Eli5: how will a power grid that is mostly powered by many non synchronous renewable generators (solar and wind etc) remain stable, when the stability of the grid is currently reliant on the collective inertia of the large scale base load generators of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants?
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You can program an inverter (of a battery storage or wind turbine) so that you would not be able to distinguish it from a synchronous generator. That is probably overkill though, a much simpler control algorithm is likely sufficient.
By the way, PV inverters already reduce their output power when the frequency is going over a threshold (50.2 Hz here in Europe).
Also, inverters can react much faster than big power plants. So you don’t need as much inertia to keep the grid frequency stable. And the inertia that exist currently on the grid is already much more than really required. And there are still conventional generators like hydropower or pumped hydro storage, and in the future hydrogen gas turbines. That, together with frequency control in the inverters of battery storage, should be more than enough in most cases. And if that’s not the case, you still can keep “free running” synchronous generators on the grid to provide inertia. Those generators are already existing and are used as “phase shifters” to provide reactive current for example.
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