Re:“Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects
by tsimionescu on Monday May 16, 2022 @04:24PM
(#31402749)
> There are plenty of grids with wide deployment of community solar, which are also unknown-capacity, unknown-delivery.
There are some important differences. For one, those are using bespoke new batteries, not used car batteries. For another, the battery storage is not concentrated, so much lower risk of fires spreading from battery to battery (which you've ignored).
For a third, if a battery fails, it's most likely going to be the house whose battery has failed that loses power if the grid was at its limit, it won't be a whole neighborhood, nor some industrial plant.
Finally, I would be quite surprised if there is any significant power grid where any industrial consumer would be at a risk of losing power even if all community batteries were to be unplugged from the network (ignoring the effects of a sudden surge, like in the oven example, of course).
At scale, everything becomes more predictable, because individual failures no longer have much impact.
Battery operators also will configure their systems to make money, so they will in fact have a big incentive to buy power when it's cheap and sell when expensive, so they will form a strong stabilising force. (unlike say solar, where operators don't track the price and just inject whatever power they produce, even if the spot price of electricity might occasionally go negative, and when it is negative, there is unconstrained overproduction)