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Compare that to Texas, with a similar renewable energy makeup, whose go-it-alone grid works great unless it’s too hot or too cold or too stormy in the case of Beryl.
I know it’s in vogue to criticize “the Texas grid,” but there was only one incident that involved the actual grid supply and demand, which was the snowstorm in 2021. The only other outages that have happened were localized outages due to mechanical damage to power lines, eg from ice or hurricane-force winds. How long it’s taken Centerpoint Energy to get all those lines back up is certainly something to criticize, but it also has nothing to do with the Texas grid." And there have been no rolling blackouts due to heat, despite the implication in that Vice headline
I’m a little annoyed that my client apparently didn’t show me this post yesterday.
I’m nominally familiar with utility scale issues and it appears the fault here lie with the lack of regulatory environment in Texas.
There’s a process called “Line Clearing” where utilities send crews to cut down branches or sometimes whole trees if they pose a risk to power lines. Line clearing mostly impacts local circuits. Circuits are neighborhood level, and those power lines are lower than other kinds of power lines. Schedules for line clearing are often set with regulatory bodies, but can be left to utilities to set.Because line clearing means that crews have to traverse every power line on the grid, it’s often not something that utilities want to do. If given a say in the regulatory process or left to their own devices, they’ll opt for as long of a span between line clearings as possible.
What’s that mean, now that I’ve written so much? Well, it means that when big storms come through, the failure point isn’t necessarily the transmission lines or the power stations. It’s the local lines, disconnecting individual houses, streets, or entire neighborhoods. Instead of a few fixes here and there to get the grid back up, it’s a lot of fixes everywhere, which is time consuming and expensive. It means that ‘everyday’ failures are more common as trees can rot out and randomly collapse.
And, sure - those everyday fixes are relatively easy to deal with individually, but in a situation where a lot of those issues accumulate at once, they can cause other, more serious issues on the grid, as well as creating a massive backlog to work through.It’s sort of a foundational regulatory problem that seems to not have been addressed. A lot of midwestern states can bear wind storms with minimal problems - because their grid standards are written with lots of wet snow in mind.
Which is all to say, it’s supply, demand, delivery, and all the trappings therein, too.
I think on those grounds, criticism of Texas’ grid stands.
100 days of 100% renewable then shows an image where demand is in excess of renewables.
30% renewable power is really not a lot at all. If that’s the best America can do in the best state. That’s really shocking. Richest country in the world with some of the best solar and wind resources of any country and they are trying to make out 30% is a good figure.
30% isn’t “The best we can do.” it’s the best we’ve done so far. Nearly every State in the U.S. is busy building out Wind and Solar capacity and that isn’t going to stop, the number is going to keep climbing.
The real news in this article is how well the battery piles are doing at keeping the grid stable while meeting demand spikes. It’s real world data showing that the base load problem can be mitigated, or even eliminated, if you have sufficient energy storage.
It absolutely is the best you can do in 2024. Future goals don’t help with now. America should be way further along. Behind both Europe and China in a lot of ways.
The present and the future are two separate issues. But even then future plans seem lower than what they should be.
The battery and grid usage is a good sign for things to come. There was a much better article on this from a few months though. China has done a real impressive job with dropping the battery prices worldwide.
Conservative media: LIBERAL California electricity only works because they’re having immigrants steal your energy! Go green, go immigrant violence! Windmills cause transgenderism!