Not the dude you’ve been responding to, but I’m curious about the infrastructure and tech limitations just in attempt to be more educated.

Warning: GIANT WALL of text incoming. Buckle up.

We all know what happens when there isn’t enough power on the grid at a given moment: a blackout.

However, do you know what the extreme result of too much power on the grid is at a given moment? Also a blackout.

Curtailment

The term to start reading up on is “curtailment”. Its used in demand (consumption of electricity) but also supply (generating electricity). Meaning grid operators are always on a knife’s edge of generating just enough electricity on the grid without being too much. For a small amount of waste, they have ways to burn it off. Think giant space heaters running outside. The loss of money from that “burned off” electricity is there, but its not that big and its considered a cost of doing business. However, there isn’t much “burn off” capacity infrastructure. Historically there hasn’t needed to be.

Grid operators usually have systems of communication they use to contact their generation partners and ask for more juice to be produced, or more frequently these days telling them to hold off generation. At the grid level though, this isn’t like a light switch of “on and off” it can take many minutes or even hours for a grid scale generator to spin up or spin down generation. Also these systems aren’t meant to be rapidly spun up and down so it gets expensive to operate like that.

So up to know its just been the grid operator guessing demand needs and talking to a handful of generators to scale up and down. Now with massive amounts of electricity generated by thousands of smaller operators (residential as well as smaller commercial) there isn’t the same mechanism for the grid operators to halt production.

So what happens when there is a huge excess of electricity and that relatively small “burn off” capacity is quickly consumed? If that excess electricity is allowed through, things literally blow up in the electrical grid, in businesses, and in homes. Those gigawatts of electricity that cannot be allowed to exist on the grid. So grid operators can use another mechanism to try to burn off that excess electricity: negative electricity prices. They can pay people and businesses to use the excess. A note here, in the years and decades ahead, our society will evolve to use this excess more efficiently by timing high consumption at times of excess, but except in a few small examples, we just aren’t there yet. If there aren’t enough people taking money to use the electricity, the grid operator may have to cut off sections of grid to keep from blowing them up. Here’s the blackout from too much electricity. A full blackout also means coming back online later is a much slower process as sections of the grid are brought up slowly to make sure the demand can meet supply.

Even in state sponsored electrical grids (like I assume France is), grid operators are expected to cover their own costs at least when providing the electricity service to the state. So forget that they still have to maintain the grid with all its equipment and employees when electricity prices are at zero, during these peak times they’re having to pay people to use more electricity. So even if they were at break-even before, they’re now at a loss because they’ve had to give out money to use their service. Again, in the future societies and technologies (power storage) can address this, but we’re not in the future. We’re here today with these problems. At its extreme, how many of us will continue to work at if we aren’t receiving a paycheck?

Grid forming/Grid following

One other difference in grid scale generators vs many/most solar generators is the responsibility for forming the grid. This means, keeping the frequency (60Hz in the North America and half of Japan) (50Hz in most of the rest of the world and the other half of Japan). This is done by grid scale generators with GIANT spinning generators and are required by their mandate to make sure the frequency is always stable.

Imagine a game of tug-of-war. The grid scale operator would be the leader closest to the middle and the leader of the team. This is the grid former. All the solar producers are behind the leader all pulling at the leader’s instructions. These are the grid followers. So in the middle of a match it is clear that our team is losing and slowing being pulled toward the line. The grid followers don’t want to be hurt in the fall, so some of them start dropping the rope protecting themselves. As each one drops, the amount of force on the leader and those remaining increases. More team members drop the rope. The forces increase again! The leader cannot drop the rope because they are not allowed to even though they can see what’s coming and is eventually very violently pulled across the line and seriously hurt while all the team members (grid followers) are unharmed because they dropped the rope before anything bad happened to them.

This is what happened in Texas a year or so ago. The result was huge blackouts across the state.

This feels like something that should be celebrated regardless of needing to clean up and awareness to improve the grid and electrification moving forward.

It should be celebrated, but it should also be recognized that it creates its own set of problems. We can’t simply “take the win” and not make any changes. We’ve got systems set up for different circumstances and we haven’t change the system even though the circumstances have changed.