Double-damn you! Looks like a sleepless night ahead…
Our small community (20 people) has a 15 kW tractor-mount generator, wired in via an automatic backup switch.
We have 40 litres of petrol, plus whatever's in the tractor's tank. Should keep the pumps, lights, computers, and Starlink on for a week or so, if we don't run many heat-producing things for very long.
To be honest, I'd recommend taking the aviation industry approach to this incident: investigate, and create a report. And for us plebs, wait for that report.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying it's a complex system, and causes will not be singular.
The available technology at the time played a significant role.
Edison advocated a DC grid, but issues with commutators and slip rings, electric motors and the like led to the adoption of AC standards. The frequency was a compromise between the needs of industry and applications such as incandescent lighting.
Renewables are better suited for small, decentralized grids. Transporting electricity over large distances has always been an issue, but hydroelectric production and points of demand rarely exist side by side. Unless we're looking at micro-hydro.
Lastly, inverters and rectifiers are to be avoided when possible as they waste energy.
Simon Michaux has described the folly of a renewables driven electrical grid, requiring massive amounts of redundancy. In a word, it's not feasible.
Of course...engineers working in the field knew 40 years ago that renewables would increase costs and decrease reliability...But the Commissioners were inevitably going to base everything on politics, and did....
The Westinghouse-Edison AC-DC feud was resolved because AC made a large grid even possible.
Edison needed a generator about every mile, due to resistance losses in wires that were forced to operate at the end-user's voltage. All the current used by all the houses at a reasonable voltage had to be passed from generator to consumer at the same time, meaning wires had to be huge, using lots of copper.
George Westinghouse (with help from an employee named Tesla) solved that problem by stepping voltage up for transmission — meaning reasonably-sized conductors — and stepping it back down for consumption. This was only possible with transformers, which only work with AC.
Small, community-level DC systems, made from batteries and solar panels and/or micro wind or water turbines could work well, post-grid. But as Michaux also points out, there are not enough raw materials to make that work for everyone.
So get your system *now*, before everyone wants one! I'll be doing mine in the next year or so.
Thanks bob for bringing up hvdc into another wise good article, which unfortunately completely misses this is essential point. Hvdc was not only ignored in the article but it's the answer to the articles problem. A national grid backbone of hvdc all the eliminates the problems being discussed in this article. We were all taught in high school that DC doesn't work but the truth is HE DC is the only form of power that travels over long distances without meaningful loss. China has been doing this now for decades connecting their hydroelectric on the far west side of the country with the population centers on the east side of the country, thousands and thousands and thousands of miles of hVdc innerties. We here in the United States built our first hvdc intertie in the 1960s between Washington State and Los Angeles county. Look it up on wikipedia, it's called the Pacific intertie. We are so far behind in the US in large part because everyone is taught in high school that hvdc does not exist. The author is a good example of this, look at all he knows about electricity yet he never mentions hvdc.
Newer components are making HVDC feasible for shorter distances, so grid balancing may be possible - if a newer grid is ever built. We're still living in the age of megaprojects.
Cool, here is the Wikipedia page for the Pacific Intertie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie and here is a map of the HVDC intertie's in China: https://www.slideserve.com/fairly/the-tres-amigas-superstation HVDC is point-to-point but can be linked so that one node is connected to the next node across the US. So solar in Nevada or wind in Nebraska can power homes in Main. Additionally, HVDC serves as a balancing force for all the AC systems drawing their power from the larger HVDC grid. This would require a national policy while also requiring private utilities to compromise on their profit models. Not expecting it anytime soon.
Small, community-level DC systems, made from batteries and solar panels and/or micro wind or water turbines could work well, post-grid. But as Michaux also points out, there are not enough raw materials to make that work for everyone.
For a little while, but you won't have the means to replace them, as very little will be available, if at all.
Yes, it seems I need to preface everything I write here with, "For a certain period…"
I've so internalized that we're eventually going back to current photosynthesis for our only energy source, that I forget that people might take my suggested steps on that path as something that could possibly "preserve our way of life, forever".
On the way down, I'll take a bunch of solar panels, batteries, and bicycles any day.
After the batteries wear out in a few years, you can still use the solar panels directly for perhaps 40-50 years or more.
In such a case, I'd stock an extra regulator or two. At some point, they'll quit making electronic devices.
And it may be possible to rejuvenate lead-acid batteries for quite some time.
As well as living on current photosynthesis, we'll have to eventually live with current sunlight. But until solar panels degrade too much, you can still use them for tasks like pumping water during daylight.
It's the cost benefit of increasing scale. A 1,000 kW powerplant is less expensive per kW than 500 individual 2 kW plants and generation efficiencies are higher. This was especially true when the early grid was developed and the two major sources of electricity were hydro and steam plants. Hydro plants on large rivers must have a grid to deliver their output and hydro was a big part of early electricity generation.
The scale benefit is less with modern renewables, but it's still there. Cost per kWh output for a home-scale system is far higher than for large solar "farms" and gigantic wind turbines. But where there is no existing grid at all, renewable micro-grids, serving clusters of users, can be more cost effective than extending the grid to those clusters.
But even with conventional gas turbines, for example, larger loads can be served efficiently with their own separate generators. College campuses, data centers and military bases often have their own sources of generation. The electricity might be slightly more expensive than getting it from the larger grid, but they get to use the waste heat from the powerplant for heating buildings and water, which reduces overall costs.
If you think it’s hard finding competent people to work on these problems and operate these systems, just wait a few decades when all the current holders of such expertise start to retire. Many of them are already retired and what is coming after them isn’t pretty. Think about how much standards have been lowered in schools all across the country. The goal seems to be to get the students through high school and out the door whether they’ve learned anything or not. And then on to college where the degrees have been so watered down that a masters is now needed to show you have bachelors level knowledge and so on. How are employers going to know who to hire? Even medical and law schools are lowering their requirements for graduation. Woe to the person that needs a competent doctor (which is everyone sooner or later) or even a competent lawyer.
You are right on target. 10 years ago one of our daughters moved to Buenos Aires to attend university and get her Masters, after graduating from Northwestern. At one point I asked her how the University of Buenos Aires compared to Northwestern in terms of difficulty. Her answer was quick: It was a lot more difficult. For one thing, no grading on a curve. Moreover, there was much less support and the professors where more demanding. From what I have read, university in China is equally difficult/demanding.
This is most likely the result of a college diploma becoming what is in essence a "work chit" in the United States to apply for any job that pays higher than minimum wage (besides skilled trades), rather than what it was originally intended to be--advanced training for only a small portion of the workforce in professional fields like business, accounting, law, engineering or medicine.
I'm less concerned with expertise than I am with resources.
Doing a small battery-solar system isn't difficult to put together. Getting the rare-earth minerals together for *everyone* to have one just isn't going to work, though.
Doctors without oil? Doctors can't do anything without oil. Pharmaceuticals is produced i china and assembled around the world where the labour is cheep. Pharmaceuticals is produced from oil. Approximately 14 000 Pharmaceuticals 99% of them is made of oil.
Excellent piece of analysis! Another factor to throw in is the increasing stupidification of the American workforce, and indeed the American public...Are we going to have enough well qualified engineers to keep the system going, and manufacture and maintain the complex equipment in good order?..It isn't just DEI, it's schools that don't teach math and science because they're "hard."
The answer to that was to recruit engineers from India, where they built on the education system and standards inherited from the British. The UK only seems to produce dumbed-down media studies graduates these days..
I don't think this assertion is at all correct for America: "Since coal is in the process of being phased out both in Europe and in America thanks to its ever increasing extraction costs (ultimately due to the depletion of rich easy-to-get reserves)..." -- parts of Europe definitely yes. Coal has been downplayed in the US for political reasons using politically-motivated regulations, but not because of increasing extraction costs. Coal mining extraction costs in the US have, in fact, gradually gone down -- and net energy return on energy investment for US coal mining has actually increased -- because of mining method innovations/equipment like "continuous miners". See Figure 8 and Section 3.1 of this paper, https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.03.015, showing that energy return on energy invested for coal has been climbing for the last 20 years and has already reached a value of about 100, the high level of EROI that oil had when it was first tapped by man.
You might suspect that at first glance, but it turns out that it is technically and economically feasible to produce heavy oil fractions (e.g., diesel) from coal itself (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1743967123001356). In addition, electricity can also be used to power continuous miners (and other equipment) used in coal mining (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01445987241266084). In sum, things will change over time with regard to oil availability, but there are ready work-arounds that will make transitions more gradual, less abrupt.
Any way you cut it, at the end we'll run out of energy. In the interim, with all the remedies you are proposing, we'll suffer from ever-growing shortages.
I'm not proposing these as remedies, I am reporting that they are already at hand. Gives us humans more time to figure things out. Cumulatively, we're all a little slow and stubborn in the head, you know -- therefore can use the extra time mess around and work things out.
Your study states right in the introduction that they use a price-based methodology, which can never capture reality without accounting for geopolitics and global value chains. Prices are not determined by a neutral, incorporeal "market" hovering above society.
But even besides that, the US has about 30-40 years of economically extractable coal left.
"The cumulative results from the four PRB assessment areas are 24.5 BST of coal reserves and a total recoverable coal resource (coal reserve base) of 162 BST in coal beds greater than 5 ft in thickness and less than a 10:1 stripping ratio"
And that's a 'current' reserves calculation in only two states and does not include deposits that have yet to be drilled enough to provide data for reserves calculations.
It should be feasible to sync all sources to GPS signals. Solar/wind sources would use that to generate AC, and rotating sources could use a synthesized signal in place of grid feedback. There will be propagation delays -- the width of the US is ~1/60th of a second -- but the existing system also has this problem and has developed ways to handle it.
"The existing system" is really several systems. Texas has its own, for example.
Interesting you came up with 1/60th of a second… 1/2 of that amount is enough to cause a dead short!
No, grids have to be synchronized to milliseconds, which is not that difficult for rotating generators, as they self-synchronize through load minimization.
If you sync to GPS across 3,000 miles, you'll have a dead short from one end to the other! But even at 300 miles between power stations, you'll be turning too many amps into heat by synchronizing to satellites.
I guess you could factor in the known differences, but it's so much simpler just to let the rotating ones self-sync. Extra electronics in inverters can do the same by phase-locking.
I live 3 km from a 37 megawatt hydropower generator. It produces about ten times as much electricity as is used by the area's ~15,000 residents.
Yet, we were without electricity for 29 hours, last Christmas eve and Christmas.
A tree came down on a power pole next to a river, sending the 14,400 volt wires down into the water. This was a difficult thing to fix. BC Hydro had to first build a road to get the new pole to the fallen pole location!
I walked down to have a look. I counted *six* diesel-powered vehicles and other equipment. Plus, at least three gasoline-powered chain saws.
I live in an intentional community of ~20 people. Many of them had only electric heat pumps to keep their houses warm. Many simply abandoned the site to stay with relatives and friends.
The three-metre (10') diameter penstock runs about a 1.3 kilometres from here.
I fantasize about poking a hole in that penstock and running some 3" pipe to our location, where we could run our own Pelton-wheel generator, independent of the grid. :-)
"trying to resolve issues arising from an exponential increase in complexity by adding yet another layer of complexity (AI) is asking for more trouble." - Excellent point!
"“Renewables” — made entirely from non-renewable materials with coal oil and gas — on the other hand, produce direct current (DC)"
Minor nit, but my understanding is that utility-scale wind turbines operate synchronously. At least that's my impression from staring at a bunch of them over many minutes; they are all turning at exactly the same speed, even during gusty winds that would be expected to be at different speeds from end-to-end of a wind site with many turbines.
If course, that doesn't solve their "intermittancy" problem…
I've lived with off grid solar power for 15 years and installed and maintain the system myself. It's not merely an issue with frequency on the mains grid, but cool sunny days in spring around midday (which is the conditions at the time of the incident) can cause solar panels to produce more than their rated output. The home and business side of a transformer in the grid is notoriously difficult to manage with rooftop solar systems also sending out electricity into the grid - and as you noted supply and demand have to roughly equal. The voltage on the grid is meant to be stable in theory, but in practice it rises and falls depending upon demand and supply, but too much solar energy with not enough demand, can raise the voltage alarmingly tripping that part of the grid, with demand and supply issues then being caused further upstream as chunks of the grid switch off.
The grid tied inverters can match frequency sure, but they're not very good I believe at adjusting their output in accordance with the demand of the local grid. That trick requires some expensive electronics, and well, my best guess is that the underlying desire was to make the systems affordable. You see, to send electricity into the local grid, you have to push high voltage into the lower grid voltage. It really didn't matter when there were only a few systems attached to the grid. Now it matters. Off grid systems have to manage this aspect at all times, otherwise the batteries will pop. My best guess is that the next grid push will be for home batteries - the thinking probably is that the extra solar electricity I mentioned, is absorbed by those expensive items, and then the load on the grid at night is reduced. I presume the problem may only get worse, not better. It's a hippy technology, and probably is suitable for a hippy application.
Excerpt from "Mona": The building was new, from ‘32, after the Great Deregulation Act, after the power generation and distribution network of Colorado had been restructured and streamlined into two clear-cut monopolistic entities. The north with Denver went to the new United Power of Colorado, sometimes called Xcel by old folks, and the south with Colorado Springs was allotted to Black Hills Energy, each belonging to a big house. All city utility companies and rural cooperatives had been merged and hence dissolved for the greater good of sound competition between giants. Economies of scale. Many rural or mountain homes were not serviced, and a few communities in the west relied on their own small production, if they had retained the skill.
Laughlin gazed up at the large monitor’s colors, awash in the crude filthy lights of the control center hall. The blackout covered their entire district and west in the Rockies now. Denver was partially impaired. He asked, “Can we shut down more to spare Denver?” From the freshness of his office to the hell of the control room, he was starting a thermal shock, his forehead pearling, and the dark pieces of his hair raked on his scalp glistening.
“No, we can’t. We have nothing to shut down.” Mona thought with disgust, he doesn’t even know what he’s looking at on the screen. She had noticed, despite the rotating rationing, the huge spike in electricity demand in the afternoon, but this couldn’t be the only explanation. An electrical grid is a delicate balance of inputs and outputs with storage and traffic, high risks on the path of the juice if not tolerably weatherized or maintained. If anything, one single cause or a combination of contributing factors can easily cascade into an irreversible crash. Like a plane accident. Mona could think of more than ten of them, off the top of her head, these contributing factors. And indeed, the unified grid was crashing down now.
The western influx of power, the largest external source, had also dried out said the map on the screen. Then all the neon lights flickered, came back thrumming for a second, and died in the room. And all the monitors went dark. The dedicated power line had just failed. They hadn’t even provided a local generator with the right capacity, disregarding her advice. This was not a building to power like a house, and in any case, you should always foresee more power than you’d need at the prospect of an extended blackout. Mona saw immediately that the Data Acquisition System would be compromised, making the grid much harder to restart.
It was mid-afternoon, the hottest sweltering 125 degrees these days, and the light from the sun crept askew through the dust of the high rectangle-windows, cast oblong shadows across the vast hall behind appliances and pieces of equipment. Loughlin mopped his head, looking dismayed and more viscous than ever, overwhelmed by the accident, and how fast the network had unraveled. He pinched his phone from his breast pocket with a heavyhearted sigh. He always took the path of least resistance, with people upward, thought Mona. In that moment though, in feverish agitation, as traveled by a high voltage current.
copyrighted in 2020, Mona, Adam Flint in the book section of Amazon.
I you haven't, I urge you to read this book: Blackout - Marc Elsberg
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33369264-blackout
Damn you! There goes my evening.
The first 62 pages are gripping.
Double-damn you! Looks like a sleepless night ahead…
Our small community (20 people) has a 15 kW tractor-mount generator, wired in via an automatic backup switch.
We have 40 litres of petrol, plus whatever's in the tractor's tank. Should keep the pumps, lights, computers, and Starlink on for a week or so, if we don't run many heat-producing things for very long.
https://youtu.be/HaZF_aRkpMI?si=BeCc3Rv_ed8IlWJb
Hi, is there a final report as to the conditions leading to the blackout? The best I could find is the energy minister addressing lawmakers: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/power-generation-loss-spains-blackout-started-granada-badajoz-seville-2025-05-14/
To be honest, I'd recommend taking the aviation industry approach to this incident: investigate, and create a report. And for us plebs, wait for that report.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying it's a complex system, and causes will not be singular.
Following up, the report is up now :
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/06/spanish-blackout-report-power-plants-meant-to-stabilize-voltage-didnt/
Official govt summary (spanish)
https://mcusercontent.com/2702b812ce1f3e6da64933b9d/files/f543f912-b15e-d3ae-8a8a-e393bf6fdfb6/20250617_NdP_Se_presenta_el_informe_del_Comit_eacute__de_an_aacute_lisis_de_la.pdf
Official operator report:
https://d1n1o4zeyfu21r.cloudfront.net/WEB_Incident_%2028A_SpanishPeninsularElectricalSystem_18june25.pdf
The available technology at the time played a significant role.
Edison advocated a DC grid, but issues with commutators and slip rings, electric motors and the like led to the adoption of AC standards. The frequency was a compromise between the needs of industry and applications such as incandescent lighting.
Renewables are better suited for small, decentralized grids. Transporting electricity over large distances has always been an issue, but hydroelectric production and points of demand rarely exist side by side. Unless we're looking at micro-hydro.
Lastly, inverters and rectifiers are to be avoided when possible as they waste energy.
Simon Michaux has described the folly of a renewables driven electrical grid, requiring massive amounts of redundancy. In a word, it's not feasible.
Of course...engineers working in the field knew 40 years ago that renewables would increase costs and decrease reliability...But the Commissioners were inevitably going to base everything on politics, and did....
The Westinghouse-Edison AC-DC feud was resolved because AC made a large grid even possible.
Edison needed a generator about every mile, due to resistance losses in wires that were forced to operate at the end-user's voltage. All the current used by all the houses at a reasonable voltage had to be passed from generator to consumer at the same time, meaning wires had to be huge, using lots of copper.
George Westinghouse (with help from an employee named Tesla) solved that problem by stepping voltage up for transmission — meaning reasonably-sized conductors — and stepping it back down for consumption. This was only possible with transformers, which only work with AC.
Small, community-level DC systems, made from batteries and solar panels and/or micro wind or water turbines could work well, post-grid. But as Michaux also points out, there are not enough raw materials to make that work for everyone.
So get your system *now*, before everyone wants one! I'll be doing mine in the next year or so.
And yet, for really long distances, HVDC is more efficient.
There’s no ideal that will meet competing requirements. Everything is a compromise.
Yea, DC has no skin effect.
I think it's going to wind up highly distributed — with a lot lower load!
Thanks bob for bringing up hvdc into another wise good article, which unfortunately completely misses this is essential point. Hvdc was not only ignored in the article but it's the answer to the articles problem. A national grid backbone of hvdc all the eliminates the problems being discussed in this article. We were all taught in high school that DC doesn't work but the truth is HE DC is the only form of power that travels over long distances without meaningful loss. China has been doing this now for decades connecting their hydroelectric on the far west side of the country with the population centers on the east side of the country, thousands and thousands and thousands of miles of hVdc innerties. We here in the United States built our first hvdc intertie in the 1960s between Washington State and Los Angeles county. Look it up on wikipedia, it's called the Pacific intertie. We are so far behind in the US in large part because everyone is taught in high school that hvdc does not exist. The author is a good example of this, look at all he knows about electricity yet he never mentions hvdc.
What little I know about HVDC is based on a long distance line built in Manitoba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_River_DC_Transmission_System
Newer components are making HVDC feasible for shorter distances, so grid balancing may be possible - if a newer grid is ever built. We're still living in the age of megaprojects.
Cool, here is the Wikipedia page for the Pacific Intertie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie and here is a map of the HVDC intertie's in China: https://www.slideserve.com/fairly/the-tres-amigas-superstation HVDC is point-to-point but can be linked so that one node is connected to the next node across the US. So solar in Nevada or wind in Nebraska can power homes in Main. Additionally, HVDC serves as a balancing force for all the AC systems drawing their power from the larger HVDC grid. This would require a national policy while also requiring private utilities to compromise on their profit models. Not expecting it anytime soon.
This was informative, thanks!
Can you expand on the concept of power electronics replacing the distinction between utilities and consumer electronics?
The North American electrical grid needs a reliability upgrade, but politicians are more interested in blowing stuff up in distant lands.
Maybe we need a repeat of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
Small, community-level DC systems, made from batteries and solar panels and/or micro wind or water turbines could work well, post-grid. But as Michaux also points out, there are not enough raw materials to make that work for everyone.
For a little while, but you won't have the means to replace them, as very little will be available, if at all.
Yes, it seems I need to preface everything I write here with, "For a certain period…"
I've so internalized that we're eventually going back to current photosynthesis for our only energy source, that I forget that people might take my suggested steps on that path as something that could possibly "preserve our way of life, forever".
On the way down, I'll take a bunch of solar panels, batteries, and bicycles any day.
After the batteries wear out in a few years, you can still use the solar panels directly for perhaps 40-50 years or more.
In such a case, I'd stock an extra regulator or two. At some point, they'll quit making electronic devices.
And it may be possible to rejuvenate lead-acid batteries for quite some time.
As well as living on current photosynthesis, we'll have to eventually live with current sunlight. But until solar panels degrade too much, you can still use them for tasks like pumping water during daylight.
Honest question: how and why did we ever wind up with these massive grids? Why not just make a large number of smaller ones?
It's the cost benefit of increasing scale. A 1,000 kW powerplant is less expensive per kW than 500 individual 2 kW plants and generation efficiencies are higher. This was especially true when the early grid was developed and the two major sources of electricity were hydro and steam plants. Hydro plants on large rivers must have a grid to deliver their output and hydro was a big part of early electricity generation.
The scale benefit is less with modern renewables, but it's still there. Cost per kWh output for a home-scale system is far higher than for large solar "farms" and gigantic wind turbines. But where there is no existing grid at all, renewable micro-grids, serving clusters of users, can be more cost effective than extending the grid to those clusters.
But even with conventional gas turbines, for example, larger loads can be served efficiently with their own separate generators. College campuses, data centers and military bases often have their own sources of generation. The electricity might be slightly more expensive than getting it from the larger grid, but they get to use the waste heat from the powerplant for heating buildings and water, which reduces overall costs.
Fascinating and frightening, another reason why the drive to Net zero is madness. Thank you
If you think it’s hard finding competent people to work on these problems and operate these systems, just wait a few decades when all the current holders of such expertise start to retire. Many of them are already retired and what is coming after them isn’t pretty. Think about how much standards have been lowered in schools all across the country. The goal seems to be to get the students through high school and out the door whether they’ve learned anything or not. And then on to college where the degrees have been so watered down that a masters is now needed to show you have bachelors level knowledge and so on. How are employers going to know who to hire? Even medical and law schools are lowering their requirements for graduation. Woe to the person that needs a competent doctor (which is everyone sooner or later) or even a competent lawyer.
You are right on target. 10 years ago one of our daughters moved to Buenos Aires to attend university and get her Masters, after graduating from Northwestern. At one point I asked her how the University of Buenos Aires compared to Northwestern in terms of difficulty. Her answer was quick: It was a lot more difficult. For one thing, no grading on a curve. Moreover, there was much less support and the professors where more demanding. From what I have read, university in China is equally difficult/demanding.
This is most likely the result of a college diploma becoming what is in essence a "work chit" in the United States to apply for any job that pays higher than minimum wage (besides skilled trades), rather than what it was originally intended to be--advanced training for only a small portion of the workforce in professional fields like business, accounting, law, engineering or medicine.
I'm less concerned with expertise than I am with resources.
Doing a small battery-solar system isn't difficult to put together. Getting the rare-earth minerals together for *everyone* to have one just isn't going to work, though.
Doctors without oil? Doctors can't do anything without oil. Pharmaceuticals is produced i china and assembled around the world where the labour is cheep. Pharmaceuticals is produced from oil. Approximately 14 000 Pharmaceuticals 99% of them is made of oil.
We don't have decades.
Idiocracy is up and running now..
The waterfall model - inter-generational degeneration of competence
Another point of instability - political conflict. They are finding secret communication devices inside Chinese made inverters.
Excellent piece of analysis! Another factor to throw in is the increasing stupidification of the American workforce, and indeed the American public...Are we going to have enough well qualified engineers to keep the system going, and manufacture and maintain the complex equipment in good order?..It isn't just DEI, it's schools that don't teach math and science because they're "hard."
The answer to that was to recruit engineers from India, where they built on the education system and standards inherited from the British. The UK only seems to produce dumbed-down media studies graduates these days..
I don't think this assertion is at all correct for America: "Since coal is in the process of being phased out both in Europe and in America thanks to its ever increasing extraction costs (ultimately due to the depletion of rich easy-to-get reserves)..." -- parts of Europe definitely yes. Coal has been downplayed in the US for political reasons using politically-motivated regulations, but not because of increasing extraction costs. Coal mining extraction costs in the US have, in fact, gradually gone down -- and net energy return on energy investment for US coal mining has actually increased -- because of mining method innovations/equipment like "continuous miners". See Figure 8 and Section 3.1 of this paper, https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.03.015, showing that energy return on energy invested for coal has been climbing for the last 20 years and has already reached a value of about 100, the high level of EROI that oil had when it was first tapped by man.
Who cares how easy coal is extract. It's a killer.
It's going to be highly difficult to extract coal when available oil is gradually running out.
You might suspect that at first glance, but it turns out that it is technically and economically feasible to produce heavy oil fractions (e.g., diesel) from coal itself (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1743967123001356). In addition, electricity can also be used to power continuous miners (and other equipment) used in coal mining (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01445987241266084). In sum, things will change over time with regard to oil availability, but there are ready work-arounds that will make transitions more gradual, less abrupt.
"Produce heavy oil fractions (e.g., diesel) from coal."
That was done in WWII by the Germans, who had little access to oil. The process is highly energy consuming, with negative net energy effect.
There's no "transition" here, just weaning off cheap energy and gradual return to the stone age.
Any way you cut it, at the end we'll run out of energy. In the interim, with all the remedies you are proposing, we'll suffer from ever-growing shortages.
I'm not proposing these as remedies, I am reporting that they are already at hand. Gives us humans more time to figure things out. Cumulatively, we're all a little slow and stubborn in the head, you know -- therefore can use the extra time mess around and work things out.
Your study states right in the introduction that they use a price-based methodology, which can never capture reality without accounting for geopolitics and global value chains. Prices are not determined by a neutral, incorporeal "market" hovering above society.
But even besides that, the US has about 30-40 years of economically extractable coal left.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1809/pdf/pp1809.pdf
"The cumulative results from the four PRB assessment areas are 24.5 BST of coal reserves and a total recoverable coal resource (coal reserve base) of 162 BST in coal beds greater than 5 ft in thickness and less than a 10:1 stripping ratio"
And that's a 'current' reserves calculation in only two states and does not include deposits that have yet to be drilled enough to provide data for reserves calculations.
It should be feasible to sync all sources to GPS signals. Solar/wind sources would use that to generate AC, and rotating sources could use a synthesized signal in place of grid feedback. There will be propagation delays -- the width of the US is ~1/60th of a second -- but the existing system also has this problem and has developed ways to handle it.
"The existing system" is really several systems. Texas has its own, for example.
Interesting you came up with 1/60th of a second… 1/2 of that amount is enough to cause a dead short!
No, grids have to be synchronized to milliseconds, which is not that difficult for rotating generators, as they self-synchronize through load minimization.
1/60 = 3000 miles / Speed of light.
My point exactly!
If you sync to GPS across 3,000 miles, you'll have a dead short from one end to the other! But even at 300 miles between power stations, you'll be turning too many amps into heat by synchronizing to satellites.
I guess you could factor in the known differences, but it's so much simpler just to let the rotating ones self-sync. Extra electronics in inverters can do the same by phase-locking.
A nice discussion of the problem here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16536121
I live 3 km from a 37 megawatt hydropower generator. It produces about ten times as much electricity as is used by the area's ~15,000 residents.
Yet, we were without electricity for 29 hours, last Christmas eve and Christmas.
A tree came down on a power pole next to a river, sending the 14,400 volt wires down into the water. This was a difficult thing to fix. BC Hydro had to first build a road to get the new pole to the fallen pole location!
I walked down to have a look. I counted *six* diesel-powered vehicles and other equipment. Plus, at least three gasoline-powered chain saws.
I live in an intentional community of ~20 people. Many of them had only electric heat pumps to keep their houses warm. Many simply abandoned the site to stay with relatives and friends.
The three-metre (10') diameter penstock runs about a 1.3 kilometres from here.
I fantasize about poking a hole in that penstock and running some 3" pipe to our location, where we could run our own Pelton-wheel generator, independent of the grid. :-)
"trying to resolve issues arising from an exponential increase in complexity by adding yet another layer of complexity (AI) is asking for more trouble." - Excellent point!
Excellent, timely and well researched.
"“Renewables” — made entirely from non-renewable materials with coal oil and gas — on the other hand, produce direct current (DC)"
Minor nit, but my understanding is that utility-scale wind turbines operate synchronously. At least that's my impression from staring at a bunch of them over many minutes; they are all turning at exactly the same speed, even during gusty winds that would be expected to be at different speeds from end-to-end of a wind site with many turbines.
If course, that doesn't solve their "intermittancy" problem…
Hi B,
I've lived with off grid solar power for 15 years and installed and maintain the system myself. It's not merely an issue with frequency on the mains grid, but cool sunny days in spring around midday (which is the conditions at the time of the incident) can cause solar panels to produce more than their rated output. The home and business side of a transformer in the grid is notoriously difficult to manage with rooftop solar systems also sending out electricity into the grid - and as you noted supply and demand have to roughly equal. The voltage on the grid is meant to be stable in theory, but in practice it rises and falls depending upon demand and supply, but too much solar energy with not enough demand, can raise the voltage alarmingly tripping that part of the grid, with demand and supply issues then being caused further upstream as chunks of the grid switch off.
The grid tied inverters can match frequency sure, but they're not very good I believe at adjusting their output in accordance with the demand of the local grid. That trick requires some expensive electronics, and well, my best guess is that the underlying desire was to make the systems affordable. You see, to send electricity into the local grid, you have to push high voltage into the lower grid voltage. It really didn't matter when there were only a few systems attached to the grid. Now it matters. Off grid systems have to manage this aspect at all times, otherwise the batteries will pop. My best guess is that the next grid push will be for home batteries - the thinking probably is that the extra solar electricity I mentioned, is absorbed by those expensive items, and then the load on the grid at night is reduced. I presume the problem may only get worse, not better. It's a hippy technology, and probably is suitable for a hippy application.
Cheers. Chris
Excerpt from "Mona": The building was new, from ‘32, after the Great Deregulation Act, after the power generation and distribution network of Colorado had been restructured and streamlined into two clear-cut monopolistic entities. The north with Denver went to the new United Power of Colorado, sometimes called Xcel by old folks, and the south with Colorado Springs was allotted to Black Hills Energy, each belonging to a big house. All city utility companies and rural cooperatives had been merged and hence dissolved for the greater good of sound competition between giants. Economies of scale. Many rural or mountain homes were not serviced, and a few communities in the west relied on their own small production, if they had retained the skill.
Laughlin gazed up at the large monitor’s colors, awash in the crude filthy lights of the control center hall. The blackout covered their entire district and west in the Rockies now. Denver was partially impaired. He asked, “Can we shut down more to spare Denver?” From the freshness of his office to the hell of the control room, he was starting a thermal shock, his forehead pearling, and the dark pieces of his hair raked on his scalp glistening.
“No, we can’t. We have nothing to shut down.” Mona thought with disgust, he doesn’t even know what he’s looking at on the screen. She had noticed, despite the rotating rationing, the huge spike in electricity demand in the afternoon, but this couldn’t be the only explanation. An electrical grid is a delicate balance of inputs and outputs with storage and traffic, high risks on the path of the juice if not tolerably weatherized or maintained. If anything, one single cause or a combination of contributing factors can easily cascade into an irreversible crash. Like a plane accident. Mona could think of more than ten of them, off the top of her head, these contributing factors. And indeed, the unified grid was crashing down now.
The western influx of power, the largest external source, had also dried out said the map on the screen. Then all the neon lights flickered, came back thrumming for a second, and died in the room. And all the monitors went dark. The dedicated power line had just failed. They hadn’t even provided a local generator with the right capacity, disregarding her advice. This was not a building to power like a house, and in any case, you should always foresee more power than you’d need at the prospect of an extended blackout. Mona saw immediately that the Data Acquisition System would be compromised, making the grid much harder to restart.
It was mid-afternoon, the hottest sweltering 125 degrees these days, and the light from the sun crept askew through the dust of the high rectangle-windows, cast oblong shadows across the vast hall behind appliances and pieces of equipment. Loughlin mopped his head, looking dismayed and more viscous than ever, overwhelmed by the accident, and how fast the network had unraveled. He pinched his phone from his breast pocket with a heavyhearted sigh. He always took the path of least resistance, with people upward, thought Mona. In that moment though, in feverish agitation, as traveled by a high voltage current.
copyrighted in 2020, Mona, Adam Flint in the book section of Amazon.