Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

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Nuclear tripped too, just like gas, because of a pump failure in the cold.

In the 2011 cold snap, the problem was all about frozen lines like the pressure sensing line that caused a problem yesterday for the nuclear reactor. Likely similar things are causing problems for natural gas.

The answer is weatherization of all these sources. Wind turbines work great in other settings with icing wind, you just have to have the hardware for it. Just like you have to have the hardware to keep your pressure sensing lines from freezing.

We are likely to experince more events like this before a single nuclear plant could be built. And the idea of building 30GW of new nuclear, the amount of gas/coal/nuclear that was lost, is so daunting that not even China is trying to build that much nuclear, and they're pretty much the best at doing it of anyone out there.

Honestly, building 60GW more of wind and solar, and 10GW/40GWh of storage would be a lot easier and cheaper than building 30GW of nuclear. Solar delivered an extra GW when it wasn't expected, wind dropped 4GW from what was expected, and gas/coal/nuclear dropped 27GW.

Adding more wind capacity doesn't help because you still need a substitute for when it isn't windy.

As far as I can tell we still don't have reasonable grid-scale power storage and until we do increasing the ratio of intermittent generation capacity (wind, solar) to non-intermittent generation (hydro/gas/coal/nuclear) will increase the probability of not being able to meet demand at times (all other things remaining unchanged).

> 60GW more of wind and solar, and 10GW/40GWh of storage

These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled out only wind from that.

We do have reasonable grid-scale power storage, last year there were 17GW of batteries in the interconnection queue for ERCOT alone, from independent investors. The major holdup from this happening, say, 5 years ago, were ERCOT regulations that made it hard to be both a generator and a consumer on the grid. But there are huge arbitrage opportunities on ERCOT because of the huge price swings, which make it a perfect place for batteries. Other energy markets, like PJM, which have capacity markets in addition to energy markets, will also see huge amounts of batteries installed since FERC order 841 forced all grid operators to allow batteries to compete.

Other regulated utilities will only install batteries when they are forced to by their regulators. As a money-saving device, it's generally bad for utilities' profits, and it also requires them to learn something new. Far more profitable to rate-base unnecessary transmission or another natural gas plant that will never be fully used.

> These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled out only wind from that.

I wasn't trying to call out wind. I just should have said "intermittent'

17GW seems like a strange unit for storage. That should be GWh I think. So my question would be for the demand that exists right now in Texas, how long would those batteries been successful in providing power to delay the rolling blackouts?

My understanding is that batteries are mainly used in grids to react to short term demand changes and not to continuously feed energy into the grid.

Totally willing to be educated on this though. I'm not an expert.

As I got heavily downvoted a month or so ago for saying. In TX the wind backup is NG plants. The storage is really only there to cover tiny glitches, and its quite expensive. Which I why I keep pointing out that the price of wind conveniently ignores the storage costs and NG generators required to back it up.

At least part of the problem here seems to be the fact that the NG plants can't start due to lack of gas because the supply is frozen.

The other problem is of course that backing up wind with NG means that its not actually "green" anymore. Its reduced the carbon footprint, but at the growth rates in TX its only slowed the increase in CO2 output, not decreased it.

The economics are changing quickly, and storage is replacing gas plants. There are now more GW of battery backup in the pipeline than gas plants, and many multiples of solar and wind GW for each new gas GW.

https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/

Texas is experiencing the interchange first because it's one off one of the few places where independent operators can connect and undercut those who have made bad long term capital investments.

So, remind me again how much storage it takes to keep a grid going for a week? And please don't confuse GW for GWh.

There is nobody who is saying "let's fix the grid and design a system that will be reliable" in Texas. It's just people raising money to build projects that they think can make money.

Right now, there's more and more people thinking they can make money with batteries, and fewer and fewer people thinking that gas can make money on the grid.

Which, if we are to believe the hypothesis that markets make good capital allocations decisions, says that they future of the grid is battery backup, and no more gas backup.

This is a process of transition, so pointing at the current amount and saying "that's not enough" is going to be obvious.

At worst wind provided only 2% of its capacity, 40GWh would be gone in minutes, please count on TWh.

It was just an offhand number, there's already 17GW of storage in ERCOT's interconnection queue for the next few years, which is 40GWh - 70GWh. By 2035, the soonest we could expect to see a new nuclear reactor powering on, we will have many multiples of 70GWh. Not sure if TWh will every be needed for a grid that only peaks at 80GW. The cheapest solution will be a tradeoff between excess renewables capacity and storage, it will be interesting to see what the market picks for Texas.

70 GWh of battery storage would have kept the lights on for an extra 2 hours during this event - assuming the batteries themselves aren't affected by temperature. While battery storage might be nice to increase the capacity factor of a solar or wind farm it isn't going to make a difference in an event like this where a weather system moves in for a week.

The current grid took a looot longer than 2-4 years to build, and that 17GW/50GWh is just 2-4 years of replacement equipment at the very beginning of a transition. So I'm not sure why this amount of batteries needs to power the entire grid, or how that's a helpful or even interesting comparison.

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