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From the
L.A. Times:
Anybody have a spare trillion dollars?
Power struggle: Green energy versus a grid that's not ready
In part:
"By Evan Halper
December 2, 2013, 7:57 p.m.
WASHINGTON — In a sprawling complex of laboratories and futuristic gadgets in Golden, Colo., a supercomputer named Peregrine does a quadrillion calculations per second to help scientists figure out how to keep the lights on.
Peregrine was turned on this year by the U.S. Energy Department. It has the world's largest "petascale" computing capability. It is the size of a Mack truck.
Its job is to figure out how to cope with a risk from something the public generally thinks of as benign — renewable energy.
Energy officials worry a lot these days about the stability of the massive patchwork of wires, substations and algorithms that keeps electricity flowing. They rattle off several scenarios that could lead to a collapse of the power grid — a well-executed cyberattack, a freak storm, sabotage.
But as states, led by California, race to bring more wind, solar and geothermal power online, those and other forms of alternative energy have become a new source of anxiety. The problem is that renewable energy adds unprecedented levels of stress to a grid designed for the previous century."
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-grid...z2mOGJpZil
Assume the best and ask questions.
Punaweb moderator
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Very interesting, Rob. For the last two or three years our observatory at the summit and others have noticed an increasing number of power "glitches". The rise is very dramatic and very real. A small part of this was switching to remote operations, i.e., running the observatory remotely from Hilo which meant we were more vulnerable to outages, but if you take away the glitches that wouldn't have been seen by an observatory running solely at the summit, the dramatic rise is still there.
I won't name names or anything like that, but I do know someone from an organisation hoping to start running an observatory next year asked someone relatively high up at HELCO about the increasing number of glitches. The answer was not what I expected. Apparently, and allegedly, the problem is due to an increasing number of people switching to solar or other renewable means of home electricity production, and that the number of times these systems turn on and off is causing HELCO problems in providing a steady supply of electricity on the grid.
This was a surprise to me and of course I can't verify how truthful the statement was. I had assumed it was an ageing grid infrastructure that was causing the problem but it might be a lot more than that.
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If you have an older transmission system with high line loss, and a locked in baseload production unit that is close to the base line generation needs, and really old production facilities and fairly old technology...well then you have what we have on island.
Some of the fluctuations are due more to the older systems on board & is also a result of having a very OLD grid...studies done on the islands energy pointed to the line losses due to the transmission lines quite a few years ago & Jay Ignoatio agreed that is one of HELCO main problems at a public forum at Imiloa last year.
Considering HELCO has stated more than once that they want to concentrate on the delivery rather than production (most of the new power production - and most of the renewable power - on island are by IPP's, not HELCO generation...) then why do we see replacement lines along a major base load production on 130 that look no .... umm... different (or better or higher capability...take your pick on value weighted expression) than the old lines? Not to mention the WHAT on moving them less than a lane width...seems to be there SHOULD be more easement space...but I digress...
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quote:
Originally posted by TomK
Apparently, and allegedly, the problem is due to an increasing number of people switching to solar or other renewable means of home electricity production, and that the number of times these systems turn on and off is causing HELCO problems in providing a steady supply of electricity on the grid.
This was a surprise to me and of course I can't verify how truthful the statement was. I had assumed it was an ageing grid infrastructure that was causing the problem but it might be a lot more than that.
It is quite true. I was fortunate enough to have attended a presentation by a couple of HELCO engineers on the challenges that they face with the new sources of power and it isn't an encouraging situation. They showed what their demand/supply system looks like with the PV and wind added to their conventional sources and it's a mess. Before the installation of the distributed sources,their demand followed a fairly smooth - and somewhat predictable - curve as people turned on systems in the morning and operated during the day and shut things down at night. With the distributed sources, they have significant power coming on and dropping off constantly during the day - they are always chasing load and trying to combat frequency and power oscillations across the grid. As a percentage of their total supply, the variable sources are much higher than any mainland utility has had to deal with - there aren't standard protocols for dealing with these effects. We are the test-bed to sort out how to deal with distributed sources on the grid - the solar industry bitches about their limiting the input from PV, but I suspect the alternative is an even more unreliable supply and risk of complete meltdown of the system.
As far as I am concerned, HELCO's greatest failing is in not better educating the public and the political class about the difficulties in dealing with the new sources of power coming on. Utility engineers have had 100 years to develop the old grid - our politicians think we can implement a new - and much more complicated one - in a decade. Good luck with that.
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Would have been nice if they started to run fiber optic lines for future network (communications) network with all the new lines being put in on 130. I thought maybe since they were going to build a new road anyway how hard would it have been to just run all those lines underground?
That being said... Wouldn't it be nice if our appliances were "SMART" say you plugged in your refrigerator to a wireless hub. Instead of doing a manual defrost that is set on a timer... The fridge could check the grid load first before doing a defrost. Say, it could wait till it's sunny outside and instead of doing a defrost at 3AM with no sun... It could reschedule at 1PM. Same thing for hotwater heaters. They could be programmed to come on certain times of day when excess energy is being produced to capture that energy.
I think in a household it's kind hard since our demands are different than the mainland. We normally don't run heating or AC here. At least I don't. But corporations like Walmart/Target/Safeway Could talk to to the grid and decide when it needs power and could tell helco when all of it's compressors are going to kick on or off... Instead of dumping that solar energy because you have no use for it ... If you had a smart load grid you could use it when it's available.
The problem is Energy Storage. You can store a small amount in transformers but what else can you do? I suppose if you had some high effient ion batteries that could capture that load for a day ... and redistribute it when you have a full charge. Tho, even if you had a massive bank of batteries to do that you would be wasting a lot of energy to store it and redistribute it later. Maybe if Helco could build a HUGE flywheel... That could use renewable energy bits at a time and then take it back off the grid at night. But I'm not sure how much energy you could actually store with a system like that.
I find it strange the article didn't really talk about what kind of systems they using for storage.
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Yet another reason to go totally off grid where possible. Less stress on fragile infrastructure, less stress on fragile planet, no electric bill, support of local businesses who provide the technology.
life is short. enjoy it
life is short. enjoy it
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...eel-design
Found that interesting. Look Ma...No batteries!
" If the Velkess prototype can be built at the price and performance advertised, it could take a big chunk of that market, and solve the intermittency problem of renewables once and for all."
That would be good!
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How ironic, then, that our local "grid" can't seem to build out that "green energy".
http://hawaiitribune-herald.com/sections...tract.html
