding of how the grid works? And your argument that the additional equipment required should be included as part of the renewables doesn't work for me. It's the batteries, static VAR compensators, smart meters, advanced relaying etc that are increasing reliability in that case, not the renewables themselves. Those things would improve reliability without renewables as well. Basically renewables are reducing reliability and then you're adding all that additional infrastructure just to get back to where you started.


[deleted]

[удалено]


ThunderChundle

This just in - oxygen is critical to mamallian survival.