Ah! Perhaps you are a member of the gigawatt club? Eligible for entry once you have accidentally tripped off 1000 MW of load or generation! No sweeping that under the table
You brought back a memory, a second hand one, but still a great story. A guy I knew long ago had emigrated from NZ to NL. His main claim to fame in NZ was that one day he showed up drunk for work. In itself this wouldn't have been memorable, if it wasn't for his job, which was to manage a relatively small hydro plant on one of three shifts. On that particular day the plant had to be brought back online after being out for service and since it was really old the synchronization was manual. You had to control the flow of the water, monitor two concentric spinning wheels with the one driven by the grid and the other driven by the local genny and when the phase markings were lined up 'just so' you had to engage this frankenstein level switch to couple the grid to the generator and from there on inertia did it's thing so you could open up the gate to allow more water so the generator would start leading the grid effectively generating power.
Any kid could do it. Probably. But not a drunk one and instead of waiting long enough for both wheels to stay synchronized indicating there would be only a small jump in phase he just said f* it and connected the two anyway. Predictably, this led to a serious disturbance to the grid which in turn caused a whole lot of other stuff to disengage. Since his chances for re-employment on account of his new-found fame were somewhat minimal he decided to emigrate instead :)
I'm the idiot that sent a fairly high voltage spike into the grid setting off a cascade. Even years later I do not fully understand how it could happen, you'd think the grid would be low impedance enough to absorb a spike like that. But it set off a cascade on a part of the local grid that was known to be weak.
I've done it. The larger the grid, the more difficult it is. But as long as you have fuel and an adequately maintained grid, its not as hard as some in the comments make it out to be. Better regulation would make it easier. For instance, in Singapore emergency diesel or some other method for black start is a requirement for most generation stations. The rest of the world likely has more lax requirements.
I’ve done small systems less than 2 MW with 2-3 generators, a mix of hydro and diesel, and only distribution level voltages.
It seems like you would black start some plant using its backup diesel generator to power pumps and controls, probably synchronize at least two units at the plant, then pick up some part of the transmission system. Perhaps the capacitance of the grid is and issue when it is unloaded, so the trick is to make sure enough real and reactive capacity is online for each subsequent transmission or load step. Probably a lot of transmission steps come with a significant amount of load too - not just picking up unloaded transmission lines. Sounds really fun, banging all the governors and exciters with once in a decade load steps
How does residential solar increase grid stability?
The “Stability” of a power system would relate to the ability to withstand changes in load conditions. I don’t see how residential solar contributes positively to that.
A downside to these schemes is that the stability of the electric system now also depends on large communication networks and some computer solving some algorithm. I can imagine the outages. I prefer my power outages to be caused by good old fashioned weather rather than Hadoop kubernetes cluster operator eventually consistent race error.
“Nodal pricing” exists in several markets but isn’t often used. One example is in Ontario the nodal price in Thunder Bay was always very low since industry there had collapsed but there were still three coal fired power plants. They could bid a low price so it would be accepted, and due to low local demand the supply and demand solved for a low price in Thunder Bay, but due to transmission constraints all of the bidders could not generate what they bid, so they would have to be constrained off. I can’t recall if they got a payment for the power they weren’t able to generate.
I think it is different than other commodities since it is very expensive to store electricity. A diesel powered generator and tank full of diesel is probably the best option.
Anyone that needs access to cheap power. So, basically anyone with high energy bills. That's why there's going to be a surplus.
People put solar on their roof not to get rich from selling power back to the grid (though that is a nice incentive) but to avoid having to buy expensive power from the grid. For the same reason factories might put solar panels on their roofs. Car charging companies might invest in some solar panels, etc. And of course power companies themselves also like the idea of swapping out expensive gas generators for solar panels plus batteries.
>The overprovisioning of solar is going to create so much cheap surplus energy during summer and during the day
I associated this cheap power during summer days as when prices approach zero or even go negative. Power you have to pay to have somebody take is worse than worthless!
So some days the power is cheap but it still costs a lot for transformers, grid interconnections, power lines, battery systems if you want power on a cloudy day, so any solar farm that gets built has to cover financing of those costs, which means power is also expensive some of the time.
We can’t both have power so cheap we can dream up ways to use it when it is practically free and also be able to pay for it to be built and maintained.
