Comment by VBprogrammer
1 year ago
It's interesting, I've heard lots of tales about how we need the spinning mass to stabilise the grid in way which apparently solar, for example, doesn't.
It's not immediately obvious to me whether batteries do or don't provide this capability. I know there are some projects where they are introducing giant flywheels with motor generators (and others where mothballed power plants are run at tickover, though I think this might be more for active / reactive power control), are these just an alternative to batteries with much lower tech or is there something intrinsic about a rotating generator which is hard to reproduce?
The inverters attached to solar or batteries can provide frequency support and even reactive power. They just need to have the smarts to do it at the right frequency, and standards for that have come about in recent years. In the early days, there wasn't much need so by KISS standards it would have been the wrong choice to start with grid-forming inverter design.
People who complain about the lack of spinning mass do not have much knowledge about AC power, even if they understand the prior forms of our grid very well. Classic mistake of is vs. ought.
The "it hasn't been done, therefore it can't be done" argument was wrong AGAIN? I'm shocked, shocked.
When you've worked in an industry for 40 years and there have been basically no tech advancements in that period, and there's strong political filters to keep everybody voting the right way to grease the fossil fuel interests, it's almost hard to blame a person for getting it wrong.
But that wrongness spread through an industry is also an opportunity for those with deeper insight!
I work with grid storage battery systems (as a software engineer, so no expert on the physics)
> It's interesting, I've heard lots of tales about how we need the spinning mass to stabilise the grid in way which apparently solar, for example, doesn't.
This is false and a common misconception according to a coworker of mine, having a spinning mass to stabilise the grid is one way of keeping frequency stable, but not the only way. In fact batteries are way better than spinning mass at stabilising frequency. The problem with batteries is that they need a lot of software systems to kick in and kick out of the grid and those can be quite complicated and costly to develop, but once they are in place they will stabilise the grid way better than a giant flywheel.
This is so commonly misunderstood that apparently Australia (where my coworker used to work) had some rules at the central electricity provider agency to enforce certain minimum amounts of spinning mass in the grid. So it seems it can also be a matter of regulations not catching up with technology.
In the article: "The Kapolei project provides a first line of defense, called “synthetic inertia,” responding to and correcting grid deviations in real time."