Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
by gwright on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @07:20PM
(#26160853)
> These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled out only wind from that.
I wasn't trying to call out wind. I just should have said "intermittent'
17GW seems like a strange unit for storage. That should be GWh I think. So my question would be for the demand that exists right now in Texas, how long would those batteries been successful in providing power to delay the rolling blackouts?
My understanding is that batteries are mainly used in grids to react to short term demand changes and not to continuously feed energy into the grid.
Totally willing to be educated on this though. I'm not an expert.
These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled out only wind from that.
We do have reasonable grid-scale power storage, last year there were 17GW of batteries in the interconnection queue for ERCOT alone, from independent investors. The major holdup from this happening, say, 5 years ago, were ERCOT regulations that made it hard to be both a generator and a consumer on the grid. But there are huge arbitrage opportunities on ERCOT because of the huge price swings, which make it a perfect place for batteries. Other energy markets, like PJM, which have capacity markets in addition to energy markets, will also see huge amounts of batteries installed since FERC order 841 forced all grid operators to allow batteries to compete.
Other regulated utilities will only install batteries when they are forced to by their regulators. As a money-saving device, it's generally bad for utilities' profits, and it also requires them to learn something new. Far more profitable to rate-base unnecessary transmission or another natural gas plant that will never be fully used.