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I don't know much about electrical grids, but I'm wondering if something like this concept could help South Africa with its endlessly struggling electrical grid problems. My city constantly has power outages and the majority of people cannot afford installing solar into their homes.
It is not necessary for the majority to install solar.
Pakistan had similar problems with rolling blackouts, and mass import of photovoltaic equipment and batteries from China has reduced the load on the grid so that outages no longer occur frequently. In fact the demand has shrunk so much that it jeopardizes financing of coal power companies.
From what I understand, South Africa's electrical problems have been long term political.
That's the case everywhere in the world, it's not a tech issue. The tech exists.
Is this more of a battery cost issue - if you owned a battery that charged off the grid and discharged during blackout periods then that might just about cover you if you budget for the expected outage duration.... And assuming you can afford said battery in the first place.
Depends on the length of the blackouts, if it's more than a day then solar panels will allow you to lower the amount of batteries you get.
I love solar, but this "those who can afford microgrids can shield themselves from blackouts" paired with net metering where "the wealthy get paid a premium for excess generation and can buy expensive high-demand power back at a discount" probably aren't steps on the path to improved grid resiliency for any definition other than this weird "no island-wide outages" definition.
The alternative way to look at it is that early adopters get the volume up such that the price comes down to where more people can afford it?
Solar panels are already so cheap that household solar is mostly about the installation price.
And more people affording their own panels is still a lot more expensive than fixing the grid.
This doesn't solve the issue of either storage or continous (and controllable) supply.
Solar output is also proportionate to area of sunlight projection. This means the theoretical capacity available to you is proportionate to real estate, area of planetary surface, under your ownership.
And the area you own is theoretical proportionate to your avaibale money.
So yes, rich people can obviously have more of it all, like with everything else that money can buy. But is this really a point worth going in deeper here?
I see the point as in "solar power plus battery is good", creates resillence, please more of it.
Unfair distribution of wealth is a different problem.
And here concreteley the article lacks for me details, what exactly the work on the grid means, if it is really about fossils vs solar, but microgrids that can connect to each other sounds like a pragmatic solution to me.
Microgrids at that size are the most expensive way to get resilience. If they're pragmatic for many people then something has failed and we should work to fix it.
Bigger ones have a better tradeoffs, so I'm not so harsh on towns having their own grids. Still unsure whether it's a good use of funds.
> Unfair distribution of wealth is a different problem
Unfortunately, all problems are eventually going to come down to this. Or many problems are, if not "all"
We can't fix a lot of the problems facing our society and our planet with "only wealthy can afford this" solutions
"We can't fix a lot of the problems facing our society and our planet with "only wealthy can afford this" solutions"
And I think, we can't fix a lot of technical problems if we make everything about money distribution.
Besides, solar plus battery became really cheap. And get cheaper every day.
And this work to connect such microgrids is potentially beneficial for poor areas all around the world.
But no, it doesn't solve the issue of extreme poverty, but why would it?
It depends on the terms of the net metering.
If it's the ancient practice of crediting on a one for one basis, yeah that doesn't help. (A look around says that's probably where PR is now). If they credit power delivered to the grid based on conditions when it was delivered, then that might help. With appropriate controls, storage can increase grid stability. It would probably be more cost effective to do utility scale storage projects, but project management is difficult in PR; letting those with personal capital hook up solar+batteries and send some of that onto the grid when demand is high seems useful?
Agreed. From first hand experience, even for regulated electricity markets, games get played to maximize profit per power generated that are directly making stability worse. Fixing these loop holes is hard for the regulator since they are instructed to encourage both increased renewable penetration and stability, despite traders/operators/producers not acting in good faith and just gaming whatever they can.
A healthy regulated will encourage maximizing profit for power and bring in competition which drives the cost down until energy is a commodity and the cost of electricity is actually based on the price of production and a small profit based on the cost of capital. Any situations that cause price spikes result in investment to harvest the difference.
The fact that you can add to the grid by installing solar and battery and connect to the grid in a single afternoon makes it pretty easy these days to have an elastic market that grows until you hit the limit of decentralized production vs. existing transmission architecture... but with the right equipment you can have community sized islands that can be much more immune to instability.
Net metering is gone in most of California (for new solar). I think it's going away in general. Distributed solar supports a more stable grid for everyone (per UL 1741-SB requirements).
the article is about Puerto Rico, not California, and specifically mentions net metering.
I think the poster’s point is that net metering is a tool to promote early adoption of solar, and (in at least one prominent example) when solar penetration becomes high enough for it to impact grid stability, larger grids have removed net metering. So to address GP poster’s point: net metering affecting grid stability in a substantial way is more a theoretical concern that’s already been addressed in one of the locations where it stopped being theoretical.
Based on what I see in the photo in the article, PV array codes in Puerto Rico must be quite different from those in California, because the arrays seem to cover almost the entirety of the roofs. In California fire access codes [1] prevent the entire roof from being covered like in PV that.
1. https://energycodeace.com/site/custom/public/reference-ace-2...
From what I understand, most homes that are connected to both solar and the grid require the grid to be active to produce solar. This is for two reasons. One, not to endanger lineman working on the grid. And two, the solar AC cycle must be synchronized with the grid AC cycle.
Are these homes not also connected to the grid? Or is there some technology that addresses these two issues that are in use in Puerto Rico?
I think you're looking for the term "islanding".
It's becoming more and more common for PV systems with a battery system to be able to work in an islanded mode, and more importantly - they're legal and code compliant to do so.
When the grid goes down/out of spec, they disconnect the home from the grid and continue to power locally.
Examples of this include Tesla and Sigenergy.
Some are able to do this in very short periods and able to operate effectively as a whole-house UPS. Some will have a flickr of the lights and maybe some sensitive devices will restart. Others will take some period of time to disconnect from the grid and run in islanded mode.
For general interest, Western Australia's State Power company has a variety of battery application cases that it assists with; home batteries, community batteries, fully stand alone, microgrids (with batteries).
https://www.westernpower.com.au/resources-education/consumer...
https://www.wa.gov.au/organisation/energy-policy-wa/wa-resid...
West and South Australia are a fair way down the integrated renewables pathway with a high percentage of household rooftop solar, mixed rural PV farms, wind power, battery farms, etc.
If you use a string inverter not a emphase style microinverter, most of them are capable of running without the grid- Particularly if you add any sort of battery system.
These use a form of transfer switch like you’d use when you connect a generator- they disconnect the upstream.
You can run sans grid with Enphase (with their "system controller").
This is true, but if you add in local batteries attached to the solar, you can have a device that works in basically all situations. If disconnected from the grid, it can run off battery instead of just not working.
I haven't read the OP link yet, but my guess is they are doing something like this: Grid, Solar and batteries.
"Grid, Solar and batteries."
They are doing microgrids, that connect to each other.
If your home is isolated from the grid you don't have to worry about syncing your 50/60 Hz. A UPS during a blackout is an example. I experienced it myself.
I have no idea about the hurdles of keeping in sync many batteries in many homes connected together. This is not even something I thought about before the news of the blackout in Spain months ago.
Keeping in sync isn't as much of a problem as you might think, it simply requires that everything able to feed into the grid has to accept the grid as authoritative for syncing.
Relevant are some of Chris Boden's videos about bringing up a hydro power plant and his comment that you have to be in sync with the grid when you actually connect because the turbine WILL sync to the grid at connection and if it was incorrect before then there will be a lot of loud angry noises from the equipment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGQxSJmadm0
Microgrids use specialized inverters with islanding capability and automatic transfer switches that disconnect from the main grid during outages, allowing them to operate independently while maintaining their own frequency regulation.
It's just a coordination problem.
You are also sort of conflating "loss of interconnect" with "outage'.
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