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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This is actually an interesting question, but it’s pretty hilarious to ask for an “ELI5” answer to a question that you need an engineering degree to understand 🙂
Something tells me the OP is against renewable energy, and believes he knows why they’ll never work.
The inverters can match the grid, they “listen”and time the ramp and then come in with the ramp of the first phase and then go in sync! I know I build out utility scale solar farms! iirc it’s 15 minutes in between that first ramp and then they come up after!
And that is the issue, it cant. Hence, the need for peeker plants to supply power when renewable is not available. And starting/stopping peeker plants adds way more pollution than just running them at a steady state.
The real solution are nuclear plants to provide a solid base.
When you have thousands of point of generation, the highs and lows cancel each other out. With more and more electric cars, those batteries can be used to stabilize the grid. In addition, various kinds of electricity demand (refrigeration, car charging) aren’t as time sensitive and can be turned on and off as demand spikes. Finally, virtually every grid is stabilized by hydro.
Pumped water storage.
You have two big lakes at different heights and either use energy to pump the water up, or generate energy from the water flowing down.
It can react in less than five minutes. And is 80% efficient (better than batteries).
Shorter fluctuations can be handled by battery storage.
It simply won’t, if you consider nuclear not in the allowed energy sources. You will always need a source that doesn’t change on some uncontrollable factor like a cloud covering the sun or the wind not blowing. As of today it’s nuclear by fission, some day we probably will be able to use fusion.
It’s backeup by gas power station.
Green energy is fake, thats why the gas companies don’t resist clean energy. Because every solar panel have to be backed up by gas power plant in case there is no sun
Storage is one strategy, for example if I had a solar roof and a battery (the ones they make for homes these days can hold enough juice to definitely run the house at night/through cloudy days), I’d be all set.
The majority of global grid battery storage is for grid frequency and phase stability to prevent brown outs rather than for ‘powering’ the grid. The battery storage and attached inverter acts like an electronic fly wheel. Possibly the most famous (or infamous) is the one installed by Tesla in Australia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
In a hypothetical world without any large spinning generators to maintain grid stability we could use lots of these grid storage plants to maintain a stable grid.
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