I think your interpretation is correct. The voltage control is done at the high level of the grid, meaning the control covers bigger generation stations and major substations. Even if it’s small generator, rotating machinery, you won’t have strict voltage control other than its own AVR. The problem I see here is that we embed smaller individual generations at the lower level, where they pump the generated power to the grid at the medium voltage level. When you have majority of your generation at this level, you won’t have strict control over voltage and even frequency, I assume. I’m still digesting the report, but what I am after is whether they really neglected it and if it is not possible to do voltage control with 50% generation coming from renewable and through medium voltage level, aka lower level.
Hoping this forces universities to change their archaic PhD system, to adapt something similar to european system. Then people who really have passion for a field and want to have normal job do their research, without working for labs as a cheap labor.
This book is geared to prepare you for functional analysis in a fast pace. It won’t take you so far in applied math, engineering or ML. Considering this, not sure the title is “right”.
You can still find books that use the same approach and covers more.
Reading through comments I saw a lot of comments confusing cloud security with electrical safety of a system. Electrical protections are completely separate from communication line/ internet, has to be hard wired. As the size of plant/substation increases the automation and control system (again completely different thing from electrical protection) has its own internet system. Burning down substation, exploding transformer through solar panel is very very unrealistic.
On top of that PVs installed at homes are insignificant to cause such troubles. As the size of installation increases, you will have different connection agreement and certain requirements. You can't install 15 MW and connect through inverters that are used at home, which is 100 kW at most. Even 15 MW is insignificant change for a grid.
You're the one that seem to be missing something, we're not talking about local electrical safety, but about the global grid stability, with a hacker potentially hijacking software controlling tens of GW, spread out over many personal home installations of solar panels.
My point is hacking into home PV inverters doesn’t affect grid stability, you can’t penetrate into grid in that way. At worst we’re talking about losing power for a short time at those homes. When the demand is planned for a region you specifically exclude PV for load flow studies.
Engineering grid and PV installations acknowledge that the generation may be lost, so you are having contingency plan by means of transferring or picking the load. You're going to lose power for short time if you didn't do this properly.
Actually due to the nature of PV generation, no sun no generation, it is reckless to just rely on PV. If sun is shining that is great, there'll be generation. However, daily peak consumption coincides with less day light. So during planning the target is the extreme cases (statistically estimating demand), in other words you do load flow studies for extreme cases. This helps to see your capacity limits.
In parallel to this you should consider electric grid as a layered system. PV generation at house is the lowest level, so less impact. So when it is lost, or neighborhood or town lose PV generation it will impact nearby station, which is couple MW if not kW. So when you lose PV generation and you planned your system for extreme case, higher level of generation or substation will take control of it.
Losing GW solar does not mean you're losing that amount power in small geographical region. You have to divide that into so many small parts. Also, PV generation at GW level is too high for small region.
Hope this explanation helps. It is because how power flows, governed by rules of physics. Bottom line, if hacker wants to affect a grid they should target higher level of grid, PV panels on the rooftops will not help their cause, they are end of line.
In greater scale, meaning power plants not the PV installed at houses, these things are taken more seriously and after purchase of equipment the control and automation of plant are in your hands. For example, Woodward, ABB have products with capacity up to 0.5 MW of single inverter.
Micro inverter for each panel would be very costly. In 1 MW plant you will have around 4000 panels, communicating with that amount electronic devices would be a headache.
Those links are very informative. Can you elaborate on Ancillary Services Monitor and Energy Storage Resource Action dashboards? What’s the installed capacity that supported?
Also your original post link states event happened at 7:02 AM, your links here points to 8:05 AM. Can you explain this?
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.
I think you’re missing the point how turbine-generator works. The rpm speed has to stay the same, meaning the rotor speed doesn’t change. As long as you don’t have closed circuit you’ll waste that mechanical energy. If you meant starting from stand still position, then you’re right it takes couple minutes to pick up the load.
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.
You’re correct that the system is statistical, and it’s planned accordingly. However, we cannot omit the fact that it’s the running turbine that responds faster to the unpredictable nature of the grid. The backbone of the grid, aka the baseline plants, are extremely responsive to unpredictable nature of the grid at a greater scale, with enough amount of safety margins to bring into service under unusual circumstances. I really don’t see, at least what we have in hand rn, that happening with solar or wind. Without strong baseline you’d experience supply demand imbalance, in engineering terms frequency decay, voltage collapse.
Your comments are coming across as lacking nuance ("nuclear is the worst possible...", for example).
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.
He does not care about these arguments, what matters is that there is no room for nuclear power.
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.
> Hideously expensive and any plant announced today will not be online in time to have any material effect on 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.
About 20 years from being announced. Compare with renewables taking 1-5 years depending on if it is solar or offshore wind.
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.
These are lies you tell yourself and how you want people to see you. In a past discussion, you concluded by saying that those who support nuclear energy also support fossil fuels.
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.
Given how the rightwing conservative politics have shifted from pure climate change denial to harping nuclear as the non-solution to prolong our reliance on fossil fuels the link is clear.
Nuclear power derives its energy from the binding energy of ultra-heavy atomic nuclei, not fossil fuels. This energy can then be used to power electric cars, avoiding fossil fuel consumption. Furthermore, unlike wind and solar energy, nuclear power generation is not tied to the vagaries of weather, meaning that it doesn’t require burning millions of cubic meters of natural gas every overcast, calm day. For this reason, Russia historically was the largest single benefactor of Germany’s green euphoria: it prolongs fossil fuel reliance.
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.
My understanding engine is a device governed by laws of thermodynamics, whereas motor is based on electrodynamics.
Always thought calling car engine a motor is incorrect, shouldn’t be used interchangeably. In my experience machinery would be common name for both in engineering terms, not daily usage.
