Australia: People Paid to Not Export Solar - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 01:27:24 am
content: The inevitable problem when you have too much solar power on the grid.https://onestepoffthegrid.com.au/how-one-state-is-flipping-the-sun-tax-and-offering-to-pay-households-to-dial-down-solar/Quote

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 03:15:56 am
content: Texas has the same problem occasionally with wind power, resulting in negative electricity prices on the market so people get paid to consume electricity. This situation may be caused or made worse by statute or regulation which subsidizes green energy sources.I suspect one of the requirements to become a politician is to be ignorant of economics.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 03:34:05 am
content: The solution is to provide incentives to use excess renewable energy as it's being produced, especially for customers without any on site. It won't take that many running their HVAC and/or water heaters full blast to use up the excess.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 03:52:55 am
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on April 22, 2025, 03:34:05 amThat's literally what they aredoing[going to do?]... negative cost of electricity you get "paid" to use power. People with heat pump hot water, battery system, electric vehicle etc. with the equipment to turn on and off already subsidise their electricity bill.Screenshots from local facebook group.Edit: I think i misread the post I scrolled past. A quick search on negative energy prices in Australia. Not sure how it works with consumer level users...Quote from: AEMO, 20 Jan 2025-https://aemo.com.au/newsroom/media-release/national-electricity-market-hits-new-demand-and-renewable-energy-records-in-december-quarterA short article from Australian energy council about negative energy prices in Australiahttps://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/negative-prices-and-revenues-in-the-nem-over-the-past-decade/Edit2: looks like negative rates have been available to consumers since 2023 at least via a wholesale to consumer service like Amber."Amber Electric Review: My First Six Months"https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/amber-for-batteries-review/"What is a negative wholesale price?"https://help.amber.com.au/hc/en-us/articles/360037084672

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 04:23:59 am
content: I can't use Amber with my battery, it's not compatible.If there is a provider who will give me zero cost electricity during the day I'll switch.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 04:30:26 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 04:23:59 amWhat batteries did you have again? I'm only just learning about amber and all this consumer VPP stuff. Their compatibility list looks pretty decent, have you checked for compatibility recently?https://help.amber.com.au/hc/en-us/articles/10015835768845-Which-batteries-are-compatible-with-SmartShift

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 04:34:30 am
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 04:30:26 amAERL, aussie brand. The owner is an EEVblog viewer.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 04:42:50 am
content: Ah yep, found the video...Have you looked at reposit? I think they have their own gateway thingo.Seems like a major negative going into the future if AERL is incompatible with these VPP's APIs.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 05:15:37 am
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 04:42:50 amNever heard of them."Reposit works with leading manufacturers of the equipment we sell and install to unlock its full potential."So I doubt they'll support my AERL system.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 05:18:02 am
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 04:42:50 amNot super important, just would be nice to have the option. My 25kWh battery already struggles to power my own house needs on bad days, will only get worse as we approach winter. So it's not like I have oodles to feed back into the grid.My bill is already just the connection fee, and maybe 2kWh/day on average excess usage.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 05:32:42 am
content: Saying that there is "too much solar" is misleading, it is wrong in the exact same way as saying "too much nuclear" or "too much coal" or "too much wind power" or whatever. In a grid, production and consumption must match all the time, and both consumption and production vary a lot by the very nature.It would be massively alarming if there never was "too much solar" - it would signify serious shortage of production.Saying there is too much solar is like saying there is too much money on your bank account if it's more than zero.In other words, atsome momentsthere is excess production, and at other moments, that same production is extremely valuable.There is nothing new in any of this, just that some homeowners thought that grid/electricity companies would be willing to buy any amount of their production, any time. This has never been true with any other form of energy production either.What is different is that distributed small scale production needs different types of marketplaces and automation. If you have, say, a 200MW coal plant, you are traditionally having a control room with a trading desk and possibly inefficient information systems added during the decades. That's not going to work for 20000 * 10kW plants.Stopping artificial subsidies and revealing the true market finally drives the development of the suitable automation. It's not rocket science. Just expose the true hourly (or 15-minute, whatever) market prices, and make the automation self-use the production whenever possible and once self-use options run out, just limit the inverter to not produce on negative price.With more realistic average compensation for PV production sold to grid, payback calculations of PV investment of course change. Then again, PV panels and inverters are cheaper than ever.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 06:16:35 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 22, 2025, 05:32:42 amErr, it's becoming such a serious problem that wholesale prices are going negative almost daily, begging people to take the power for the stability of the grid.This is why there are government programs to try and solve it. If it wasn't causing a problem then there would be nothing to solve, export as much as you want.If there is too much solar on the grid at any point then the grid can collapse, it's a real risk.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 07:00:40 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 06:16:35 amOf course the price needs to go negative, how else would it have any incentive to reduce production and/or increase consumption?? It needs to go negative enough to motivate producers to add the necessary automation to reduce production, or consumers of electricity to increase their consumption. Priceisthe feedback loop output parameter and it needs enough gain to operate.It is not "serious", and it is not a problem, even if yellow media tells you so. It is free market operating under normal market rules that are as old as the human kind itself. During negative prices, don't generate; consume!And if it's negative significant % of time, then clearly it's a signal you have enough production compared to consumption: do not invest in building more production! If you want PV, get a small system which you can easily self-use.To see how well your energy system operates, look at the actual results:* Are you having power quality issues, grid collapse "close calls",* What is youraverageenergy price you are paying? Is it expensive or cheap on average? Peaks don't matter.For example in Nordic countries we have very cheap electricity and very reliable grid, yet media and politicians play "we have a problem and need to do something" cards all the time. And what do they have to suggest? Things straight out of communism like fixed prices for consumers and producers, and we know very well how that is going to work (how difficult it is to regulate fixed prices outside of free market so that it does not lead to serious over- or underproduction).QuoteThe last thing we need is government panicking and doing random, probably detrimental stuff. Governments areexcellentat inventing "problems" and "solving" them.We who operate in energy markets and grid stabilization are horrified every time we see politicians open their mouths about "problems" of energy markets / power systems.Mandating some simple open interfaces for things like solar and battery inverters, enabling innovation and the free market solving its own problems, would be optimal, but I'm afraid politicians and governments don't operate like that.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 07:21:07 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 22, 2025, 07:00:40 amOf course, I never said otherwise, the negative price is an indicator that more demand is needed to offset the ever rising solar out, and if that demand can't be found and the solar keep increasing, then the grid is at risk of failure.The utilities have said this and warned the public many times about this possibility.QuoteThe warnings come direct from the energy utility companies operating the grid.QuoteNo shit, but tell that to the millions who keep installing their new cheap Chinese home solar systems.QuoteThey have beenwarned by the utilities companies themselvesthat the grid is at risk of collapse due to excessive solar, so the government is acting and looking at programs to solve this.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 07:26:30 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 07:21:07 amOh, but that one is easy. Just mandate enabling the Hz control available on every inverter*. Manufacturers understood this need for over a decade ago. And they have exhaustive list of national grid code options, just for purposes like this. It's a solved problem. If you are in the phase of having "what should we do??" discussions about it, it seems your political system is dysfunctional and broken.This is guessing, but probably the whole problem is made by the politicians, it is well possible theyforbidthe frequency control earlier to create the problem they are now "solving", this has happened before.*) some older installs might not be feasible to update, but there is no need to update them all. Changing the grid code settings for new installs, and those behind manufacturer's cloud services, is likely more than enough

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 08:50:34 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 05:15:37 amYeah reposit were just someone in my periphery I'd heard of. Amber honestly seems much more "legit"

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 09:06:54 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 05:18:02 amMaybe not "mandatory" into the future but I think it will be very important considering bigger picture grid stabilisation, flattening the duck curve needs as we get higher renewables mix, especially with the current barriers to getting wind in place limiting the diversity of energy sources. The opportunity cost of not being able to participate in getting literally paid take power off the grid will be too much.Even now you say your 25kWh battery struggles to supply your daily household needs... so you have it running well below 100% charge regularly. Having it be connected to a VPP API and programmed to take power from the grid means you can getpaidto fill up that available capacity or at the very take least advantage by filling up when the price is at a minimum.API connected controllers for grid connected solar inverters on the other hand will certainly be amustas is evident by the increasingly occurring negative feed in tariffs. It may be made legislation that new installations need to have VPP connected inverters (I'm assuming it isn't already). Also possible existing installations are effectively forced to retrofit already due to getting slammed by negative feed in tariffs without retrofitting being legislated.Edit: Even if going with a retailer instead of wholesale spot price directly, I would think retailers will start requiring customers to retrofit VPP controls to their solar or just retrofit it for them.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 09:07:28 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 06:16:35 amThere is no such technical problem as "too much solar".Every inverter sold limits the output voltage to the specification of the grid. Wires work with Ohm's law, when you generate current, the voltage will increase. And with the voltage increases enough, the inverter is shut off. The grid has enough capacity to carry all the power generated by the solar panels, or it will automatically shut down inverters. Again, this is guaranteed by Ohm's law.There is afinancialissue with the generation of solar power. Power's price is set on the day-ahead market, and they have bad algorithms and lack of talent, and bad financial incentives to predict solar generation accurately, a day ahead. Meaning that there is often times they undersell solar. And when more solar generation comes in, on the intraday market, the price becomes negative.The solution isnotshutting down solar. The solution would be to reform the energy market. But there are huge industrial giants with disposable lobbying money on one side, and millions of disorganized people on the other side of this table.I've seen reports where the Belgian government agencies with their infinite wisdom cut incentives to solar, and kept on doing it for coal power. People were really pissed of by that. And this is happening everywhere.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 09:10:31 am
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 22, 2025, 09:07:28 amI'm gonna let someone else unpack all this...

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 09:38:30 am
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 09:10:31 amYet, while inaccurate in some details (e.g. talking about voltage when it should talk about frequency; voltage regulation is for local control, frequency for grid-level control, and inverters implement both), it got the big picture right.Ineverygrid system, there is always more production capability than consumption. It's guaranteed; because if production < consumption, grid will collapse. Therefore you always need more production capability than consumption. And as such, even saying that there is "too much" of something is just absolutely ridiculous. There can't be. There is no upper limit - from grid stability viewpoint.Now, production needs to becontrolled, but this is a different thing from it existing. And there's absolutely nothing new here. Production (most of it; some can freeload) has been controllable since the start. Because grid stability is based on the two trivially simple principles:At any point in time,Realized consumption = realized production,and to be able to satisfy this,Maximum possible production > realized consumptionThis "control" is distributed and based on the grid frequency.Inertiain grid slows down changes in frequency, so that control loops don't need to be infinitely fast.PV is no special. Well it is in the sense that some of the first inverters did not have proper frequency control, but then again it was so niche it didn't matter. Now PV has frequency control just like any other production. All that is needed from the power system (which unfortunately is always under some kind of political control):* Not forbid the control (sounds absolutely ridiculous, but apparently needs to be said out loud),* Mandate it,* Follow the grid stability and reasses default parameters every year or soThis is one of the simplest things to do. If a society fails to do this and their grid collapses, they deserved it.All of this is really like saying "we have too much water", when the issue is that someone removed a mandatory pressure regulator switch from a pump and it runs causing overpressure and bursting pipes.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 09:42:11 am
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 09:06:54 amYes, but it's not supported, so I don't have the option really. I've got what I've got and just have to use it as best I can.If I can get a plan that has a known fixed time window for a really low rate, then I can program the Deye inverter to charge the battery at the full 5kW during those hours. Although it will use the sun first if there is some.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 09:43:46 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 22, 2025, 09:38:30 amI'm not going to play word semantics with you, I'm out.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 09:48:39 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 09:43:46 amIt's not semantics, it's an important distinction. You are mixing up important concepts:* Economics of buying and operating a PV plant,* Grid stabilityand* Amount of production capacity, vs.* Actual production powerMixing these concepts willy-nilly is the major source of poor decisions. You chose to introduce wrong ideas and then run away behind some "I won't discuss this with you" when corrected. Quite childish.In case you didn't get it: installing 100000000GW of solar does not collapse the grid, unless instructed and programmed to do so. The inverter will just not produce more than is needed by the loads in the grid. Now it sure will compete with others and there will be some who don't like it, and instead prefer fearmongering and misunderstandings.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:00:27 am
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 22, 2025, 09:07:28 amLimiting the output voltage to the specification of the grid is not enough. Under adverse conditions, loads somewhere between the consumer's solar generator and the utility power plants, or behind the consumer's solar generator, may have their line voltage increase above the voltage specification because the distribution was designed with a specific load dependent voltage drop in mind. The impedance of the power distribution network may be too high to support uncontrolled sources.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:07:30 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 01:27:24 amThat's not "too much solar power". It is "more solar power than we can use on some occasions", something that also happens with other energy sources.Overcapacity is good, because it implies that solar power becoming like other power sources and beingdispatchable. In other words, it can be turned on when it can be used and not turned on when it isn't used. It is also highly technically desirable to have grid-scale energy storage, so that "otherwise unused" generation capacity can be "banked" for later use. Currently the only reasonable grid-scale storage is pumped storage hydroelectric.Everything else is economics.A particular sticking point how to determine the price of electricity from plant that isn't being used at this moment - butwillbe required more or less rarely. For every GW of non-dispatchable "clean green" energy plant that is installed, the amount of dispatchable "non-green polluting" plant that can be decomissioned is 0GW (zero). How should that be accounted (financial sense) for?

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:11:49 am
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 22, 2025, 10:00:27 amAlmost always the grid is a tree, through, with impedance rising coming close to leafs. It is true that distribution transformers are set to output higher than nominal voltage (asymmetrically) so that minimum voltage can be maintained in all leaves, but this is normally in the last branch. If you insert production in the leaves, the highest voltages willalwaysbe at the production, and sensing it locally, like every inverter does, then suffices.I can see that in theory, you could have an upstream link seriously undersized and adjusted to higher than nominal voltage, and now if a lower-level branch is less undersized and has relatively smaller impedance it could raise the upper level branch voltage more than it raises its own voltage. But is there any report of anything like this ever happening in real life? Because normally the deeper you go in the tree, the sturdier the branches.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:12:23 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 22, 2025, 09:48:39 amThe actual grid supply stability problem comes fromminimal loadcaused by the excess solar.When you have an overabunance of solar on the grid then it impacts grid stability due to the spinny spinny generators not having enough base minimal load. It screws things up.The AEMO generates reports on this issue and wants more powers in various states to help control the problem before the gird collapses.https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/learn/fact-sheets/2024/fact-sheetminimum-system-load.pdfhttps://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/der/managing-minimum-system-load/supporting-secure-operation-with-high-levels-of-distributed-resources-q4-2024.pdf?la=enhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-02/aemo-demands-emergency-backstop-to-switch-off-solar/104670332It's very real problem that is trying to be solved by our energy companies and governments, and it IS caused by the excessive solar we have installed in this country. I'm not making this shit up.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:21:36 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 22, 2025, 10:07:30 amYes. Overcapacity in PV also means that you have more power available during cloudier days, or during winter. Of course, theaverage monetary valueof electricity goes down with more capacity, applying to any type of power generation. This value reduction means that any incremental energy production must be more and more economically efficient, thecost of producing1MWh must go down with its sales price going down.Finally, at the point when it makes no financial sense to build more production, we are at the equilibrium of having "enough" production. Also at that point, people can enjoy pretty cheap electricity. Not free-of-cost on average, because it always costssomethingto produce - again on average.Alarmist media of course keeps clickbaiting, and energy pricing makes excellent headlines. 30c/kWh? Too expensive! 0c/kWh? Too cheap!

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:23:24 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 22, 2025, 09:38:30 amThe thing is to what extent can you practically rely on inverters with frequency/phase control to keep the grid running? You can probably try legislate/standardise a frequency deviation vs allowed feed-in curve but to what extent do you allow people to feed-in? The curve must cross zero and be negative at some point or else it has potential to just drift off into infinity away from the set point. Obviously you can have hard shut off points but everyone doing an emergency shut off the moment the grid trips a certain point not desirable. (Command economies often have a lot of issues...) Having diversity and wiggle room in terms of generators is a good strategy from reliability perspective.Until we get energy storage systems up to the point we can cover the grid though an entire low generation event (not sure the proper jargon?) due to wind and solar variability, we will alsoneed"baseline" generators such as gas turbine, nuclear, geothermal, etc. These are "real inertia" sources but also not capable of instantaneous reaction to grid variability, gas turbines can be fired up and turned off relatively quickly but anything using steam turbines is going to take much longer to adjust. There needs to be a degree of prediction and means of curtailing (preferably in a controlled manner) as the grid drifts from the setpoint towards emergency cut off points. Emergency shut off in these examples is much more costly and potentially damaging than simply turning of an inverter.The currently implemented and planned solution is this market based system. As the system drifts further from the setpoint, price decreases to encourage producers to switch off or start to reduce their output. As that drifts even further, prices go negative to enable storage of surplus production. If the pricing function is not aggressive enough then you risk tripping the emergency shutoff points. Using a prescribed, predetermined price function would lead to the usual command economy issues with the complexity of such system and constantly changing contexts (both economic and environmental) its pretty much guaranteed to bankrupt producers at some point. Might as well just have a fully nationalised grid...Too much production means exactly that. There is too much energy being produced and fed into the grid to the point there is a negative energy price in order to curtail production and encourage consumption/storage.I think what you're saying more accurately is you can never have too much productioncapacitywhich even then isn't exactly true because having large amounts of capital outlay sitting around doing nothing is never a great thing especially if it goes beyond spare capacity for a "rainy day" (both literally and metaphorically).Really the problem already has a solution... its just taking time for it to be commercially and widely implemented. In the mean time unsavvy consumers will pay the price. A win for industry and their lobbyists??

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:31:34 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 22, 2025, 10:07:30 amQuote from: Siwastaja on April 22, 2025, 10:21:36 amI feel like Siwastaja and tggzzz are talking about a related but separate topic on the side of government policy and national energy security with relation to renewables adoption particularly into the future and long term...where as Dave is talking about themacro economic impacts (particularly on consumers) of these policies and directions in the current day.Edit: To me, I think there is mainly a short fall between the long term "fully renewable grid" vision and the current energy mix, particularly in terms of ESS. As a result we are seeing some... market "weirdness" which is also impacting consumers. If things go "according to theory" this shouldeventuallywork itself out with the invisible hand of the capitalist market and we will get cheaper and fully green energy... eventually...This transition is probably something more worthy of discussion.Edit2: I meant micro economic impacts not macro but there are also macro economic impacts with the function of the energy market and suppliers currently and in the short term.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:32:51 am
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 22, 2025, 10:00:27 amBut that's not what happens. You cannot push more current through a cable without increasing the voltage. And cables work both ways exactly the same. In fact residential installations already are seriously limited in their export capabilities.The system was designed to go from power plant to customers, one direction. The transformers were selected with the taps to go from ~10KV to 230V (or 110V or whatever) by going a bit above the nominal voltage, so if the customers use more power, it's still within the limits. You have feed lines, if you are connected closer to the transformer, your voltage is typically higher than nominal.Solar installations start. The current starts going the other way. The high voltage increases even more, and the distribution of voltages for customers reverse. Whoever is further away from the transformer, the voltage is higher, their inverter shuts down first. It's really that simple. If all your voltage sources are within the limits of the network, you cannot have higher voltage than specifications.Their entire claim of too much solar is just nonsensical. It's equivalent to claiming that there is too much current "pushed into" the grid and it has nowhere to go.Hallo, Kirchhoff's Current law? Never heard of it.When I was working at a company, trading renewable electricity, we looked at billion+ of data points. You have that many, if you have thousands of customers, each sending electricity usage every 15 minutes. You get 35K data point per customer per year. We could predict accurately who's inverter was export limited. I think about 5% the installations were loosing more than 150 EUR capacity per year due to this. We are talking millions of EURs overall.The distribution service operators response: Let's do nothing, not our problem.OK, so we can turn hat excess into generating cos-phi, reducing the need for doing that elsewhere: No, we don't want to pay customers more for such thing.There are better control methods than voltage alone, it's not really a control method. But it ensures that solar can never generate more than the grid can handle. And it makes their claim bullshit.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:35:00 am
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 22, 2025, 10:32:51 amSomebody needs to go back to school and relearn AC basics

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:40:18 am
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 10:35:00 amI'll reply the way you do, OK?"Haha you dumb, I'm smart, I'm too good to write a reply"Honestly the only thing I regret was clicking to seeing your post again. I have to stop doing that.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:43:02 am
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 22, 2025, 10:40:18 amIm terribly sorry for upsetting you.Does this help?https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/alternating-current/chpt-11/true-reactive-and-apparent-power/https://resources.pcb.cadence.com/blog/2020-use-the-phase-angle-formula-to-understand-power-deliveryEdit: I forgot he had me blockedcan't say Im particularly happy about an established community member just coming in demonstrating a lack of understanding in fundamental electrical principles and trying to use technical jargon based on that misunderstanding to prove their opinion.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:45:19 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 10:12:23 amOh yeah. Lack of inertia, and lack of start-from-blackout capability. Most solar inverters currently sold indeed can't do those. They could be designed so, though, but it's not the only way.It's not like adding PV somehow is removing inertia on its own. No, shutting down rotating machines is another decision. You could be keeping running those turbines as pure energy storage devices (to maintain inertia), and it's not like some weird new idea, those turbines exist anyway for energy production during night time and winter when the sun is not shining. Keep them rotating to maintain inertia, and keep them operational, even if not currently fed with fuel, for emergency reserve.You just need to put a price tag on these features; have a market that operates on the needs. For example we are participating on Frequency Reserve Containment markets here, basically controlling distributed batteries within seconds of frequency deviations. There are other markets for even faster responses and maintaining inertia. The free market will then automagically find the optimum way of implementation: if it is running existing synchronous machines for inertia, or maybe batteries.It's a fallacy that having more PV power forces you to shut down existing infrastructure. But yes, in the end engineering is reactive. Maybe humans are incapable of planning ahead and instead shoot themselves to feet and then get their shit together and fix what they broke. Maybe you guys will see the "Frequency Containment Reserve = a lot of money to everyone" mass psychosis one day, too. But that sure is working, and everyone's now building their frequency containment reserve systems here.

author: BadeBhaiya
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:47:39 am
content: Controlled loads would fix this problem for the most part. The excess solar power is just begging to be utilised for heating water, charging EVs and other bulk consumptionAnother issue though with "too much" solar power is that during the day, the load on fossil fuel power plants is minimal, which leads them to tone down their generation. This is a problem because these power plants are slow to adapt to transient load changes, so the grid often goes down in the evening when solar power (remember, this is several thousands of MWs of power) rapidly drops to zero, so the power plants are forced to quickly ramp up production (which they struggle to do).To avoid this, power plants often just work at a higher capacity during the day even when the demand is low just so that evening solar drop is less severe. Imagine wasting energy and more importantly polluting the entire day so that the grid can be stable. I often get 250V on the supposed 230V mains during the day.Solar power has no flywheel effect, compared to turbine driven power plants so any load transient (if a load suddenly appears or disappears) will affect the stability of the grid just because solar cannot absorb or dissipate any extra or insufficient power, unlike turbines.I hear that actual flywheel based energy storage solutions are seeing interest. Basically massively heavy flywheels made of cement or whatever are spun up when there is an excess of power and when there is not enough of it, the flywheel supplies the power from the stored energy. A physical capacitor for the grid, if you will.I find this solution quite hillariousfor whatever reason but if it works, good going.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:48:19 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 22, 2025, 10:45:19 amYeah this is the "problem" hence the result of negative electricity prices and consumers now "losing" from installing solar...

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 10:53:39 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 05:18:02 amJust out of interest, what ratio of panel generation : battery do you have (or anyone else who wants to comment)? I'm currently looking at adding more panels (as opposed to more battery) because with a year of data now available the chokepoint is not enough production during stretches of rain/heavy cloud during winter.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:03:06 am
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 10:35:00 amAgain to be fair, if you replace "currents start going the other way" with "power starts going the other way", then that message is again pretty much spot-on. Points of productions will have the highest voltages due to Kirchoff laws mentioned, and they work exactly the same for DC or AC distribution. (You can add a little bit of extra leeway by adjusting the PF setting of the inverter, though.)Now the exception would be some very weird corner case where an intermediate high-voltage link has (relatively) larger impedance than the final leg of distribution. When transformers are added, it's then two or more separately controlled regions of voltage, so if one segment has 10% voltage over the nominal, the other one can have 15%, if it has baseline voltage set at higher. tszaboo's analysis misses that, but I'm unsure how common that would be. I hear about the idea for the first time now.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:03:31 am
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 10:43:02 amWhich part of my post you think "misunderstands" apparent power?

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:11:20 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 22, 2025, 10:45:19 amIt doesn't matter if you think it's a fallacy, that'swhat is happening here, and it's a fact confirmed by our grid operator the AEMO. There is an oversupply of solar on our grid and it's a real problem that needs to be solved in this country. They have warned the government and consumers that the grid is at risk due to excess solar.Our current goverment is using the federal election as an opportunity to push for a million home storage batteries at the cost of billions. Not only to reduce our high electricity prices as an election vote ploy, but also because it's one of the recommend solutions for the solar grid stability problem.https://alp.org.au/news/labor-to-deliver-one-million-energy-bill-busting-batteries/

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:17:27 am
content: The huge home solar uptake in the country (the largest uptake in the world) has also caused us another problem, namely the financial viability of nuclear energy here.With so much excess solar it makes the viability of nuclear base load energy sketchy at best, so people are having a hard time making the payback calculations work, and that means weak political support.The opposition party have proposed nuclear, but the cost and payback is so laughable that it's almost become a political meme at this point.In effect, we have kind of cornered outselves into a battery solution instead of nuclear.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:19:26 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 11:17:27 amYep, I think this situation is a bit easier to understand if you have more awareness of the (unique?) circumstances of the context in Australia.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:21:02 am
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 10:48:19 amThe issue is overly optimistic expectations. One thing I have learned about nearly every energy-related tech is none of them is ever a goldmine. Adding more insulation to your house? Heatpumps? EV? Solar panels? Batteries? Frequency containment reserve markets?Allof them makes sense, a lot of sense. And always there is some sort of mass psychosis where people believe everything salesmen say to them, trust they are making big savings (or even earning moneyz directly to their bank accounts), act by masses, even causing the tip of supply vs. demand such that the already expensive thing getseven more expensiveand even less profitable.e.g. here:Air-to-water heatpumps typical turn-key cost 8000 EUR -> 15000 EUR in 2020.Typical PV turn-key installation 6000EUR -> 10000EUR in 2022.EV prices +10000 EUR in 2023 then back -10000EUR half a year later.In 2024 the battery frenzy which allowed us to do some successful business to optimize these PV-storage-only batteries for spot price. Of course the batteriesstillwon't ever pay for themselves given typical cost structure of consumer sales, but hey, at least the payback is in the range of 20 years instead of 200 years with our box.And now suddenly the FCR frenzy is going here. It will pass in probably less than half a year. But currently no one wants to buy anything else than FCR batteries.So yeah. If you bought a PV system, you are now faced with the reality that sometimes you export with negative price and that "sometimes" might be more than just one isolated hour every now and then, it might be large part of summer time. Still, look at how much you save by whatever amount you can self-use, and export during non-zero prices. Oversized system still allows you to produce for your own needs during cloudy or winter weather. It is the expectation of always getting good compensation of your goods that was wrong and you just have to accept that. It is actually quite obvious in the end: if something is in excess, it does not have much value. Gold is valuable, sand is cheaper.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:23:30 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 11:11:20 amAt home batteries are a very costly solution to this problem.I understand why people do it today. I understand why you would install one.But it cannot work long term. If something is profitable to do at home, it's more profitable to do on an industrial scale. Because you get bigger inverters and can rotate battery packs, and make it more affordable.And then there is the taxation. When you import and export electricity, you get taxed. When you do this on industrial scale, there is going to be government contracts, incentives and the fact that this happens as a company (who can subtract cost from profit). So once grid scale batteries are connected, and huge P2G plants are built, the math will change substantially. Not only will negative prices disappear, it will also make electricity cheaper during the day. Because you can just turn on an industrial 500MW Power to gas plant when the sun shines. And make H2 or CH4 for practically free.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:24:41 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 22, 2025, 11:21:02 amYou canalwayshave too much of a good thing I guess

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:27:10 am
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 11:19:26 amYes, we are in the very unique position of having not only the largest home solar uptake in the world (IIRC 40%+ of homes have solar now), but also a famously sunny country with some of the worlds highest solar insolation. So we get the double whammy on good days. Which is great of course, if grid stability wasn't a problem, and you also didn't have the one of the biggest deposits of uranium in the world whcih would otherwise make nuclear a no-brainer.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:28:56 am
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 22, 2025, 11:23:30 amBut a GREAT short term political solution. And, well, you know what politiicans like...

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:30:18 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 11:27:10 amIf only we had the raw materials available to support the solutionsI joke but Australia's propensity to export our natural resources undertaxed with basically zero domestic value add has always been farcical

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:31:40 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 11:28:56 amStill better than the plan proposed by the opposition

author: dietert1
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:48:59 am
content: In Sao Paulo we don't get paid for the power we produce. The government represented by ENEL allows us to feed the grid, but they have remote control of each and every installation, even small ones like ours. Our solar generator is for 4 KW and our sun is strong! We did not notice yet any remote turn-off, but it may happen at any time. ENEL measure production and consumption and if we consume less we only pay for their counter and grid.The solar generator is made such as to stop during a grid power outage. Until now we have a gasoline generator to cover power outages and a little no-break to keep WLAN and some lab equipment running, but i think we will soon start building a battery storage.I looked into it and already found pretty interesting solutions, where you start buying the converter plus some minimal battery. The converter is quite strong, so one can add more batteries later. There are many interesting offers for LiFePo4 batteries (safer).Regards, Dieter

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:59:34 am
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 11:24:41 amI'm still waiting for my free power to chill my free beer...

author: mikeselectricstuff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:04:34 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 11:27:10 amI wonder if you took the entire cost of nuclear, including decommissioning, and spent it on battery storage distributed at substation level, could that be a good solution?

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:12:31 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 22, 2025, 10:45:19 amExisting batteries installed a couple of years ago are designed to address the problem of lack of inertia. The batteries instantly come onstream at exactly the right phase to keep the frequency within limits.Their capacity is sufficient for that, but not for grid-scale storage.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:25:57 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 11:17:27 amThat is a reflection of the difficulty of pricing electricity from a generating plant that is only needed, say, 2% of the time. It is irrelevant whether that plant is nuke, gas, hydro, coal, etc.Commercial companies would bedelightedto be able to say the grid will have a 98% uptime. That could save them a lot of capital investment and theymightbe generous and passa proportionof that onto consumers. The companies will also attempt to slowly drift into that situation by stealth.The question is how to ensure companies are accountable for coverage for the remaining 2%. Since consumers cannot ensure that, there are three ways: jail the executives or bankrupt the companies that fail to achieve that - or have the facilities in public ownership so the politicians can be ejected.Choose carefully. e.g. in the UK, once again Centrica is decommissioning its gas storage facilities on the grounds they are "uneconomic".

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:31:45 pm
content: Quote from: mikeselectricstuff on April 22, 2025, 12:04:34 pmSee the technical characteristics of individual technologies and viability ofseveral different classesof solution:http://www.withouthotair.com/Caveat: that has an emphasis on the UK.Note: that is lauded byeverybodyfrom "Big Energy" to "Rabid Greens".If you don't like the consequences/options, then the author invites you to make your own choices -but make sure the numbers add up.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:35:15 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 22, 2025, 12:25:57 pmIn addition to spot pricing we have a fixed price contract market as well as a securities market based on in it for baseload generators.https://www.aemc.gov.au/energy-system/electricity/electricity-market/spot-and-contract-marketshttps://www.asxenergy.com.au/products/electricity_futures/asx-energy-futures-and-option.pdfGenerators get penalised if they can't met their contractual generation obligations.I believe we also have "dispatchable power" which also have contracts where they need to be able to turn on and provide when required or get penalised?

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:39:53 pm
content: Quote from: sandalcandal on April 22, 2025, 12:35:15 pmOh, we can penalise companies too. In theory. But can we penalise themsufficientlythat they willchooseto avoid the penalty?We are currently experiencing that with the UK privatised water/sewage industry. There's a long-running major scandal that they are manifestly breaking their obligations, and yet...Then add excuses about "unforseeable" "black swan" events like the disruption of energy supply due to war in small countries far away...

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:41:47 pm
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 22, 2025, 11:23:30 amGenerally very true. But there is one opposing point, and it relates to the costs of transmission of electricity, and yes, taxation. Compared to a dedicated grid-connected battery business, at home you have the advantage of havingbaseload consumptionwhich is thereanyway. When you supply that by PV or by discharging a battery, you avoid importing and exporting. Your grid connection point reads zero. As such, you avoid transmission fees, you avoid taxes. Fees based on maximum power might get actually lower if battery offers peak shaving.Can't have exactly that on a 10MW dedicated battery site. Sure, you can make deals to lower taxes, but never down to zero long-term. You will need to pay for the grid connection. At home you had that anyway, and the cost of it will either stay the same or decrease.But sure, doing back-and-forth import&export in home conditions rarely make sense. It can make sense on industrial scale.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:42:34 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 22, 2025, 12:39:53 pmYep... always a problem for the regulator...A through understanding of the market an economics is required in addition to resistance from lobbyists...

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:44:37 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 22, 2025, 12:41:47 pmDefinitely not the case

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:47:23 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 09:42:11 amI don't think such a plan exists. For dynamic tariffs you'd need a provider which tells you the spot prices and then your system can decide what is the most economic thing to do (like pulling power from the grid into a battery, run whatever large load, etc). But this requires investment in automation equipment (and maintenance + setup costs), paying for access to the data and you are stuck with paying through the nose for when you can't shift a load to off-peak. IMHO this is not viable as a widespread solution; more for tinkerers who like to mess around. Another think to keep in mind is that big energy companies can buy & sell futures (like stock options) and even out the prices to a similar average level compared to having a dynamic contract. As a small consumer buying those futures (if you can) means a massive amount of extra work. At some point you have to realise your time better spend on doing something else and pay somebody to do work for you.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:54:39 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 22, 2025, 12:47:23 pmIt literally exist does with VPP companies here like reposithttps://repositpower.com/"No Electricity Bills Guaranteed For Seven Years or More." How sustainable their business model will be once they have to properly compete with large scale industrial ESS and renewable is another matter... As a conglomerator they will have the ability potentially do "big energy company" things but they might be hamstringed by differences in their underlying technical efficiency compared to more centralised industrial operations.Amber is a more hands-on solution/provider for accessing dynamic traffs as a consumerhttps://www.amber.com.au/

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 12:58:44 pm
content: Quote from: mikeselectricstuff on April 22, 2025, 12:04:34 pmYou'd need to define "good".If you want to talk about long term strategic energy independence, then no, because we have zero local battery manufacturing supply chain. Not to mention barely any local solar panel manufacturing ability.Coal, gas, and uranium on the other hand, we are kings.In any event, it looks like the party that has proposed the multi billion dollar battery subsidy for 1 million homes is going to win the election shortly, so we are about to be flooded with the cheapest home batteries that China can supply. Good news is, it should solve our grid stability problem, for now.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 01:00:31 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 22, 2025, 12:47:23 pmI think it does in certain states, but last I checked, not in NSW.

author: mikeselectricstuff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 01:02:07 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 12:58:44 pmAssuming they actually work as intended.... problem with cheapest is it's often a poor investment, and anything subsidized attracts cowboy installers.Maybe invest in a few more fire engines while they're at it.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 10:34:04 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 06:16:35 amReading straight from the speaking points of one political side.Ask yourself this:Why are open cycle gas generators running during periods of negative wholesale price?? In the absence of network constraints (since that is talking point 2 as standard rebuttal).The market is broken through a relatively complex set of overlapping rules that all suit the large scale fossil generators.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 12:06:25 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 23, 2025, 10:34:04 pmI don't read political "sides", I hate them both.It's literally our grid operator sounding the alarm:https://aemo.com.au/about/who-we-are

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 12:34:59 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 24, 2025, 12:06:25 amNon specific claims AEMO are saying something, you should be able to point to the specific quote in context rather than your editorialisation.From what you've posted I'm not convinced its something you actually understand which is why I say you're just blindly repeating some political talking point.If one of the regualtors (AEMO aren't the only one) are saying something then show us them saying it rather and expecting us to hunt through all their content to prove you right.Quoted again since you chopped it out:Quote from: Someone on April 23, 2025, 10:34:04 pmWhere is AEMO claiming that there is too much solar? ..and that will collapse the grid. Those are your added political/unsupported claims.Adding more solar will not collapse the grid, it will cause some new pricing or dispatch rules to be needed but the grid will not collapse.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 05:34:57 am
content: I went through the AEMO docs and nowhere it said there is "too much solar". Some points that I could see:* Theydohave a system in place to limit production, and have used that system, so there is no grid stability risk* Said system is very primitive though,* Said system is probably unfair, especially if it cuts inverter output power to zero for n customers (as I understood it does, hopefully I'm wrong); this also prevents them to self-use during that time, while others are still exporting. Limiting to half output power for n*2 customers would be much more fair* So they don'twantto use that system.* The grid operator seems concerned about people being unhappy with their power export limited. They need to get rid of that thinking, it's not their job. Regulating actual production to match actual consumption istheir job, dealing with investment/financial side of things is the job of producers.Clearly they want to convey the message "don't buy more PV, we have enough already".I would expect a technical person like Dave deep into technical details but he seems to be more concentrated on the simplified layman version leaflet and simplifies it even more to a clickbaity headline.What I don't really understand is why AEMO chose the more difficult way of mandating inverters behind remote control, instead of local frequency control. In reality they might want both, i.e. with local frequency control with high droop so that it will never overreact and then remote control to strengthen that up when needed, but if they could manage the more challenging one (the one with data communications), why did they not do the easier one at the same time? I'm not saying they are stupid, but would like to know why.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 06:04:24 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 24, 2025, 05:34:57 amA few points on that.Dumping 100% of solar into the grid without any soft limit/control was a low cost way to kick start solar installation (really dumb inverters) and retain the fast anti-islanding (which appears to be prioritised ahead of stability even for grid scale sites).Uncontrolled exports have been kept for far too long partly as granular billing (smart meters) is still not universal:https://www.energy.gov.au/news/100-smart-meters-2030Few residential installs have export control/limiting and it is seen as some additional extra rather than an essential component:https://support.solarquotes.com.au/hc/en-us/articles/360000030495-How-does-a-solar-export-limiter-workAlmost all solar installs in Australia have carbon credits sold from them, if they get curtailed then the carbon credits are reduced so there is still profit in producing solar energy and paying for it to go to the grid!The grid regulators are ok with more solar coming online, but at some point it will be like every other generator on the network and be required to participate in dispatch rather than blindly adding power.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 08:04:28 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 23, 2025, 10:34:04 pmThere are two markets. The day ahead market and the intraday market.You can sell electricity at 14:00 tomorrow. Imagine this:You operate a gas plant, you bid that tomorrow I'm going to sell 10MWh electricity between 14:00 and 14:15 for 0.10 AUD/kWh. Your bid gets accepted.The sun comes out, PV generates more than expected. On the intraday market the price becomes negative. Everyone who is using more electricity (on the intraday market) is getting paid for doing so, and everyone who delivers more than they bid needs to pay for that.Your gas plant still delivered 50MWh, and it got paid 1000 AUD for doing so. You would only get less money if you delivered 51MWh for some technical reasons.And because of this initiatives, like linked in the OP, some solar installation gets shut down, because of the intraday price is negative. Instead of throttling down the gas power plant.Quote from: Someone on April 24, 2025, 12:34:59 amI had university professors explaining me that if we have more than 5% renewable on the grid, it would collapse. They had pictures of collapsing windmills in powerpoint presentations. Saying that it will bring the "next dark age" where the power will be out so often.This was a while ago, and it was clearly propaganda bullshit, since we have evidence of the contrary.There is a clear pushback against renewable in the industry. What could be their motivations in your opinion?

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 09:13:18 am
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 24, 2025, 08:04:28 amSomegoodreasons will be technical, some will be commercial. There will also be some poor reasons. Some malign players (e.g. Koch brothers) will spread outright FUD. As is always the case, it is necessary to extract the good reasons and solve them, circumvent the poor reasons, and ignore the FUD.Some people, especially on forums, will make simplistic statements and make doctrinaire points. Those indicate more about the person making them than the subject itself.

author: Zucca
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 01:36:50 pm
content: Exporting energynormallydoes also implies if the grid is down your solar panels need to be turned off as well.This is the main reason I do not export anything, and during storm Helene I enjoyed my solar energy very much (even one neighbor did, he brought his fridge in my garage).Meanwhile many many others solar panels owners were grinding their teeth: with full sun the home had no power, sometimes for weeks.Oh yes I have batteries, God bless the LiFePO4.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 01:58:01 pm
content: Quote from: Zucca on April 24, 2025, 01:36:50 pmI don't get it. You sure can get battery hybrid inverters capable of off-grid operation mode, andstillcapable of exporting as well. The two features (support of off-grid and support of on-grid) are orthogonal. Can have either or both.Limiting yourself to never export sounds like waste of resources. Sometimes energy is very valuable, and you have excess with your battery already full.

author: Zucca
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 03:09:27 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 24, 2025, 01:58:01 pm99% of the installations I see around me are panels with uInverters on the back, no batteries.If grid goes off, the uInverters are required to turn off as well for safety.Moreover in my case the "upgrade" to bidiretional meter would have increased the base price/month in my bill.No thanks, I buy a bigger battery.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 03:15:35 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 06:16:35 amIt's a shame that even though Australia mandated Volt Watt controll very early, the voltage it kicks in at is still huge. They could have used Volt control with a more sensible volt watt curve.Personally I'd have left it at 100% output till 5% overvoltage, then taper to 0% output to say 8% overvoltage. Use the smart meter measurements to catch the dipshits which put a transformer on the inverter (actually being done here in my country, it's not even illegal because the regulators are idiots).PS. prices going negative is not an inherent problem. That can happen regardless of problems maintaining voltage standards and not overloading distribution.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 06:13:52 pm
content: Quote from: Zucca on April 24, 2025, 03:09:27 pmSad to hear things are so ancient for you. We are forgetting the era of non-smart or unidirectional meters because the first round was over a decade ago and now most have their second rounds of smart meters. We were lucky in that when early adopters started to get PV systems in masses, the metering infrastructure was already done.Replacements are of course free of cost because at the cost of a maybe two manual readouts, they just swap the meter and then automation takes care remotely reading and billing for the next 10 years. Meters are cheap, and electricians doing every house for the street 15 minutes each is extremely efficient if organized properly. Normal expense for the grid company, lost in the noise in their normal service fees.Getting compensated for excess PV based on actual day-ahead market (spot) price is the only option here. It works very well. Some days ago, energy was zero cost of even slightly negative, so self-used it all. Today there was shortage and price skyrocketed, so I minimized self-consumption and exported it all. And this is not some sort of utopia, this is how it operates in many modern-day countries.

author: Zucca
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 06:25:04 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 24, 2025, 06:13:52 pmIt is even a more perverse sad story to tell, my meter is a smart one and, according to the specs, it only need a register byte change to make it bidirectional.And everything is done remotely so those bastards are just pressing a button one time and then charge more every month.No thanks.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 06:29:21 pm
content: Quote from: Marco on April 24, 2025, 03:15:35 pmVoltage->power derating deals with local distribution capacity, frequency->power is needed to deal with grid-level production control. But this is also a widely out-of-box feature on inverters, see example of random Chinese specimen (Growatt).It's a simple P controller. Like the whole grid is. And because it's linear derating, it's pretty fair, there is no complete shutdown.Literally all you need to do as a society is to ask the Chinese to ship the inverters with a suitable default setting. And you can mandate those who don't have the feature implement it like their competitors. They'll do it in a week.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 06:49:43 pm
content: But frequency control makes mains synchronised clocks (including the digital ones) wander. You may not want to hear this, but the fact is that mains synchronised clocks are still sold by the thousands. So mains frequency needs to have long term stability otherwise people show up late for work. Another problem is that grids between countries are connected. You can't have one country throttle the frequency up while the other is throttling down. Again, power production excess and shortage are localised events on a continent scale. Frequency control isn't going to work either.Actually, there are two problems at play here: inbalance between production /consumption and grid congestion. There are 4 possible combinations which can occur.

author: uer166
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 07:06:03 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 24, 2025, 06:49:43 pmNot another completely made up BS problem

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 10:24:06 pm
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 24, 2025, 08:04:28 amDay ahead settlement, in Australia? As above I'll ask for some references to support that. There are secondary markets, but wholesale price is set exclusively on 5 minute settlement:https://flowpower.com.au/five-minute-settlement-explained/or go for the longer explanations from one of the regulators:https://www.aer.gov.au/documents/state-energy-market-2024-full-reportDemand and Supply are balanced at the last minute and bids are accepted in combination with price and FCAS/stability:https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/data/ancillary_services/2023/settlements-guide-to-ancillary-services-payment-and-recovery.pdf?la=enQuote from: tszaboo on April 24, 2025, 08:04:28 amThe regulators (here and in other countries) are extremely conservative in their uptake of technology. But there seems to be another component at play which is why I keep referring to politics, some posters will wilfully, forcefully, and nosily claim that renewables are not going to work:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/renewable-energy/stability-of-grids-with-a-high-percentage-of-asynchronous-sourcing/?allhttps://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/will-ac-power-distribution-become-obsolete/msg5548593/#msg5548593Why are these people taking so much effort to embarrass themselves with arguments that are trivially proven false? What is their motivation?Politics is a big part of it as enormous (and barely known) subsidies/market interventions are at play, so with the changing of a government an energy supplier can quickly change their profit/loss position. In the absence of any long term investment the grid is approaching a loss of reliability, but that fact is used by politicians (mostly of one side of politics) to create division and scapegoats for their goals by claiming specific generator types are the problem.No one seems to listen to the experts:https://www.austela.net.au/news-policy-and-research/gencost-shines-light-on-low-cost-of-solar-thermal-to-deliver-renewable-dispatchable-capacity-to-australian-energy-systemhttps://reneweconomy.com.au/gencost-doesnt-just-rule-out-nuclear-it-makes-solar-thermal-impossible-to-ignore/What? renewable energy with day scale storage and dispatch-ability, with mechanical inertia, and its cheap!! No no, don't talk about that.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 10:32:16 pm
content: Quote from: uer166 on April 24, 2025, 07:06:03 pmOh look, the same poster putting up the same proven incorrect statement (linked in post above). So we're back to politics and noise, rather than facts.Frequency control can maintain the long term time accuracy, by asking the large plants to shift their set point. Just as is done today. No change required in how the grid is operated or managed. If at some point we are looking at residential installs becoming even more dominant (unlikely) then they can be mandated to participate in that same behaviour. The smart meters are already bidirectional comms channels which can support this, or some other channel.Not to mind this thread being about Australia where there is no requirement for long term frequency accuracy:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/renewable-energy/stability-of-grids-with-a-high-percentage-of-asynchronous-sourcing/msg5575323/#msg5575323

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 06:25:18 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 24, 2025, 06:49:43 pmNNOOooooOOoOOOoo, not this again. Please go away and do something nice, take a walk, watch birds doing bird things or something.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 07:12:14 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 24, 2025, 06:49:43 pmI'd call that cycle maintenance, it's not all that relevant. A relatively small amount of "power" can synchronize a lot of free running inverters. This is a not an issue (doesn't even need any real power).I'd reserve frequency control to the inherent instantaneous frequency-power control in 50Hz motor/generator load/supplies.Classically, frequency control handles instantaneous power mismatch, then a combination of centralized and decentralized control adjusts generating power. This last part becomes harder with haphazard distribution of small generators. Generation used to be relatively well matched to load locally so even if centralized control was completely absent for a while due to one reason or another, the control still worked out.The only true control over small generation at the moment is letting voltage rise near service limits, service limits the power company is contractually obligated to keep too. If you try to run near the upper limits all the time, you will go over accidentally a lot more. Not a good option.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 07:35:08 am
content: Quote from: Marco on April 25, 2025, 07:12:14 amIt's not relevantat allbecause grid in Australia is not clock synchronized and thus not designed for grid-synchronized clocks. End of story, simple as that.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:26:26 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 24, 2025, 10:24:06 pmYou know, probably I didn't think about regional differences. I also don't think that you guys have poisonous snakes, spiders, enderman roaming the streets and other things that I only ever saw in minecraft.So you have 5 minute bidding and settlement for power? No wonder you cannot integrate a nuclear power plant into that.Energy storage in moving objects is definitely possible. Batteries as well. I'm a big advocate for P2G, Australia could become a huge exporter of CNG or LNG if you want to. In the end it's going to take a combination of these things to make energy generation long term sustainable.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:34:18 am
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 25, 2025, 08:26:26 amThe UK has 10 nukes and is building more. The UK has 30 minute settlement periodshttps://www.neso.energy/industry-information/balancing-services/tradingSo, please explain how that can be done with nukes and a 30 minute balancing period, but not with a 5 minute balancing periods.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:37:42 am
content: The nuclear power plants have near guarantuees of profitability from contracts which supercede the settlement periods, money they make bidding the spot market optimally is just gravy.Any real level of risk of non profitability and they would simply never get build ... which is the problem getting them build.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 10:04:05 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 08:34:18 amAs if you wouldn't have known that new build nuclear is off market priced:Quote from:wikipedia

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 10:13:51 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 25, 2025, 06:25:18 amYeah, as expected... Per usual MO you cancel people disagreeing with your views. I don't think this forum benefits from such bullying behaviour. Just play the ball or move on.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 10:28:02 am
content: Quote from: Marco on April 25, 2025, 07:12:14 amThere could be a a risk of spikes. Then again, inverters sold in the NL shut down at 253V (+10%-ish) and IIRC the maximum is 265V (+15% ish) so there is some margin left. And not all inverters in an area with overproduction will shut down at the exact same moment so even with a fixed voltage limit, the change the grid sees will be more gradual.In the end excess solar electricity production is a multi-facetted problem. Prices going negative is a market (economic) problem. Local overproduction due to grid congestion is an infrastructure problem.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:08:58 am
content: Quote from: nctnico link=topic=459144.msg5892734#msg5892734That was a very recently planned change and AFAIK not yet implemented, more a proof of my assertion that setting small generator cut off at delivery limits is not smart.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:15:35 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 10:04:05 amI am well aware of that, at one plant in one country.The point is more general.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:17:08 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 25, 2025, 10:28:02 amWhoever is further away from the transformer, and has higher impedance of the network shuts down first. It self balances nicely because you have thousands of generators.Or as I was saying, if you control the inverter smart, you can use the excess energy to cancel out reactive power. You need smart control for that, but more importantly some financial incentive to do so.One of my colleges was theorizing that there could be trivial changes to inverter FW and HW to cancel out reactive power even during the night with the inverters. And then you could get rid of stations like this, and have it all distributed on the network.Overall, a NB-IOT module at every inverter would be the most sensible way of controlling these. Retrofit existing ones on modbus, require them to install it in new ones.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:17:25 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 25, 2025, 10:13:51 amPlease explain (1) what you think "cancelling a person" means and (2) how he has managed to do that to you.Hint: you're wrong.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:19:05 am
content: BTW I have been thinking about what would be the best way to retrofit centralized control to inverters. By the point government starts thinking of paying people to shut it off themselves, this seems to me a realistic solution.I think you could add a relatively cheap device inline with the inverter, which adds a (resonant) impedance in series with the inverter to get it to shut off gracefully, then you can disconnect it via a relay. Avoids an abrubt shutdown. Communication could be through the low frequency power line communication already in use. Unfortunately does require an electrician housecall.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:23:00 am
content: Quote from: Marco on April 25, 2025, 11:19:05 amMost inverters have modbus interface, both ethernet and RS485.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:32:42 am
content: An official solution would likely need to be universal and not requiring reverse engineering.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:41:48 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 11:15:35 amPretty much all Nuclear generation is government backed and not free market investment. How many of those 10 plants in the UK are privately operated without market intervention? I'd be guessing none, insurance is basically impossible to obtain and costs are too high to meet market demand for electricity.UK and 10 plants was your choice, so back it up. Moving the goalposts to "oh but other countries and other situations" only makes it harder for you to prove not easier.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:49:51 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 11:41:48 amLook at the context in which I made the original statement, and don't invent strawman arguments. It is clear I was using the UK as an existence proof that nukes plus 30 minute settlement periods are entirely possible.For those with a short attention span, here's a repeat of the context...Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 08:34:18 am

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:52:11 am
content: Quote from: Marco on April 25, 2025, 11:32:42 amA decade ago we had official specifications of all the biggest 4 inverter manufacturers at the time, with APIs and whatnot to control everything on those inverters.It's not really an issue.If you want to roll out a gadget for a million inverters its really not that expensive. You could make the gadget for about 50 EUR and install it for about the same amount. For an electricity network this is peanuts.But then everyone wants to make money and they have opposite incentives.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:02:46 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on April 24, 2025, 10:24:06 pmThank goodness some people here can still understand context and think critically instead of just aggressively regurgitating what gets fed to them.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:19:48 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 11:49:51 amYou said it can work with 30 (or 5 minute) settlement, I pointed out that new entrants (not those that have already paid off their investments) are relying not on the volatile 30 minute settlement market but an off market price.I agree with tszaboo that Nuclear does not fit well to 5 or 30 minute settlement as it is much slower to respond. If exposed to short settlements then Nuclear is less profitable than slower or fully fixed markets.You claim it's all peachy and profitable, so show us how the economics work rather than just expecting us to accept your bold claim.Even the Nuclear industry are happy to acknowledge that market intervention is required:https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/united-kingdomor we can go with the relatively independent work in Gencost:https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/electricity-transition/gencostWhere nuclear simply doesnt stack up as a competitive technology, unless some externality is added in to bias that (have to get your nuclear bombs from somewhere).

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:34:10 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 12:19:48 pmMy "bold claim" is that nukes and 30 min settlement periods do work together, and that is sufficient to disprove tszaboo's contention. Evidence from the UK:that trading exists with 30 minute blocks:https://www.neso.energy/industry-information/balancing-services/tradingthat the nuke plants exist:https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statusesJob done.(Still waiting for an explanation of why 5 minutes would make a difference)

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:40:40 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 12:34:10 pmJob done in sticking to your position of moving the argument nowhere. No one is disputing that there is 30 minute settlement or that Nuclear plants exist in the UK. New build Nuclear in the UK needs off market guarantees of price, investors don't believe it can compete in the open market otherwise they'd be lining up to build more of them rather than cancelling projects part way in.You have to show that Nuclear is actually operating on the 30 minute settlement without some external force/manipulation/subsidy/etc.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:45:27 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 12:19:48 pmNuclear should never be looked at only from the profit side. Like in Hungary, Nuclear is 40% of the electricity, and its set to export day and night almost the same amount. It's a strategic investment, that takes decades to build in the current environmental protection nightmare and it might never be profitable. But you gotta do it anyway, same way as planting a walnut tree.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:48:46 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 12:40:40 pmNo, I don't.I guess, without evidence, that there is no requirement for a plant to bid. Hence when bids are announced for a 30 minute period, any plant running at full capacity simply won't bid. That would be true for nuke, wind, solar, tidal or any other part of the generating system.It would leavedispatchableplant to bid at any price it chose. ISTR that is exactly what Tesla's first battery in Australia did once, and the price it could charge paid for its installation.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:54:06 pm
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 25, 2025, 12:45:27 pmYes indeed.The core problem is that commercial markets are a very poor mechanism for ensuring such strategic investment takes place. It is often cheaper to "do a Ford Pinto" and accept small commercial penalties for not meeting obligations. The problems and costs caused to customers and society are, to use the economists' word, "externalities" - i.e. "somebody else's problem".The UK water industry scandal is an excellent example of that.It isn't confined to capital investment; companies in the UK stopped paying for apprentices because "we're not going to spend all the time/energy training them only for them to go and work for our competitors".

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:56:28 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 12:48:46 pmFeel free to enter the market if you think that is how it works. In Australia the market price is capped, so that doesnt work. Equally plants do not have to bid, but if there is a systemwide shortfall they may be obliged to operate anyway and paid a compensation determined after the fact.So we're hearing you know little to nothing about how these markets work and have been unable to substantiate your claim that UK Nuclear plants are competitively bidding in the open 30 minute settlement market.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 01:00:51 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 12:56:28 pmWhat is so difficult about the concept of nukes (and other non-dispatchable plant) stating "no bid", while other plantsdobid?I have not, and would not, make any statement about how markets in general - or Australian markets in particular - do and don't work.I merely note that nukes are (and IMHO should be) integrated within a dynamic pricing market. That's SOP in many different markets, e.g. software, construction, ...

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 01:01:29 pm
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 25, 2025, 12:45:27 pmSure, they are an important part of many countries systems. But the costs need to be clearly accounted for. Various smoke and mirror accounting practices have been used to make out like they are cost competitive with other options. Nuclear is most profitable when long term sell prices can be locked in, both over the life of the plant (investment payback), the life of the fuel load, and over the slew rate of the reactor (day ahead vs 30 minute or 5 minute).

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 01:05:00 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 01:00:51 pmThen why all this commentary in a thread about Australian electricity markets and solar power? Perhaps write some letters to your countries operators and politicians to complain about the lack of market participation by the Nuclear generators.Turing around and claiming you didn't make any statements about markets is bollocks.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 01:07:59 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 01:01:29 pmThat's what's happened with Hinkley Point C in the UK.I doubt there is any 30 minute demand pricing in the contractsand there doesn't need to be.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 01:11:44 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 01:05:00 pmI have stated markets (with nukes plus 30 minute pricing) exist, which is clearly true. Don't invent other strawman arguments.The relevance to Australia is that if X can be done in the UK then X it is not impossible to do in Australia. Whether Australianschoosetonotdo it is a separate issue.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 01:12:20 pm
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 25, 2025, 11:52:11 amI was wrong any way, there is an official port for shut off for a decade or so. That probably is enough coverage.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 02:14:07 pm
content: Topic: "Australia: People Paid to Not Export Solar"Everybody:

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 06:47:40 pm
content: Quote from: Marco on April 25, 2025, 11:32:42 amThese modbus interfaces are openly specified by inverter manufacturers and they are the official way to control them, no reverse engineering (unless you count deciphering a document written by Chinese engineers as such). We have been well able to support well over half of the inverter population (over 10 makes and models) with myself alone adding the drivers among all the other work to do. It's around 0.5 working day / solar inverter and 1-2 working day / hybrid battery inverter to get it under monitoring and control.Universal solution is a box which supports most usual inverters.Standardization of interfaces called "SunSpec" failed due to classic "overengineered by the committee" disease*, but that's normal for attempts like that. We can do with 20 different modbus formats just fine.*) Two of the 10+ inverters we support have SunSpec, yet they still don't speak the common language and both need their own drivers anyway

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 06:57:04 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 25, 2025, 10:13:51 amActually no; deliberately ignoring others in "the game", their arguments and all proof, and reinstantiating claims proven absolute rubbish dozens of time before, every freaking time you see a chance to do that, is not only bullying, but borderline spamming. Therefore, just please stop. What you are trying to start herehas been discussed to deathand does not need to be discussed again especially as we all know it's not going to be any kind of real discussion. People are getting PTSD symptoms from your posts, remembering tens of pages of your trolling with more and more rubbish. I'm not the only one getting sick. My NOOoooo reaction was honest. You are abusing others, not the other way around. If you don't understand you are doing that, please take a serious look in the mirror for once.Now go on and watch birds, I'm done with this."play the ball" nice try. Won't fall this time.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 07:06:29 pm
content: With nukes it's quite simple: they are so expensive to build and keep in running condition that running them at significantly below 100% average is economical suicide. And offering them to spot/day-ahead markets is a huge risk. Long-term fixed contracts are pretty much needed and some assurance backed up by taxpayer's money helps to make them profitable.Once they run at full power,thenthe cost of fuel + maintenance is quite small per MWh produced.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 07:40:46 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 25, 2025, 07:06:29 pmJust so.And they are reliably dispatchable, at least until they are well past their design lifetime.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:20:49 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 07:40:46 pmIMHO you should consider nuclear economics in a future situation where the electricity prices are primarily driven by storage and distribution costs. It looks like most of the renewable energy is going to come from solar panels (in the next decades) and until we figure out how to make the sun shine constantly across the globe, there are day/night variations (and depending on location large seasonal variations) which require backup / buffering. Currently the backup comes from fossil fuels which are super cheap but that can't go on forever. Running a nuclear power plant at 100% 24/7 economically shouldn't be a problem in case there is enough storage capacity during times when solar panel production is high. When solar panel production is low or nothing, nuclear supplies part of the base load. The NL government seems to be planning to implement this strategy.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:43:59 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 25, 2025, 08:20:49 pmFor a decent discussion of the physics, chemistry and biology of various technologies, read learn and inwardly digesthttp://withouthotair.com/It is highly endorsed by everybody from Big Energy to Rabid Greens.The author doesn't care which mix of technologies is selected,provided the numbers add up. He even presents six mixes, chosen to highlight various objectives, and invites people to make other choices.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 10:49:13 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 01:11:44 pmThat a Nuclear plant is connected to a gird where other generators are selling into a market with 30 minute settlement, does not prove the Nuclear generators are also playing in that market. It is publicly known that the new generators are NOT playing in that market, so your claims that Nuclear will work fine in a 30 minute settlement market is not supported. If Nuclear can play in a level playing field, why aren't they going ahead? Why are so many failing to finance or proceed?To install Nuclear power in Australia would require massive subsidies on Nuclear generation, just as they do in the UK.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:22:36 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 25, 2025, 08:20:49 pmStorage can be economically modelled as cost per kW/h or MW/h delivered:https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/services/consultancy-strategic-advice-services/csiro-futures/energy/renewable-energy-storage-roadmapIs that a grid cost? or a generator (as it is now) ? or a cost to be borne by new generators (as suggested by politicians wanting for favour particular generation) ?Either way the delivered cost of energy from Nuclear is so high, that you can compare it to wild things like 3x-8x the deliveredenergyfrom on-shore wind. Chance of wind plants 10x-20x overbuilt by nameplate capacity and geographically distributed across the Australian grid dropping that low for any significant period of time starts looking similar (or better than) the availability of Nuclear.All that extra energy? The market will find a use for it.Most? Australian consumers already pay more for delivery across the network than they do for the wholesale electricity:https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/electricity-prices-australia-mb2907/

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:31:52 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 10:49:13 pmOver the past decades, it has not been a level playing field for nuclear.Some states, or all if the federal government was involved, had rules where the power from "green" energy providers like wind and solar had to be purchased first. The result was operating nuclear power plants significantly below their capacity factor, especially during the day. The reduction in their capacity factor makes them uneconomical. Of course if they are shut down, then they are not available at night and the marginal cost of power production increases.Large battery banks could replace baseload power production if the wind and solar production is high enough, but cost even more than the replaced nuclear power plants. The scale here is 10s of billions of dollars in battery support. Current battery systems are tiny compared to what is required.No politician is going to pay a premium for on-demand power, or invest in huge battery banks, unless they have no other choice, and since they make the rules, they have a choice even if it means much higher power costs for their constituents, as is the case in California now, and they still have rolling blackouts every year. It is so routine that the media no longer reports on it.None of this was an accident. Various "green" special interest groups discussed this decades ago and deliberately pushed these policies with the intention of making nuclear power uneconomical. It worked, and now states like California pay several times more for power, with no relief in sight.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:51:08 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 25, 2025, 11:31:52 pmIf you read the links I'm putting out above, this is explainable purely from an economic view without any intervention. Solar PV in particular has almost zero marginal operating cost. In an open market they can and will bid to almost zero price (or negative price if there are other credits, which would similarly apply to nuclear). The rational market option is to take the lowest cost energy.It is the reverse of what you claim, with regulators forcing markets to buy more expensive power such as Nuclear.Quote from: David Hess on April 25, 2025, 11:31:52 pmAs I keep pointing to, the cost of alternatives even including storage is still cheaper than nuclear:https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2024/may/csiro-releases-2023-24-gencost-reportThat gets massive scrutiny from the industry and they take feedback to correct any errors.Only taking life extension of already depreciated plants can the price of Nuclear power come down to something competitive. Which is why continuing to operate existing Nuclear plants is rational, but building more is incredibly risky financially and almost certain to produce higher energy costs, not lower as you claim (without any references). So over to you for some examples of analysis showing new build Nuclear is cheaper than alternatives.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:52:15 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 11:22:36 pmI'd like to see some stats demonstrating that.That's the kind of thing the rabid greens used to claim here, usually with the slogan "if the wind isn't blowing here, then it will be blowing there".I took a year's worth of wind generation across the UK (ideally suited for wind power), downloaded fromhttps://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/and looked at the CDF of wind power generated. For no reason I can think of, there seemed to be a rule of thumb: if the peak wind power generation is P GW, then the generated power will beroughly<xP for x proportion of the year. In other words for 365 days/year the power will be less than P and for 3.5 days a year it will be <1% of P.That is nowhere near nukes' dispatchability.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:58:57 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 11:51:08 pmSo you would be content if you you were supplied with, say, water cheaply for 95% of the year, and had no supply for the remaining 5%? I think not.The question seems to come back to how do youforcesuppliers to keep sufficient dispatchable power available even when it isn't used. Yes, of course such dispatchable power will be extremely expensive per kWh used. A commercial generating company is required (duty to shareholders) to skimp, get caught out, and then say "oops, completely unpredictable black swan event".What is to prevent a commercial company from doing that?

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 12:03:08 am
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 25, 2025, 11:31:52 pmOh dear:https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-12-19/cpuc-approves-723-million-dollars-to-extend-life-of-nuclear-planthttps://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2024-_vf.pdfWind or Solar + Storage, still cheaper than new Nuclear capacity.Australian situation makes it a huge margin rather than the relatively close competition in California, your choice of framing and quickly found to be incorrect. So, any more politics, misinformation, and falsehoods you'd like to try?

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 12:26:44 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 11:52:15 pmA classic argument of "trust me I will say I know something but will not show you the proof". Or we could take your preferred reference:Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 08:43:59 pmWhich gives us:Quote from:Sustainable Energy - without the hot air David JC MacKaySimilar to the scale of storage that is priced into the Gencost analysis for Australia I keep linking back to. Which finds renewables plus storage is the cheapest way, and works in an open market.Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 11:58:57 pmYou're free to imagine all sorts of markets that work in some way to make your disingenuous arguments (as we have already seen). I support consumers being exposed to fluctuating energy prices for electricity, just as they are for petrol and gas. You don't, and that is fine but it is yet another complexly wild tangent you have added that does not patch over the unsupported, faulty, and disingenuous crap you keep posting.Simple fact is that renewables plus storage is found to be the cheapest form of energy, today, in many markets, by many different analysis. The Australian market operator does provide market incentives (in several ways) for generation operators to provide sufficient reliability, they have consistently warned that the major problem is a lack of new projects coming online:https://aemo.com.au/newsroom/media-release/urgent-investment-needed-for-electricity-reliabilityNothing about particular types of generation, as the market forces guide a mixture of technologies. The system works other than politicians making investors nervous by announcing they would take market intervention for their pet causes, something which is happening on a grand scale right now. Odd how Dave barely mentions Nuclear power until it's in the news, and then like many posters in this thread just takes the shallow media talking points (fed by politicians) as if they are the full picture.You can keep on with your misdirections, unsupported claims, and straight out failures of logic. Then the question becomes, why are do doing this? What are you gaining from demonstrating your ignorance?

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 02:56:45 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 11:58:57 pmIt is easy. Wait until the situation becomes a crisis, so regular rolling backouts and high prices drive industry away. Demand will fall and prices will continue to rise, but so what?Quote from: Someone on April 26, 2025, 12:03:08 amIt is not.Do you think California would be extending operation of a nuclear power plant if there was any other choice? And of course, it still has to happen; usually the money vanishes without accomplishing anything. Politicians love to convert public money into private money for the special interests who own them.QuoteYet somehow California finds itself in its current situation after applying your solution for decades, and getting worse. The same politicians who created the current mess are going to solve it? Yea, right.I discuss California because I understand the conditions and politics there better, but ultimately the Australian politicians will be just as rationally illiterate of economics and owned by special interests.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 03:19:42 am
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 26, 2025, 02:56:45 amYour politics and market interventions are your business. But the original claim was:Quote from: David Hess on April 25, 2025, 11:31:52 pmWhy is it so hard to acknowledge that continuing the use of a mostly/wholly depreciated asset is cheaper than building a new replacement? That does not make new build of that same type of asset cheaper than the alternative. Claiming renewables are more expensive than Nuclear only applied in the past, it has not applied for years now.Trying to flip it around and claim Nuclear is being left out because renewables are given priority in the market is where you are injecting politics and falsehoods. Nuclear is the one being propped up with market interventions, because it cannot compete on price in an open market against the low marginal cost generators that use free sources of energy. Going forward the vast majority of predictions are that adding Nuclear will cost more than adding renewables.... even if the cost of storage for the renewables (which mentioned earlier in the thread storage is economically valuable for Nuclear too) is included.Why is it so hard for you to find some analysis or references to support your claims? I provide credible sources and you just say "nope".

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 03:34:24 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 26, 2025, 12:26:44 amUnlike the commentators here that are shy to let the facts and figures speak for themselves:Australian renewable generation cumulative distribution, longest streak of consecutive days below a given load factor, from the last year of NEM data.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 11:20:15 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 25, 2025, 11:51:08 pmThe executive summary only shows predictions up to 2030 which is when coal and gas can still be used as a backup. I'd like to see a forecast up to 2050 when coal and gas are abandonned and way more storage is needed. And you need to keep in mind that Australia needs to take far less seasonal changes into account where it comes to storage compared to Europe and the northern part of the US. So what will work in Australia, won't work for many more people in the northern hemisphere.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 12:05:56 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 26, 2025, 11:20:15 amConveniently ignoring the California analysis I pointed to earlier. You cant play both sides, "oh but I'm only talking about UK" then flip to "oh no we can only talk about Australia". Particularly when you bring zero references or data people could consider and interpret for themselves. So instead nit pick about all the little details and distract from the core argument.We have a uniquely Australian meme for people telling others how to act/think without letting them see the reasoning:Quickly followed by the rat character doing something entirely self interested to the detriment of others.Or since this thread was supposed to be about Australia the gencost report has projections all the way up to 90% variable (non dispatchable) generation, including the storage required to support that reliably but only projected to 2030. Do you claim that somehow storage will get more expensive in the future so the numbers cannot be considered? How about some analysis to support your wild claims?Everything I look for finds adding new Nuclear non competitive economically, you claim otherwise but cant provide a single credible source?

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 12:15:53 pm
content: Just implement automated load management and provide incentives to implement it, the technology has been affordable for well over a decade but the lack of standards is making it hard to implement. Aside from adapting demand to supply, lowering the peak to average ratio would slow the need to upgrade infrastructure.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 12:49:15 pm
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on April 26, 2025, 12:15:53 pmJust give A) a free market, B) people the option to see in their own pockets how the market works, and people are happy to buy automated load management systems, and companies eager to develop them.Whilegoodstandardization work is helpful (and bad isn't), you don'tneedany standards for this. Companies like us deal just fine with adding support to different types of devices case-by-case. We have been very successful doing this so far with just simple relay-connected on/off loads, plus data integration to hybrid inverters, plus our own low-cost bidirectional metering solution. Rest is software.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 02:20:01 pm
content: Quote from: Someone on April 26, 2025, 12:05:56 pmThe California analysis explicitely says it is not a forecast so that doesn't answer my question. You keep reasoning nuclear isn't viable now so it is never going to be viable but fail to show the numbers which forecast that scenario. The fact that several countries are going to built nuclear power plants make it reasonable to assume the forecasts do show that nuclear is going to be economically viable (as in being part of a solution to ensure availability of electricity) once coal and gas power plants are shut down AND more storage is needed. Ofcourse this depends on the local situation as well but you can't go around saying nuclear has no place just based on generation costs alone. IMHO it is also wrong to look at generation costs only for various reasons (including distribution costs being in the same ballpark as generation costs already); in the end the consumer price is what counts. Electricity suppliers / grid operators do need to cater for the worst case situation so they can still supply the required amount of electricity. This will drive the price up for the consumer but you have to see this as an insurance premium. The free market only goes so far. Actually, the article you linked to explicitely says:from selling the plant’s power and an additional $6 billion in value to the state for providingconsistent, reliable power.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 12:05:18 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 26, 2025, 02:20:01 pmGencost, in the above quote tower has fossil, nuclear, and renewables forecast out to 2050. You're continuously making out like the data isn't there when it's being shoved in your face, and somehow fail to find absolutely any references at all to support your claims.More sealioning?And chopping out the rest of the quote:Quote from: Someone on April 26, 2025, 12:05:56 pmSo you're back to asking for something, and when its presented then moving the goalposts. While doing nothing to add any support to your claims.Your cheap talk is just that.All plants can have grid reliability and dispatchability/standby priced into their operation. As we do in the Australian market.Nuclear can provide reliable and consistent power, there is no question of that. But for what it costs, in many regions/markets/countries you can add so much storage and generation from other sources that you end up with not only more energy (or lower cost) but also higher reliability. Which is what the Gencost report finds in Australia, time and time again, and what the 2024 Lazard analysis points to for US conditions (though they take a less extreme position in their "one liner" answer).

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 12:46:13 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 26, 2025, 12:49:15 pmThe noisy poster is explicitly against exposing consumers to price signals:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ev-politics-mandates-(corrupting)-science-and-engineering-to-become-political/msg5762729/#msg5762729That thread also has a link out to a very comprehensive explanation of how renewables + storage is viable and cost effective:https://www.rethinkx.com/energy/in-depth/clean-energy-u-curveThe huge amounts of excess energy above today's generation will find a use only if there are price signals to consumers. If grid operated storage is dominant and only flat rate pricing shown to consumers (including large industrial users) the price to everyone will increase to cover the rare worst cases that some (I say significant) portion of the population would be willing to clip/chop/reduce if they could see a benefit from doing so.Heat pumps, Renewable Energy, Bicycles, Electric Vehicles, they seem to bring out the crazies... at least this forum avoids one of them!

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 05:27:38 am
content: While this thread is about Australian problems, there must be a similar problem here in the US with renewable energy sources.The picture below was taken a couple of weeks ago on a trip through Washington state. It shows a portion of one of dozens of large scale wind farms that were nearly continuous over a major portion of the drive. I haven't tried for an exact count in the picture, but believe there to be well over one hundred windmills here. What can't be seen in the picture is that virtually none of them are turning and generating electricity. As I drove down through this field I only saw five in operation. On a day when the wind was steady somewhere around 25-30 km/hr, which I would think would be near ideal conditions for generation. This was representative of most of the fields seen that day. Overcapacity seems the most likely explanation. It is spring and hydropower is at its max in the region at this time of year. But hydro can't be the primary explanation because I have seen similar situations in wind installations over much of the western United States.Another common problem was mentioned earlier on the thread. Utilities would love to have a 98% availability rating and the suggestion was that they may be surreptitiously implementing that operating plan. That may at least partly explain the erratic power at my home, which is the cause of my installing a battery backup system to go with my solar installation. The electric rates with my utility provide no incentive for load shifting, so there is no economic payoff for the battery. But not having to restart computers, reset clocks and in some cases start the generator to preserve food in freezer and refrigerators and to keep operating the heaters was more than enough justification for SWMBO and to honest, me.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 06:44:47 am
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on April 27, 2025, 05:27:38 amImagine hearing this:I drove past some coal powered plants. No smoke was coming off from any of them, they were not running and generating electricity. We have a problem of overcapacityNo one in their right mind would ever say something like this. Yet with renewables overcapacity is somehow suddenly a problem. Often coming from the same people who a few years earlier said that renewables are such niche they can't generate any meaningful power. Now suddenly there is too much.As explained above, overcapacity isthe opposite of a problem: it's asolution, an absolute necessity. Without overcapacity, we can't have a grid. Grid collapses as soon as consumption exceeds production, therefore there always needs to be dispatchable extra production capacity to cover worst-case load needs (and or dispatchable load that can be shed). And that means real worst case over long period of time, as people prefer their grid not to randomly collapse every now and then.With every generation type there has been overcapacity. With wind and PV, you want even more overcapacity because then you can have power in less than ideal conditions. That means it often sits doing nothing. Just like coal and hydro has always done.Initially in some countries there were artificial taxpayer incentives for building wind but that is over long time ago. For a decade, companies have done their own cost analyses and built more and more wind power purely on free market rules. They have seen that it can be affordedeven ifit sits sometimes not operating. There is trulyenoughwhen no one wants to make the investments to build any more. It's that simple.

author: dietert1
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 07:29:55 am
content: In Sao Paulo the main reason for power outages is strong weather. Storm makes trees fall onto landlines and tear them down. Sometimes transformers break during heavy rain. So the main reason for grid problems isn't unpredictable production or consumption and we already live with 98 % availability. Lucky enough most of the time power outages are regional and rarely take more than 12 hours to get fixed. When the storm happens at night, they remove the fallen trees on the next morning to get the supply going once more.ENEL could make their infrastructure more robust but that would require a joint effort as it's very expensive, so i think it won't happen. And due to climate change it can become a never ending story. Really it's a wonder how nuclear plants can be built and a better grid cannot.In Germany there are some large scale energy storage systems based on pumping large amounts of water to a higher level (artificial lake). Nowadays it seems almost impossible to build such systems as battery storage became cheaper. They are constructing strong grid enforcement lines necessary to bring wind energy from the north sea to the southern parts of Germany, but again it's very slow and expensive.Regards, Dieter

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 07:55:17 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 27, 2025, 06:44:47 amIt can be. I posted links to our grid operator who explain how over-generation of solar is a problem for the stability of the grid in Australia.You can kick and scream all you like about the details, how it shouldn't be, etc etc, but it's a practical fact here in Australia and a problem that we have to solve.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 08:56:41 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 27, 2025, 07:55:17 amI went through all your links and none said nothing about grid stability being at risk, which I summarized in reply #70. You already have working solutions in place, just not optimal/fair.You can kick and scream all you like, but that does not change the fact that your grid stability is not in danger. You are just being a so-called "happener" here.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 09:04:28 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 27, 2025, 08:56:41 amOh FFS, do i have to highlight words for you?It's from their damn fact sheet.https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/learn/fact-sheets/2024/fact-sheetminimum-system-load.pdfI will not respond to you again on this.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 10:31:19 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 27, 2025, 09:04:28 amWell that does not support your sensational claims of too much solar and grid stability issues:Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 11:11:20 amQuote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 10:12:23 amYet your snippet to support your claims is AEMO saying they have controls in place to maintain network stability and may use them. Of course you chopped out the surrounding context which says this is only on new installs that are participating in the controls:Quote from:AEMOQuote from:AEMOSo where is the evidence that there is too much solar and stability is at risk?If there was too much solar you wouldn't expect the operator to be planning to add more solar to the grid:https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/planning_and_forecasting/generation_information/2025/nem-generation-information-april-2025.xlsx?la=enBroadsound Solar FarmHorsham Solar FarmTilbuster Solar FarmHow solar is interacting with the grid is changing. The grid operator has things well in hand and has solutions for adding more solar while maintaining stability/reliability.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 10:53:20 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 27, 2025, 08:56:41 amBacktracking from the link/source Dave posted the snippet from we can find progressively more in depth versions:https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/learn/fact-sheets/2024/fact-sheet-operating-electricity-grids-with-rooftop-solar-installations.pdf?la=enwith no alarmist hand waving at all:Quote from:AEMOSo that is the market operator (which Dave claims is saying they cant safely support more solar) saying they have in place plans to support more solar.I also like the point which I have brought up many times is in there too:Quote from:AEMOLonger reports and examples of the system being used:https://aemo.com.au/initiatives/major-programs/nem-distributed-energy-resources-der-program/managing-distributed-energy-resources-in-operations/managing-minimum-system-load

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 10:55:23 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 27, 2025, 10:31:19 amThe AEMO does not decide what new infrastrure is built, they just have to manage and control the grid. The government mandates what new infrastructure is built and things like net-zero targets by set dates, and the AEMO then releases a plan every few years that must reflect the wishes of the government in terms of renewable energy targets etc.If a new government suddenly said burn baby burn, the AEMO's new plan would be all about new coal stations.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 11:01:58 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 27, 2025, 10:53:20 amI never claimed it's not possible to add more solar, I said it's a known problem that needs to be managed otherwise the grid stability is at risk if it's not handled right.Hence the battery schemes, EV remote control trials, negative FIT schemes, trials to pay to not export, schemes for more systems with remote grid control etc etc. They are doing all this stuff as part of managing the known PROBLEM.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 11:17:39 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 27, 2025, 10:55:23 amThe market operator does not get to decide what is on the network? lolshttps://energy-rules.aemc.gov.au/ner/QuoteWhere those performance standards are explicitly about system security .Quote from: EEVblog on April 27, 2025, 11:01:58 amYou explicitly said there is a problem, word for word:Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 11:11:20 amQuote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2025, 10:12:23 amOr do I need to go in there and bold the exact phrasing?You're making out like there is a problem which needs to be solved. AEMO are saying pretty much the opposite, that there would be a problem if they hadn't planned ahead, but they have planned ahead and there is no problem at all.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 11:23:04 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 27, 2025, 11:17:39 am

author: dietert1
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 11:29:25 am
content: They could even use rapidly variable loads to improve stability, e.g. a hydrogen plant. As far as i understand those plants will be necessary at large and they are about as easy to control as a gas generator.Regards, Dieter

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 11:35:06 am
content: Quote from: dietert1 on April 27, 2025, 11:29:25 amIf you have a commercial need for using huge excess power at peak times then they'll pay you to take it.It should be mandatory for every one of governments new $3BN rebate home storage batteries to be remote controllable during peak times. if you don't like that, don't take the taxpayer rebate.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 11:37:28 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 27, 2025, 11:23:04 amYou're the one who keeps pushing the barrow:Quote from: EEVblog on April 27, 2025, 07:55:17 amThe problem wassolvedby the regulator you link to, years in the past. There is no problem to solve.You posed it as a disingenuous question as if there is no solution. So the premise that there is too much/excess of solar is plainly false.

author: dietert1
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 12:25:22 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 27, 2025, 11:35:06 amNegative energy prices are a shame and can't be a base for business or political plans. Once these markets get going, negative energy prices won't be possible. There may be discounts though, like we had in the past for consumption at night, e.g. for electrical heating (storage). In the future, the discounts will rather apply during daytime, when the sun is shining.Regards, Dieter

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 06:14:50 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 27, 2025, 09:04:28 amFFS, it reads clearly right there! They might take actions to shut down production as needed to keep the grid operating! That's exactly what we are talking about. The grid isn't at riskbecause they have this control. What is so difficult in understanding this?That thing literally says: we need to do what we do to prevent grid from collapsing.In other fucking words: if we DID NOT do this, we WOULD have problems. But because we do what we do, grid is OK.And you manage twist this to: we have a grid stability problem. No, you don't, because they have mandated exactly the control they need. This is how all grids operate!And they tell this to consumers so that they don't wonder why their production is being cut out. They have to be clear about the reason why the control is mandated. They can't tell people "we are cutting you off just because". They have to say it's for grid stability, which is both the truth, and sufficient explanation people have to accept.So you are acting like any yellow media journalist, pick a random phrase like "grid stability" and play some mental gymnastics to twist the meaning 180 degrees by omitting the context. "We have grid stability in control" - OH LOOK "grid stability" appears here! - We have grid stability problem, boohoo!Now are you able to get over your ego and start analyzing the situation properly? There are many serious and factual viewpoints to take, like, some consumers have been promised big earnings by salesmen, and now their production has negative cost or needs to be limited? That's a real problem, for one. Or maybe how coarse their control to maintain grid stability is? Is it "fair" to small producers?And grid stability isn't rocket science, feel free to analyze it with bode plots and control theory. Some of us might have some idea about is as it is what we do.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 06:37:04 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 27, 2025, 06:44:47 amI understand the argument. But have a problem with it as stated. The overcapacity implied is something on the order of a factor of twenty. But whenever I see costs of wind discussed it is on a per turbine basis, operating as the wind allows. If that is really the appropriate amount of overcapacity the costs are far higher than reported. Your coal power analogy is flawed. If I drove past twenty recently constructed coal plants and only one was operating I would definitely think they had overbuilt. I suspect you would too.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 08:09:51 pm
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on April 27, 2025, 06:37:04 pmI would ask what the minimum expected output was compared to the required load, what else.could supply the required load, and who paid what when the (presumably rarely needed) sources were needed.That's useful since it applies to all generating plant, and doesn't depend on especially loved/hated types of sources.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 10:30:23 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 27, 2025, 08:09:51 pmThat is certainly a better way of evaluating costs. My gut tells me that it would be an incredibly unusual circumstance that would cause twenty coal plants to be built with 5% expected utilization. But who knows, I haven't actually done the math.I will also guess that there would be a much larger set of conditions where a set of twenty plants built under different economic circumstances, including different available technologies would be retained with only 5% utilization.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 10:57:25 pm
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on April 27, 2025, 10:30:23 pmYou have extrapolated in the wrong direction. Wind farms are typically managed as block bids/units and generally are not all modulated together across the network. You saw a single farm maintaining some extremely low load (could well be the house load), just as witnessing a single coal plant idling.You did not see xxGW of wind idle, but just some "small" xxxMW amount.Demand/supply is not the only thing driving the dispatch, but also network constraints and that "stability" boogeyman.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 11:09:22 pm
content: And there is also something called 'bird curtailment' where it comes to wind turbines.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 11:28:36 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 27, 2025, 11:09:22 pmWhich is another wildly overblown anti-wind "point", ignoring facts like cars + trucks kill more birds per capita (even if wind share was scaled up). Yet we don't have the roads being closed off when birds are in the area.Then people study it in depth and find that the turning of the turbines is actually not the main risk for birds:https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jwmg.21844Structures are a risk for birds, quick, stop building offices and houses!

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 01:10:58 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 27, 2025, 11:28:36 pmYes, when I did research on this, glass buildings killed way more birds and wind turbines. I think it was orders of magnitude more.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 01:24:30 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 27, 2025, 10:57:25 pmI no idea of the legal arrangement of the facilities I saw. They may have been a single farm. But the picture represents a single sample of what I saw spread over hundreds of kilometers. Total number of mills perhaps a thousand or more. All with similar percentages operating.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 01:30:42 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 28, 2025, 01:10:58 amhttps://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/wind-power-bird-deathsCats, Pollution, etc etc

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 01:45:11 am
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on April 28, 2025, 01:24:30 amLets go back to your analysis:Quote from: CatalinaWOW on April 27, 2025, 05:27:38 amOver supply of wind?https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WA#tabs-4Or as keeps being repeated, solar and wind power is so cheap that it is economically viable to greatly over provision to the point it doesnt deliver the majority of the power it could do (less than half the cost of competing sources). Rational markets would make use of that cheap marginal generation capacity.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 02:15:23 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 28, 2025, 01:30:42 amWow, cats are more than buildings. Still, buildings are 2 and a half orders more than wind turbines.

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 02:58:54 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 28, 2025, 02:15:23 amThe cat figures are always a bit suspect, I've seen astoundingly high figures published which, with a back-of-the-envelope calculation for the country's cat population, would have meant every cat, including the older ones whose biggest effort each day is wandering from the couch to the food bowl and the significant percentage who are indoors-only, would have had to be killing one to two birds a day. Given the emotionally charged nature of this (bird lovers vs. cat lovers) I've taken any figures for this with a grain of salt.And if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, the figures completely omit the number of birds killed each year, mostly by eating their eggs, by rats, stoats, weasels, etc. Which happen to be killed by cats, this reducing the numbers that prey on birds.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 03:34:12 am
content: Quote from: 5U4GB on April 28, 2025, 02:58:54 amI had an indoor cat which if she got out, would kill something and bring it back every time, including birds, rabbits, and squirrels. She would tear her prey open and eat the liver, and then leave the rest for me, as a warning I guess.I am not convinced that the estimates of what is killing more birds matters. We are not going to limit the number of our pet cats, and I hope we would not limit the use of wind turbines because of the bird deaths that they cause. At most it is a situation that requires future monitoring.Knowing something about the subject, I suspect that if wind turbine bird deaths really are significant, then there will also be significant natural selection pressure. We could help that along by making wind turbine blades, or wind turbines, consistently easier for birds to identify.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 05:05:41 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 27, 2025, 10:57:25 pmOK. I didn't count the turbines as a drove by. But I did a rough count in the picture previously posted. And I could have take a similar picture at more than an handful of locations. I spent an entire day driving SWMBO on a quilting exercise, covered in excess of 600 km and I was seldom out of sight of an array of turbines. Say 8 just to put a number on it. That would be 800 turbines. By my rough estimate then 720 off line. I would put fairly large error bars on this number. But probably no less than 400 and probably no more than 1500. According to Google the typical turbine installed is in the 2-3 MW category. So the nominal capacity of the off line turbines would be 1.9 GW. And guestimated low and high numbers for offline then being 0.8 GW and 4.5 GW. Using my estimate of the percentage on-line there would be nominally 100 MW on line, with low and high estimates of 40 MW and 220 MW.You later provided a chart showing that in January about 800 MW of power were generated by non-Hydro renewables. Since January sucks for solar in that part of the world I would assume that most of that was wind, though there are probably small contributions from solar, wave energy collection, biomass and all the other pieces of the pie. I by no means drove past all of the wind installations in the state, so my estimates at least pass a laugh test in comparison with your chart.The point is not whether the numbers are small in terms of GW or MW. We are probably close to the limits on the economies that can be achieved simply by scaling them up. The turbines scale by building more of them. We are building an amazing number of them in the US. They are going up everywhere I have gone, and there are impressive numbers of them in all the western states I have visited. Building large quantities of these machines only to use a fraction of them seems ineffective.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 05:37:44 am
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on April 28, 2025, 05:05:41 amPower vs Energy. You claimed 5% utilisation from some short observation in time, completely inappropriate. Then extrapolate that to "oversupply of wind turbines" which is fallacious.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Washington1/3rd of the roughly 20GW of hydro resources in Washington State are run of the river with little to no effective storage, overall hydro load factor 34%. Wind around 3.5GW, load factor 27%. Which does in no way suggest there is an oversupply of wind across the year. Seems like wind is pretty profitable and there should be more of it in that region despite you observing a day when very little was being generated.Or perhaps you'd like to take down all the wind turbines on the days they aren't needed and put them somewhere else?

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 08:31:21 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 28, 2025, 01:10:58 amProbably, but in case the turbines are placed near a major bird reserve with rare bird species involved, any bird killed is one too many. In France they even shut down a wind turbine farm and fined the owner/operator:https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/04/french-court-shuts-down-wind-farm-over-death-of-golden-eagle/In the Netherlands there is a procedure to shut down wind farms during bird migrations:https://www.noordzeeloket.nl/en/functions-use/offshore-wind-energy/start-stop/

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 12:44:36 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 27, 2025, 09:04:28 amIt could be this didn't work out so well in Spain and Portugal. Both countries (and parts of France) suffer from a massive outage at the moment. The cause is unknown except that there was a huge drop in demand.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 02:32:55 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 28, 2025, 12:44:36 pmIt could also be due to a solar storm, or the Kremlin's associates, or gremlins.In other words, speculation is (at best) pointless. Wait and see; you won't have to wait long.

author: JoeRoy
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 11:13:59 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on April 28, 2025, 12:44:36 pmSome media outlets are reporting a surge in renewable energy production that's putting strain on the electrical grid.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 11:25:26 pm
content: Quote from: JoeRoy on April 28, 2025, 11:13:59 pmMost media outlets confuse energy and power, e.g. battery "size" in MW, not MWh.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 11:27:45 pm
content: Quote from: JoeRoy on April 28, 2025, 11:13:59 pmhttps://www.eevblog.com/forum/renewable-energy/spain-and-portugal-electric-grid-failure/

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 06:22:32 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 28, 2025, 11:25:26 pmTo be fair, "size" of a battery has both aspects, MW and MWh in it. Grid batteries are often specified in MW, and MWh discussed then in finer print (related to which kind of services it exactly can provide; there are many, some require very little energy.)

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2025, 08:42:26 am
content: It was not easy to find, but the feature which allows a nuclear power plant to disconnect from the grid while remaining operational by powering itself is called "net load rejection". This is also required for a nuclear power plant to cold start the power grid. I imagine it involves a bypass to allow cooling of the reactor under all conditions while producing varied and low amounts of electrical power. It should also allow for load following.In the US before deregulation, it was a commonly required feature in US nuclear power plants. After deregulation, new plants were not built with it because nobody was willing to pay for it even though it aids power grid stability. Without it, a nuclear plant requires days to restart and considerable external power.

author: Poroit
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 08:46:42 am
content: Aussie voters were not convinced about solar.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-06/federal-election-shows-voters-support-renewables-over-nuclear/105252888

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 06:04:11 pm
content: Thisis why I thought there was no standardised control input. There is a similar experimental scheme in the Netherlands where they asked households to turn off their PV and get paid ... but they have to do it manually!!!Also actually searching, EU only seems to have said type A generators should have a logic input. Unlike Australia, they didn't actually say what it should look like. Australia has AS4777.2:2015 DRED. For compliance a lot of inverter manufacturers seem to have made a box to translate DRED to the native interface, but that's fine, still allows a really simple universal controller compared to having to support dozens of modbus/ethernet variants (with all due respect if that's your business).Am I just missing an implementation guideline for the EU or did they really leave it completely unstandardised?

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 06:14:02 pm
content: Quote from: Poroit on May 06, 2025, 08:46:42 amMore specifically, the article makes the case that voters were not convinced about anti-solar. Dutton ran on renewable/EV scepticism and lost seats.