Comment by mschuster91
2 days ago
> That's a serious amount of stand by power for absorbing excess power or dispatching power when needed.
... and a serious issue should one of the few large manufacturers or remote-control dispatcher/trader companies get hacked. The outage in Spain a few weeks ago was just a small warning, probably caused by a technical malfunction. But now imagine this being used as a side track in an act of war? The first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by the hack of Viasat satellites, which led to 5.800 wind turbines shutting down due to a lack of remote control capabilities [1]. Now imagine the large Chinese inverter and power bank controller vendors that often enough just white-label for other brands? That's a whole lot of a different game now.
> and a serious issue should one of the few large manufacturers or remote-control dispatcher/trader companies get hacked. The outage in Spain a few weeks ago was just a small warning, probably caused by a technical malfunction.
If everyone agrees, you can use grid frequency/phase to coordinate, and not a separate realtime communication system. Grid interactive demand/response is a proven way to manage supply and load.
When your section of the grid is stressed, supply power or abstain from charging; when your section of the grid is abundant, charge.
Coordination is useful too, of course; predictive charging is helpful, and you wouldn't get that only by monitoring the grid; you also want to know somehow that a supply or load is scheduled to be added or removed at time X, or was unexpectedly removed and will not be reconnected for some time. And the system operator would want to know about capacity in many dimensions.
It doesn't work that way. Maybe in the US where everyone seems to do their own shit, particularly in Texas, but here in Europe our grid literally spans the entire continent, from Portugal through into Ukraine's front lines, and from Norway even down towards Africa. It's a three phase grid that is in synchronized phase everywhere. Like, literally everywhere.
Grid frequency cannot be used at scale to coordinate energy production as a result, because the grid elements themselves don't know why the frequency is going down on its own or where the cause is. For that you need to monitor the country or region crossing to see where energy is flowing and aggregate this.
Drop a couple gigawatts from the production side, for example, all at once and the frequency will immediately drop, only not crashing due to the mechanical inertia of the large power plants. Immediately, electricity and physics will lead to current balances redistributing and automated systems will kick in (e.g. gas peaker plants ramp up in a matter of seconds, battery storage kicks in even faster). But when too much capacity gets dropped, the available spare capacity isn't enough and eventually the first lines will trip due to overcurrent or frequency deviation. That is what happened in Spain, made worse by the fact that inverters don't have mechanical inertia and so immediately more inverters dropped out for safety reasons as the frequency sagged too much for their protection circuits. The inverse, adding a couple of gigawatts of consumers, causes the same effect.
That's also why very large consumers such as smelters must contact the local electricity distributor in advance before any load change - dispatch must know precisely when the consumer will drop or add load, so that other plants can be regulated up or down to avoid too much of a sag or hike in frequency.
Minor, but it's from Denmark (Jutland) south.
There's a separate Scandinavian grid for East Denmark (Zealand) and north.
(And the British Isles are their own grid.)
1 reply →
Of course the Ukrainians are now much less dependent on central power generations out of necessity. It turns out that all those big power plants and electricity distribution centers make for nice drone targets. The Russians did far more damage with that than with their satellite hackery. Those 5800 wind turbines came back online and are mostly still operational.
The lesson here is that distributed power is a good thing in war time scenarios but you might want to pay attention to digital security. Central power generation becomes a tempting target.
Now the good news with Chinese stuff is that a war is not imminent and we have the benefit of hindsight and can do something about that.
> Now the good news with Chinese stuff is that a war is not imminent and we have the benefit of hindsight and can do something about that.
We are and we have been at war with China (and Russia and North Korea, fwiw) for many years at this point. The ongoing cyberwarfare from either country is more than enough to warrant this label, the problem is we were and are governed by chickens who refuse to accept the reality we are living in and still think that kowtowing to China's every demand will save our economies.