Overgeneration risk this weekend

[minimutly]

Here's a bit of a tidbit - apparently NG are pooping themselves due to the uk demand this weekend not being able to eat up all the renewable generation, likely to cause overvolts, overfrequency, likely to cause major generators to come offline. This is obviously likely to cause undervoltage, underfrequency and no power....
Boogar eh?

 

[Sid]

Pretty sure a great money spinner for the renewables is to be paid NOT to generate power. Do you have a source for this? So much nonsense on the internet, and I have my doubts there will be any problem...

 

[Kayos]

Slightly off topic, I've got an interview at a ground source heat pump company coming up so I've been researching.

Any excess energy from gshp is pumped back around the loop to recharge the ground for later, there is always a way to dump or store the energy, might just not be exactly obvious

 

[frank horton]

my first though at the headline was people are having to much sex....silly me.......

power generation pht..........
see to day that Houston, Texas expects to be total renewable powered very soon......
I worked at the new power station in Connah's Quay......well 20years ago......a complete "Fred Karnos"
Management !!!!!!!!!!!......

 

[Parm]

I would think fluctuation in demand is one of the most basis things any power generation system would have a handle on

 

[Kayos]

I would think fluctuation in demand is one of the most basis things any power generation system would have a handle on

It reads like a daily mail headline so power generation is either on or off. Obvs

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

my first though at the headline was people are having to much sex....silly me.......

power generation pht..........
see to day that Houston, Texas expects to be total renewable powered very soon......
I worked at the new power station in Connah's Quay......well 20years ago......a complete "Fred Karnos"
Management !!!!!!!!!!!......

Is that excluding cutting and burning trees

 

[500e]

A bit in the Times this morning about it

 

[Neilj]

I worked at the new power station in Connah's Quay......well 20years ago......a complete "Fred Karnos"
Management !!!!!!!!!!!......

Slightly OT, is that the place with the strange speed limit signs on the entrance road, something like 19MPH?

 

[Wany]

I went for a job with one of the private load balancing firms. Didn't get it which was probably good as they were odd beyond all measures.

Putting in extra "juice" is quite easy, they spin up their gas piston engines, but for taking extra "juice" they were investing in big LiON storage arrays. This has been historically less of a problem as it's normally the "other way".

 

[fizzy]

I would think fluctuation in demand is one of the most basis things any power generation system would have a handle on

And yet we had a big outage a few months ago. The British National Grid is the best in the World but they have come close to the limit several times recently.

 

[minimutly]

Not able to quote the source, it's come via work - we are a major power user as well as a generator - the issue for us is loss of supply more than anthing else. With weather related loss we normally switch plants to standby generation - in this instance it will be counter - productive...

Not arsebook story, this is genuine, a real risk.

 

[fizzy]

I remember many years ago my mate's father was chief engineer in the steel works in Port Talbot. I was a bit young to understand everything he said but I do remember him going on about heat pumps all the time. He was ahead of his time.
Anyway he used to tell me how the steel works would generate their own power and dump it back on the grid. Sometimes they would have an excess the grid didn't want so they would have all the staff turning the lights on and cookers and everything else just to knock it down a bit

 

[minimutly]

In days of old NG knew who was online and generating, and what load they had to fulfill. Now with solar and wind being such a massive input things are harder to predict. Add a bank holliday, corona lockdown, sunshine and wind, who knows.
DNOs are working on constraint systems but are way

 

[sako243]

I would think fluctuation in demand is one of the most basis things any power generation system would have a handle on

It is and it isn't. The problem with renewables is that they quite often kick in when they're not really needed. With the drive to be more renewable it's much more unpredictable. The other side of things is that the grid was designed for "fixed" location stations, i.e. big feeds powering the back-bone. Now every man and his dog is sticking up solar farms, wind farms etc., it's much more difficult to distribute effectively. One of my old lecturers was very heavily involved with trying to develop control systems for the national grid.

An entertaining story was Sizewell B was scheduled to go offline for maintenance / testing. During the test then a couple of other minor power plants went offline which was fine, there were contracts with other reserve plants to cover that. Then one of the nuclear reactors in Scotland went offline and they were stuffed. They had reserve but were not expecting the two largest nuclear plants go be offline simultaneously along with a couple of smaller ones.

So rather than have problems all over the country to fix, they played eni-menie-miny-mo and picked Northampton and Bedford to lose power . That way rather than having lots of issues all over the place due to the drop in demand it was all going to be localised in one area.

 

[WorkshopChris]

Green power has gone mad, a simple solution is to just turn off a few of the inverters that feed in the solar and rely more on big spinney heavy metal, problem solved in the short term
Why rely on green just for the sake of it, if the grid is at risk its not worth the eco brownie points.

 

[minimutly]

Can someone invent a dislike button?
Sorry @WorkshopChris this is the biggest head in the sand post ever.

 

[Gareth J]

Any excess energy from gshp is pumped back around the loop to recharge the ground for later, there is always a way to dump or store the energy, might just not be exactly obvious

This sounds a bit odd - I can't see anyone paying to run a gshp to warm up the ground, unless it's in order to cool the house in summer.

Unless it's maybe if you're on the octopus agile tarriff where, on the odd occasion prices go very close to zero, or even negative. At this point, the high losses involved in trying to heat up the earth, for recollection later might make sense?

Anymore info? Genuinely intrigued

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

Can someone invent a dislike button?
Sorry @WorkshopChris this is the biggest head in the sand post ever.

Why?

If there's too much water pouring in your bath you turn the taps off

Not like we can store it

 

[WorkshopChris]

Can someone invent a dislike button?
Sorry @WorkshopChris this is the biggest head in the sand post ever.

It's not at all head in the sand, I totally agree we need clean power but we need a functional grid, we already had an outage last year as a result of low frequency basically due to lack of inertia. wind and solar are fantastic but are progressing without any planning on load sharing and grid stability. In the short turn if we are facing an oversupply issue dump the least responsive feeds.