We need smart-gridness to reduce our dependency on idle fossil-burning power plants as a safety net to balance the now much less predictable grid. Strictly ecologically speaking, this seems problematic.
Increasing renewable penetration into a power system leads to:
-> reduced inertia
-> increasing Rate of Change of Frequency (RoCoF)
-> reduced time to react
If you rely entirely on manual systems to react to frequency changes on a grid with high renewable energy penetration (e.g. the Irish grid), you'd really struggle to avoid daily blackouts without decommissioning a bunch of wind farms.
It is by using such automated control schemes that countries like Ireland are able to push the limit on wind power penetration.
If I was being truly cynical, I would think that a push towards mandating manual control (rather than mandating that it is available as a fallback) is actually a way to limit growth of the renewable energy sector.
but i’d think they’d be largely automated to reduce human error?
My point was that a grid comprised of a higher percentage of nuclear wouldn't need as advanced networked feedback, as sources wouldn't be turning on and off suddenly.
Indeed there would be local digital monitoring and control with nuclear, but that's a much less risky threat vector.
There is no valid reason to make nuclear power plant controls accessible for control by internet.
Nuclear is statistically the safest form of energy in terms of deaths/kWh and waste storage is massively overblown, not even accounting for how we could be recycling that waste in new plant designs if it weren't for the fubar politics around it.
This is somewhat misleading, because the major risks are things like birth defects and cancers which are really hard to attribute to any specific cause. Not to mention that it's stochastic; we probably won't have a disaster, but if we do it ruins a huge land area at tremendous cost.
Also, this doesn't work for every country.
For example you could build an array of flywheels that charges when the frequency is above 50Hz and discharges when the frequency is below 50Hz.
No network connection necessary, and if you want to you can build it entirely analog. If all you really want is inertia and reaction time it could even be as simple as dumb three phase motors with weights.
All rotary field machines (power plant generators, phase shifters, motors) work this way and contribute stability to the grid.
These basically add inertia (i.e. dampen frequency changes), but they do not regulate frequency. That's a fundamental difference.
But really inertia is all you need because all we are trying to do here is replacing the lost inertia from replacing spinning generators with solar. The recovered inertia gives human operators the time to make phone calls to increase energy production, spinning up a pumped-hydro plant or whatever is available.
I'm not sure if frequency regulation is currently considered an ancillary service in electricity markets right now though - from what I know about NY state, only 10- and 30-minute reserve are priced.
As someone responsible for the IT systems reliability of a grid operator I have to wonder if this really is a backhanded attempt to limit to the growth of renewables.
We run load frequency control on the grid every 4 seconds to keep the grid in balance. Hard to see how that'd work with manual controls on today's complex grid.
https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-announces-...
Physical grid improvements may be as important as computational ones. More available and cheaper electricity is crucial to reducing the use of gas-powered building heat systems, which represent a large chunk of CO2 emissions: