Comment by terom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by terom | Hacker News Reader

https://www.fingrid.fi/sahkomarkkinat/sahkojarjestelman-tila... shows a roughly +1GW (~12GW -> 13GW) rise in consumed power during the first two hours after the price hitting the negative pricing floor (-500€/MWh) at 15:00. Seems like there's some consumer elasticity there, but not enough to make the grid fall over.

This is after the national grid operator planned to intervene as necessary and imposed some restrictions on trading [1], but those seem to have been lifted and the intra-day market is working (at 10× normal volumes).

> Fingrid is prepared to initiate Intraday purchases, if necessary, to ensure system security and balancing capacities concerning the non-matching situation in the Finland bidding zone after Day-ahead trades.

> Update 24.11.2023 12.:12 Market situation has normalized due to Intra day trading. Fingrid resumes normal operations. Fingrid asks BRP to manage their balance normally.

> Fingrid has closed intraday trade in directions FI>SE1 and FI>SE3 to ensure system security and balancing capacities concerning the non-matching situation in the Finland bidding zone after Day-ahead trades.

> Update: Intraday trade in direction FI>EE closed

> Update 24.11.2023 12:25 Intraday trade is open to all directions

[1] https://umm.nordpoolgroup.com/#/messages?publicationDate=all...

As a nuance, the grid falling over would not yet result from too much demand, absent other snafus. Rather you have rolling blackouts when loads get disconnected by the grid operator, or if there are failures in implementing those in a orderly way, less orderly blackouts for parts of the grid. These kinds of managed blackouts are common in some parts of the world, eg South Africa, the recent Texas situation, etc.

The frequency of the system is a clear signal about the demand/load match, and if it starts to drop more below some threshold of deviation, loads get disconnected from grid branches.

Of course there can be "interesting times" leading to cascading processes in the multiple interacting automatic failsafes, you can read up on post mortems of grid failures about what kinds of things can go wrong, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Seq... .. which is why really want to preemptively do the controlled rolling blackouts instead.

The grid falling over would result in a harder, more uncertain and lengthy "black start" process, since plants need power to restart. See eg https://practical.engineering/blog/2022/12/5/what-is-a-black...

>Seems like there's some consumer elasticity there, but not enough to make the grid fall over.

This has been widely reported as a market error, so many consumers might understand that the cheap electricity is not because there's a massive amount of electricity up for grabs but rather because some Norwegian company fucked up.

Perhaps if this was a real situation where there is actually a huge energy surplus that more consumers would actually "waste" electricity.

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