Government power blackouts and solar PV

Ectophile

70sbudgie said:

I would suggest that anyone who has batteries investigates their ability to force export. 😉 

Unless the inverter is designed to support islanded mode, that will be difficult.  The inverter will wait for a little while between being turned on and generating, so that it can monitor the mains and synchronize itself to the grid.

In theory, you could try to synchronize it to a generator, but get it wrong and you could have an exploding generator to deal with.

70sbudgie

Ectophile said:

70sbudgie said:

I would suggest that anyone who has batteries investigates their ability to force export. 😉 

Unless the inverter is designed to support islanded mode, that will be difficult.  The inverter will wait for a little while between being turned on and generating, so that it can monitor the mains and synchronize itself to the grid.

In theory, you could try to synchronize it to a generator, but get it wrong and you could have an exploding generator to deal with.

Sorry, I didn't mean during a blackout. I meant that it will probably be quite financially lucrative if you can export between 4pm and 7pm during the winter months. Those of us with only PV will struggle to do that. 

As

ed110220 said:

Doesn't this all suggest that the forecast problem is a lack of capacity, rather than a lack of gas? Ie something separate from the current energy crisis and something that should have been foreseen well before it?

If the problem was a gas shortage, power cuts wouldn't be limited to times of highest demand.

This is a capacity issue. It isn't the first time that NG have warned of blackouts at this time of year, for the coming months. The over capacity margin has been shrinking for several years. This has a lot to do with how NG include intermittent generation (most renewables) in their calculations. The back up spare capacity is usually provided by ff generation and this year, as we all know, that has a lower certainty factor associated with it. 

As renewables / intermittent generation capacity increases, grid balancing services become more important. There have been loads of innovative trials going on for these from voltage regulation to demand side management (commercial and now seemingly domestic) to different storage / battery materials (cryogenic, sand, iron, pumped hydro is back). Even the current scare mongering is a sort of demand side management - if everyone expects blackouts, hopefully enough people will change their behaviours and usage patterns, so blackouts become less likely. 

I know I am an eternal optimist at heart, and although I am doing what I can to personally mitigate against the risks, I don't believe we will actually see planned blackouts. (And the tree hugger in me is really pleased that strong positive action is actually happening to become less reliant on fossil fuels.)

ispookie666

I wonder if the difficulty in predicting demand load is partly fed by domestic Micro generations, ASHP etc? 

QrizB

ispookie666 said:

I wonder if the difficulty in predicting demand load is partly fed by domestic Micro generations, ASHP etc? 

That seems unlikely. There isn't enough of it.

70sbudgie

As demonstrated by the first 2020 lockdown, industry accounts for about 20% of electricity consumption. 

I don't think the difficulty is in predicting the demand load, I think the difficulty is that renewable energy is intermittent. Currently, the only thing that can be done if the wind doesn't blow, is to burn fossil fuels.