How the electricity markets respond to a nuclear trip(blog.gridstatus.io) |
How the electricity markets respond to a nuclear trip(blog.gridstatus.io) |
It would be cool if individual generators shared this curtailment status/reserve in realtime publicly similar to how ERCOT reports real time generation mix data.
Citations:
The grid frequency itself functions as a signal: a deviation below 50/60 Hz indicates support is needed, and a deviation above means curtailment is needed (or load added).
Instant frequency-response assets such as batteries typically monitor the frequency independently and respond as required. They don't need to wait for explicit signals from the ISO.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/tesla-software/autobidd...
[2] https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/tesla-software
[3] https://electrek.co/2023/09/15/tesla-autobidder-product-330-...
What I mean to say is that solar and batteries are likely an order of magnitude faster to respond to sudden demand changes. So I would expect a more reliable system when more solar and especially batteries are being added.
The point of ramping up the power plant is to make sure that the rotor doesn't change speed (by e.g. burning more fuel to push it harder, because there's suddenly more load on it), and that can happen a lot faster than spinning up the rotor from scratch. Indeed a heavy rotor helps to stabilise the grid "for free" by acting as a flywheel (which, in a way, responds even quicker to the demand change than a battery can).
A quarter of a 60 hz cycle or a fifth of a 50 hz cycle is really fast. For comparison, it takes a current limiting fuse around a half cycle to clear a short circuit current and a GFCI takes around two cycles to clear a ground fault.
With that said, turbines responding in couple minutes are more reliable as a baseline when you’re planning load flow of as big as country or wider area. The basic reason is that you have source of energy under your control such as nuclear, water, gas, coal. You cannot have solar, wind as your baseline, I don’t want sound dramatic, but it’s kind of suicidal to do that. Solar’s ramping is not a win when you consider greater scale.
With regards to transmission congestion, that is easily fixed with installing batteries at currently storageless renewable generation facilities (the batteries then charge with excess solar, and can continue to discharge after the sun sets or the wind dies down, maximizing transmission utilization temporally). The Inflation Reduction Act also enables those batteries to charge from utility side if needed, whereas before they could only charge from the renewable generation (AC vs DC coupling).
See https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/86932.pdf. It deals with estimating reserves from these types of resources, but also talks a bit about general considerations, and references other good papers and demonstrations.
Because a few hundred thousand chips in solar systems costs less than an entire network rethink.
If you like grid data, we have a lot more info for the entire country here: https://www.gridstatus.io/live
Also your original post link states event happened at 7:02 AM, your links here points to 8:05 AM. Can you explain this?
It incentivises the grid-stabilizing deployment of batteries.
Texas is really the market to watch and learn from.
The amount of heat that can be dissipated by evaporating water is kind of incredible.
(It's obviously not a meltdown situation!)
The reaction can be slowed with control rods, which stops/minimizes the heat from being generated. The previously generated heat still needs to be handled, however (by evaporation).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor
A meltdown occurs when the reaction can't be slowed down through normal means because the safety systems fail.
For example, Fukushima and Chernobyl:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
However, those safety systems are obviously designed expressly to prevent such a disaster. For example, control rod systems are often designed to be fall (via gravity) into the reactor in the event power fails. These failsafe systems are typically very reliable, in the absence of other external events (such as the flooding and earthquake that took place in Fukashima.)
Also, nuclear poisons (neutron absorbers) build up after the reactor is shut down. After the control rods are withdrawn it takes a few days for the poisons to be burned up and the reactor can resume power production. I think they call that poisoning out the reactor.
From the RISKS archives:
"A fail-safe system fails by failing to fail safe."
If the turbines are 50% efficient, then the heat load on the cooling towers would double, which I have to assume is WELL within design limits.
You have made me wonder about turbine overspeed and steam bypass.
Just to clarify and understand what happened, I believe right after the trip some generators all around the grid picked up the load (unless UFLS was activated) immediately (around 7:03), we can call these generators support system. Then around 7:05 batteries kicked in with 468 MW, as a support to support system.
The entire grid is a statistical system where we define the acceptable uptime.
Renewables are as good as any other energy source bringing its own fuel, just need to take the variability into account.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
Dispatchable nuclear power to complement renewables has never made sense.
For an on-line gas turbine, the time to ramp up production is the second or few needed for the automated controls to open the throttle on the "Gas IN" pipe. It's basically a natural gas-burning turboprop jet engine, with the propeller replaced by a generator. (Yes, this can be less efficient in a combined cycle plant.)
To put it another way, if you build solar between city A and city B, would you build it so it can still be fully utilized even if city A stops using any power and city B wants all of it? No, you assume city A is always going to need some power.
However, there are other ways to store energy; unfortunately, most involve converting electricity to another form of energy such as potential (gravitational) energy, like pumping water uphill or lifting heavy weights. These also have relatively little long-term environmental cost. Unfortunately, they're a bit more inefficient (but so are batteries, relative to some other forms of stored energy such as fossil fuels).
It'd be interesting if we could find some ways to convert landfills or other urban blight issues into a durable energy store without poisoning the environment.
Lithium-ion, sure, but aren't there a whole host of other battery chemistries that are basically too big / too heavy to put on vehicles but a lot cheaper so well suited for stationary storage?
Are they all still at the research phase and so currently more expensive than the decades-of-learning-curve lithium-ion?
Sodium-ion is the second largest contender, with a few pilot facilities opening in China recently, but it will be a few years before it eclipses lithium-ion.
> For several reasons, including their relative bulkiness, vanadium batteries are typically used for grid energy storage, i.e., attached to power plants/electrical grids.
VRFBs' main advantages over other types of battery:
no limit on energy capacity
can remain discharged indefinitely without damage
...
wide operating temperature range including passive cooling
long charge/discharge cycle lives: 15,000-20,000 cycles and 10–20 years.
low levelized cost: (a few tens of cents), approaching the 2016 $0.05 target stated by the United States Department of Energy and the European Commission Strategic Energy Technology Plan €0.05 target
See also NPR's story: The U.S. made a breakthrough battery discovery — then gave the technology to China https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1114964240/new-battery-techno...
None of this is accurate. I encourage you to update your mental model with recent data. Citations below for your convenience. AMA, global energy transition is my passion.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/batteries-texas-consumers-6... ("Utility Dive: Batteries saved Texas consumers $683M during 2-day January freeze: Aurora Energy Research")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919052 ("HN: China's Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601878 ("Lazard: IRA brings LCOS of 100MW, 4hr standalone BESS down as low as US$124/MWh"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35513612 ("HN: The biggest EV battery recycling plant in the US is open for business")
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-24/battery-r... | https://archive.today/OjA91 ("Bloomberg: Battery Recycling Shatters the Myth of Electric Vehicle Waste")
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost... ("Lazard: 2023 Levelized Cost Of Energy+")
https://raokonidena.substack.com/p/history-of-10000-cycles-o... ("History of 10,000 cycles or 10 year warranty for Battery Energy Storage System (BESS)")
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf ("NREL data shows BESS asset life is 15-20 years.")
https://web.archive.org/web/20240728011101/https://www.eia.g... (US EIA; gray installations are new battery storage planned for deployment over the next 12 months, June 2024 through May 2025)
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202 ("US EIA: U.S. battery storage capacity expected to nearly double in 2024")
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 ("US EIA: Solar and battery storage to make up 81% of new U.S. electric-generating capacity in 2024")
https://www.woodmac.com/blogs/energy-pulse/battery-storage-b... ("Wood Mackenzie: Battery storage begins to play a key role for US grids")
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/07/climate/batte... ("NY Times: Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricity")
Seeing what you write, it seems more like an obsession disguised to support your ideologies
"Why did the U.S. miss the battery revolution?"
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-did-the-us-miss-the-batter...
About half the comments on the article were Americans saying very similar things to your comment and denying there was a revolution to have missed, which kind of answers the question posed.
Work with the world, not against it.
Nuclear has a place depending on how you weigh specific factors in your grid design. It's zero carbon. It's hideously expensive, particularly in capex. It's generally quite reliable and its availability is mostly uncorrelated with that of solar and wind. it's modestly dispatchable - you can scale down to 60% or so in many designs. (A little lower but let's be conservative).
If you place high weight on zero carbon, nuclear is an (expensive) way to get through the night. It can work pretty well in a grid mix if your grid is large enough that the loss of one nuclear plant isn't a really big chunk of your power supply (since, obviously, you want enough redundancy to handle a certain fraction of generation failures at peak load).
Are solar+wind+batteries on a much better trajectory? Yes. But batteries are not there _yet_ for 24x7, though I think we all hope they will be in the reasonably near future.
These are your ideological premises; you don't care about creating a better world, nor are you interested in facts and problems. You only care about your vision of things and making it prevail over others.
There's no need to know anything else to make any of your comments irrelevant. It's no coincidence that you are in every nuclear discussion, asserting how much you are against it.
In fact, battery manufacture is not damaging the environment in most places where first-world people live, so perhaps they just don't care, but I think that's pretty sad.
So often, emotional thinking leads to conclusions that are opposed to reality. You really have to watch out for it, if you want good results.
In a past discussion I talked to him about how one of the important things to do was to diversify, as China has a lot of influence on the whole renewable sector (solar, batteries, etc.)
Needless to say, that's not a problem for him. For him to hope that batteries are the future is already a sure thing, without the slightest doubt.
Which means funding diverted from renewables to nuclear will prolong our fight against climate change.
False, we have 26 years to decarbonize, all the time it takes to build any number of nuclear power plants in any country in the world.
> Which means funding diverted from renewables to nuclear will prolong our fight against climate change.
We can say the same thing about renewables. Then come and tell me you are not ideological... Where is the mathematical certainty that batteries at scale will be available everywhere and for everyone by 2050? If you come from the future, prove it to me and I will agree with you.
Say 5 years for renewables.
This means that investing in nuclear will have 15 years of cumulative emissions before anything is curbed.
Meaning, even if the renewable options ends up solving only 80% of the problem it will take until somewhere 2080-90 for the “perfect” nuclear solution to have less cumulative emissions.
Even if renewables are completely unable to solve the entire problem we can invest in them and then in 2060 and still be ahead of nuclear power, and then choose it as the final solution.
Today it is simply lunacy proposed by the fossil fuel industry or people looking for the perfect solution rather than piecemeal solving the issue.
