Private electrical interconnections
Posted by Temlakos 3 years, 1 month ago to Technology
How would a private interconnection operate? Consider the Texas interconnection (which failed spectacularly over the weekend of 12-14 February and for several days after that). Any other electrical grid in the world has to operate with a central authority managing the "just-in-time inventory" of electrical energy. What would be required to do away with, say, the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas and its equivalents in the Eastern and Western Interconnections of the USA, the individual island connections in Hawaii, etc., etc.? What's missing? Would grid-scale storage alone, with one or (preferably) more private electrical energy storage operators competing to buy power low and sell it high, be sufficient to forestall system-wide blackouts? Do grids need to have a maximum always-on size? This discussion is open especially to electrical engineers, not just philosophers.
Are you seeking power availability? If so, a variety of solutions are available, each with a different cost/price. Put the sources and energy storage online, and pay for the premium of availability. There is little technology here, I am an engineer, and have worked in power most of my career, mostly Navy ship/submarine power; however, the technology is not fundamentally different.
One can take power from any source or storage device that is connected. The connection is the local grid. Maximizing the number of sources or storage devices that are connected increases the availability. This includes grid interconnects.
I really feel what you seek is a contracting option, not technology. A contract for higher availability that costs more, and or one's own local source (solar, generator and/or energy storage). If such contracting vehicles existed, people could pay to be minimally (or last) affected. People could alternatively pay to have their own local backup sources (at homes or municipalities).
What is confusing about all this?
Grids are designed with sources supporting the peaks with demand factors. Demand factors are statistically derived. Power companies know the relative load per household in a municipality, and as homes are brought on, generation capacity is added, in steps. The generation sources each have a cost to operate and a cost/time to startup/shutdown. Nuclear runs all the time. Hydro runs all the time. Coal runs pretty much all the time. Solar and wind run when they want to. Gas turbines are the best sources for intermittent peaks (some are called "peaking power generation systems". We used to package these for Pratt and Whitney - SwiftPack and Twin-Packs)).
Rolling outages are caused by inadequate power generation vs load. This is a decision, based on the design and spare capacity, not technology.
If you don't want an outage, have more spare capacity and have varied sources that are not subject to common failures (e.g. freezing).
Most power companies are monopolies, so I guess that is the first challenge. However, these days, competition could be offered. Just allow a private company to compete and service homes. Then you can have whatever contract you and the company can agree to.
Our local municipality (just the town) chose to go it alone. We (the town) manage our own lines, buy our power as we choose. This works a WHOLE LOT better than any of the state companies in adjacent towns. Our power is 1/2 the price ($/kW-hr) and it much more rarely goes out. One town N, S, E, W, and the grid is much less reliable and twice the cost.
As you note the state (in my case the State of MA) is far worse. The only bad thing for us is we shun the state programs for solar et al, and can't get the big, tax-funded rebates. Oh well. We have our own solar farm, right by the dump. It serves about 20% of the town load.
Moving scope to a town municipality is one step. Having your own, solar, generator and battery is the ace. We have a generator, capable of running the whole house, from propane or gasoline. We use propane for heat, hot water, stove, etc, and have a 1,000 gal tank in the ground. We haven't gotten around to solar, but I might if we put on a big garage. Payback is damn quick now.
I am unclear how practical it is, but this is one thing proponents of blockchain say it can do. They say it eliminates central management of trust. Consider a taxi company or ride sharing app. Strangers give strangers rides because the ride sharing company maintains a database of ratings of drivers and passengers and makes sure the riders pay. The company gets a big cut for maintaining the database. Supposedly blockchain can be used to maintain tamper-proof records on a peer-to-peer basis, obviating the need for the central database.
I could imagine this being applied to a smart grid, a very smart grid, where you can sell your neighbors power from your electric car battery or PV panels if the price is right, all without going through the power company. I could imagine floating prices, and you could set your furnace and other appliance not to run when prices are too high, evening out the load.
But I don’t know if this would help TX. I suspect their problem is peak to average ratio. I suspect many people use heat pumps plus electric heat there instead of gas or oil because they don’t need that much heating. On the rare occasion when more than a little heat pump (reversed A/C system) is required, everyone uses their electric heat. When I lived in FL in the 80s, the power company had a system to deal with this that could temporarily cut power from people’s HVAC, electric water heater, and pool pump, to even out demand. Despite this, when I was in Tampa in Christmas of ‘89, it hit 28F, and they had to do rolling blackouts.
I agree with your idea that some form of decentralization would help.
Hopefully, entrepreneurs will develop inexpensive solutions for this so that more people with houses can be at least somewhat independent of a grid.
Maybe grids should only be relied on for some of the power people use, but not the essential power that people rely on now.
Someone should develop devices which could turn on and off essential loads so that a house could not overdraw from an alternate source of local power when grid power was not available.
New construction should be wired with certain outlets on special circuits powered by the alternate local power if needed.
The ironic thing about solar and even wind power is that you can install your own panels and turbines. Then you can winterize those, and manage the supply.
I’m intrigued by things like blockchain, but I think they just need market price signals that cause people to produce the amount consumers demand.
This could become a common, automated practice in a short amount of time. Utilities are regulated monopolies on the idea that you can only have one power company and one set of wires. That's not true anymore.
This reminds me of the dire predictions in the mid 90s about deregulating cable companies. People could conceive it would become common to get TV through other means.
The issues that are happened in Texas are many. The Wind Turbines froze and they have a feature that keeps power going to them to protect the equipment at about 1MW for each turbine. They also had issue with valves on gas lines freezing that prevented gas flow to homes and also gas power plants, so gas provided power could not be ramped up. So, BOOM, you have lost around 50-60% of your power generation off line and power consumption going up because of the storm. I do not blame the grid operator (ERCOT) as they did an amazing job of keeping up the power available. They instituted rolling blackouts to avoid causing problems on the main power grid. When you had power, it was reliable and they kept it to vital resources, like Hospitals, Fire Stations and such. However it was not enough to keep everybody with power. As resources became available, they brought more on line. I blame the utilities as they did not "harden" their systems for winter. Things like rebuilding valves on gas lines, heaters for the pumps at natural gas pumping stations, and many other things. Not much could have been done on the wind turbines as they are usually in remote areas and are 80 to 120 feet in the air. I am sure that there will be studies and politicians will get in their hacks at the industry.
Run the electrical grid. Good lord this is the 21st century and we are racing to a dystopian Anthem.
I am looking to design a grid from which no one is in any position to exclude anyone. Ironically, a group calling itself Energy Sage is looking for "distributed" solutions to power generation and power distribution. They speak of "microgrids." Which are semi-autonomous associations of sources and loads of electricity that can, when conditions warrant, disconnect from the larger grid and work independently of it.
Anything that generates electricity is a source; anything that uses electricity is a load. I would define one thing that does not (yet) seem to have a definition in conventional discussion of microgrids: a reservoir. Which, like its counterpart in a water system, stores energy in any form. This could be electrochemical, like a lithium-ion battery or even a hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell. Or it could rely on gravity, like hanging a weight over a shaft, or building a pair or cascade of water reservoirs at different levels, with two-way pump/generators connecting them.
The simplest microgrid is a single-family residence, the householder of which manages his own sources (typically photovoltaic batteries or wind turbines; yes, someone has designed a wind turbine suitable for residential use), loads (lights, appliances, HVAC/well/septic systems), and reservoirs (typically wall-mounted batteries). An apartment complex could call itself a microgrid if it maintains sources and reservoirs to serve its own loads. Two or more complexes of any size could form a district with a microgrid to serve it.