Comment by viraptor
10 hours ago
Technical detail question: if all of those batteries were on connecting allowing feeding back to the grid, would they be able to synchronise the frequency/phase? What's the threshold/requirement for that to happen?
10 hours ago
Technical detail question: if all of those batteries were on connecting allowing feeding back to the grid, would they be able to synchronise the frequency/phase? What's the threshold/requirement for that to happen?
It can be done, but it would requires additional equipment. Batteries are traditionally grid-following, so they'll just follow whatever frequency the grid is already running on. The frequency itself is then provided by the rotational inertia of "spinning metal" power plants.
But there's no reason that has to be your frequency source. Any single battery installation on its own is perfectly capable of making up some frequency, which is why home power banks with island-mode AC output are a thing - or even just a traditional UPS. Doing the same with thousands of individual battery installations across the grid? You'll need some way to get everyone to agree exactly on frequency and phase, which in practice is probably going to mean getting them to agree on time to within a few microseconds, which could be done (albeit not very sabotage-proof) using GPS.
> Batteries are traditionally grid-following, so they'll just follow whatever frequency the grid is already running on.
Is there in theory an amount of batteries with inverters where enough energy is created to "not notice" the spinning generators going away? I.e. everyone is trying to follow the frequency that's already flowing therefore everyone sees some frequency flowing? Or would it be like talking with echo/delay where they start slowing down by always being behind until everyone stops?
> The frequency itself is then provided by the rotational inertia of "spinning metal" power plants.
This might or might not be true. I used to live near a large plant that took HVDC from a power plant several states away and transformed it into AC. They used electronics to provide the grid frequency, not spinning metal. All the other local peak power generation was run in grid following mode.
Grid Forming Batteries are a thing - but since it's not free to implement of course such a provider would like to get paid, not give it away, whereas both a conventional thermal plant or a hydro plant unavoidably has spinning metal, their stability comes free with the electrical supply.
The risk vs reward isn't great. If you made your country's 10GW grid work with only batteries for 15 minutes to show it's possible, maybe you get one half page in a "Electricity Weekly" industry newspaper. But if anything goes wrong and ordinary people notice - now you're on TV News for a week.
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> What's the threshold/requirement for that to happen?
The RoCoF (rate of change of frequency) must be low enough that the inverters can form the grid without letting out the magical smoke. Having inertia is what slows this rate down.