>The unprecedented market rally highlights how volatile the Texas power market has become as coal-fired power plants, which have seen their profits squeezed by cheap natural gas and renewable energy resources, continue to close. Texas’s grid operator has been warning for months that plant retirements and increasing electricity demand has left it with slim supply margins.
>This week’s price spikes also underscore how dependent the region’s power grid has become on wind farms, which now make up about a quarter of the generation capacity in Texas. Lackluster breezes have contributed to the higher prices, Hehir said.
This is one of the downsides of the push to "green" energy. While wind and solar are great, there can be significant variability. Unfortunately, battery tech is not there yet to help with the supply-demand mismatches.
"Unfortunately, battery tech is not there yet to help with the supply-demand mismatches."
Isn't this the situation that Elon's battery in South Australia was built to handle? From what I understand, it's been profitable and successful.
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Without something to handle soaring peaks, a friend of mine who works in energy described the power landscape as like needing a 100-lane wide bridge to deal with peak-hour crossing a city river.
The South Australia battery is profitable because it solves the problem of changes in demand over a period of seconds or minutes, filling the gaps while a larger fossil fuel plant manually ramps up to take over the load.
It’s critically important and far more costly to do in other ways.
From the article, it seems they're dealing with demand fluctuations of 1000-3000 MW within a given hour (2PM was the example), so I think it's really working on a totally different scale. Even 10x as many batteries wouldn't be able to smooth that load fluctuation.
I think they actually just need more solar power - try to keep the two technologies approx even.
To a first approximation they are complementary and generate power at opposite time periods (stormy windy weather has clouds, hot dry weather has no wind but does have lots of sun).
I agree but solar would only partially address the Texas problem. Texas is so humid right now that it doesn't cool down at night, so people have to run air conditioners all night long.
>This week’s price spikes also underscore how dependent the region’s power grid has become on wind farms, which now make up about a quarter of the generation capacity in Texas. Lackluster breezes have contributed to the higher prices, Hehir said.
This is one of the downsides of the push to "green" energy. While wind and solar are great, there can be significant variability. Unfortunately, battery tech is not there yet to help with the supply-demand mismatches.