Comment by mc32
2 years ago
A map of power outages over the last few years with TX, CA, LA, WA and MI in the lead: https://www.fixr.com/articles/power-outage-solutions
Maine is a headscratcher with HydroQuebec across the border.
2 years ago
A map of power outages over the last few years with TX, CA, LA, WA and MI in the lead: https://www.fixr.com/articles/power-outage-solutions
Maine is a headscratcher with HydroQuebec across the border.
That is a pretty misleading presentation, because of the cherry-picked dates and conflating (apparently) capacity-related outages with public safety shutoffs, and for not weighting by population impact.
California has not had any capacity-related problems in the past 2 years, mostly due to the fact that they now have 5.5GW of battery backup capacity that covers the critical period at dusk, when solar generation is headed for zero, during late summer where the days are getting shorter but it is still hot.
> they now have 5.5GW of battery backup capacity that covers the critical period at dusk, when solar generation is headed for zero, during late summer where the days are getting shorter but it is still hot
Am I supposed to interpret "covers critical period at dusk..." as the "hours" part of 5.5GW? Because I'm having trouble grokking what is the actual battery backup capacity described here... Does CA have battery capacity that can last a single evening @ 5.5GW of load?
Every grid-scale battery in CA has 4 hours of energy capacity at its rated power, so 22GW-h at present.
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MI downtime is a result of cutting back on expensive tree trimming and other upkeep functions. We had a good run of very light storms but we’re back to normal wind and all those tree limbs that should have been taken care of now are adding up the down time.