cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17558715
It’s not just base load, turbines also provide grid stability. All the quick fluctuations as people turn things on and off are hard to load balance with solar, wind, or battery. A big spinning turbine has a lot of inertia. That helps keep thr grid at a constant frequency. As solar gets bigger and bigger we might need big solar powdered flywheel generators just to stabilize the grid.
Inverters could also provide “virtual inertia” which help to stabilize the grid frequency. However most of today’s inverters don’t have it, or it’s disabled.
This means we don’t need solar powered flywheels, which are inherently inefficient, we just need software (edit: and batteries of course) more or less.
Partially. Inverters providing virtual inertia is good but has the problem of still being active and reactive. It helps and is cheaper and more efficient than flywheels.
Flywheels and turbines however provide a very sticky frequency. They help out a lot with stability and give inverters time to respond.
Think balancing a stick on your hand vs anchoring it in clay.
If we take enough turbines off line we are still probably going to need some mechanical power stabilization no matter how inefficient.
But yeah I think we are going to see a blend using as much electrical and as little mechanical as possible.
The other side of that is matching supply to demand is basically instant. You pull power from batteries and they give you more (provided they’re not at their safe limit). There’s always a lag in getting turbines to spin up and down, and so there’s a non-trivial mismatch time.
Actually no. Batteries and thier inverter adapt in the about one second to half a second range. The massive inertia of a turbine adapts in the millisecond range.
To maintain 60 hz you need to be in the very low milliseconds range. Remember at 60 hz you do a full sin wave cycle in 16ms.
Turbines act as a tremendous power smoother in the grid.
The main issue with using batteries for load balancing is the massive resource investment required for them at a grid level, BUT that’s more of a concern with lithium based batteries due to a number of factors. Sodium batteries use way more easily accessible and abundant materials.
NGL I’m hella fuckin hyped about sodium batteries vs lithium batteries.
