Texas power issues. Windfarms getting iced up. 67

[Alistair_Heaton]

That's a lot of capacity that's been lost. Must admit being Aberdonian we always associate Texas with hot and humid... Not snow storms.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...nd-turbines-texas-power-outages-b1802596.html

 

[dik]

The tan and the brown are really bad... and will have to be phased out in the immediate future...

Rather than think climate change and the corona virus as science, think of it as the wrath of God. Feel any better?

-Dik

 

[dik]

Most difficult driving condition... and dangerous...

Rather than think climate change and the corona virus as science, think of it as the wrath of God. Feel any better?

-Dik

 

[davidbeach]

...and rips electrical systems apart.

I’ll see your silver lining and raise you two black clouds. - Protection Operations

 

[Fischstabchen]

Cranky,

Batteries are being used already for peaking service in the U.S. The PUC in California turned down applications for peaking units for battery storage. In Miso, the fiscal parity point is looking to be around 2025. Battery storage being used as peaker generation is going to be more a reality as Li-ion prices drop.

You always had spinning reserves and you need them with wind and solar. The larger the footprint of wind or solar, the less variability there is in the forecast. Wind turbines in ERCOT feather their blades to reducing ramping. The grid was almost taken down in 2009 with hard ramp rates. It is better but areas with high penetration like NC and CA do have frequency control problems. No longer having as much system inertia is a problem that hasn't been solved. The newer wind turbines use power electronics in how they are connected to the grid and supposedly can supply artificial inertia but nothing is simpler than tons of steel spinning.

This is idea that units ran all out at 100% isn't really accurate. The markets in MISO and ERCOT close out with reliability taking presentent over price. That is why you will see very efficient units not running all out all the time. I believe all ISO regions run state estimators and do continuous real time contingency analysis.

 

[byrdj]

Mainly OVERHEAD power lines.
the buried, not so much

 

[miningman]

WE all know double posting is frowned upon , but I would ask that I be cut a bit of slack on this one. Post Texas , I believe this post deserves wide exposure and would really interested in suggestions.

https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=479718

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

We used to have army vehicles that were capable of doing this to charge radio power packs. And they were being used 40 years ago.

There was a hand throttle in the front that you could set. They pumped out 24V. It would be relatively easy to exchange the battery charger for an inverter on the end of the output.

We used to call them Clansmen rovers. They had a beefed up generator on them.

Found a pic of the back of them. The black box at the bottom had the "hotel" batteries in them for internal use and there was a plug at the back that you could plug the command post setup into. But from memory it used hellish amounts of fuel.

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

Fischstabchen I think they are going to bring in mandatory dynamic reactive production control controlled by ripple receivers on solar in Germany if its not already come in at small producer level.

My German made inverter can do it and they can vary it between a power factor of 0.8-1-0.8 I don't have the ripple receiver. There has been news emails coming out from them about it and improvements in the system but only in German. They have a smart meter which goes on the feed in link. And they have now set things up via ethernet so you can control and it can control the whole site. Before you needed one smart meter per inverter and things could get into a funny oscillating mode as they all did there own thing. With this they all get set to the same what ever the power company wants it to be not just to track 1

 

[davefitz]

I think the recent Texas power fiasco was greatly worsened by the loss of natural gas capacity, as the backup power supply of gas fired combustion turbines could not provide the needed power. A similar loss of natural gas supply used to be common in Florida due to hurricane disruption of supplies sourced from the gulf of mexico gas rigs and undersea pipelines.

To address this, Florida had mandated all gas turbine plants to be "dual fuel" and to have a large storage tank of low sulphur oil to carryover the plant for a few days of hurricane gas disruption. In Texas, the same solution could be implemented if it is less costly than retrofitting the gas wells and gas treatment facilities for frigid conditions. The oil tanks could be filled during a low point of oil cost that may occur in the summer.

"...when logic, and proportion, have fallen, sloppy dead..." Grace Slick

 

[RedSnake]

We have started to build up systems that uses electrical car batteries as backup and contributing to balancing.
When the cars are parked and connected to the grid for charging, they can also deliver power back to the grid if needed.
Right now I think it is mostly done by larger companies with there own parking garage and car fleets.
When it is high peak during the day, the cars delivers power to the grid and when the demands is less high they charge.
At a power outage they can keep the building powered.
I think this also will be a more utilized when there is more electric cars out there.

Best Regards A

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

A bit of amusement....

Taken from a solar forums. Everyone getting very excited about the possibility of having a self charging car

I banged out after getting flamed for mentioning the second law of thermo and suggesting googling perpetual motion machines. And my only supporter was someone saying it won't work because the earth is flat......

Apparently having this fitted would have solved the Texas power issues.

 

[RedSnake]

There where the same discussion /augmenting involved with electric bicycles.
Someone sade they had made a self charging bicycles.
Someone else sade you can't claimed it's self charging.
Which the manufacturer never really claimed, the bike charged the battery in downhill slopes which meant you didn't have to charge the battery as often with grid power.

BR A

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

I think EV's have regeneration systems in them anyway with braking and going down hill.

 

[RedSnake]

Why does one propeller planes and wind generators often have three blades and not more?

I know from former colleagues that have started the work on WGs that there is a issue with the blade when it passes the column.
And if I do not get this right someone will probably fix it for me ;-)

The wind need to pass on the sides on the column so it compresses and an gets more speed on the sides.
When the blade passes in front of the column the pressure is different front and back, from what it was when its not in front of the column.
I don't remember if the blade is pressed against the column or from it.
But they say that the constant wiggling on the generator bearings and axis, isn't good.
I always thought that it could be solved with same aero dynamic change to the column, but I don't know if someone is working with things like that.

BR A



“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

There is also something to do with pressure build up in front of the disk.

I don't have a clue about wind generation turbines. The high powered turboprops have also sorts of fancy tweaks to get as much power as they can into the airflow but not let anything go super sonic. I think it also depends as well where they want the sweet spot so low wind speeds need a different setup to high.

 

[FacEngrPE]

Less than three blades on a wind turbine is difficult to mechanically balance.

As the number of blades goes up, torque under high slip goes up, but design slip efficiency goes down.
This makes the solid disc full of blades is ideal for a water pump, they need starting torque.

Generators have very low starting torque requirements.

Fred

 

[1503-44]

Two blades at 10 and 2 o'lock in stronger winds balances 1 blade at 6.

 

[SuperSalad]

Also, blades are very expensive. The design of 3 blades is to maximize output per unit material. I studied wind turbines for a short time in the very beginning of my career. You can find all sorts of blade designs and configurations out there, but the 3 blade design tends to be the most efficient for large turbines.

Andrew H.

http://www.MotoTribology.com

 

[electricpete]

I'm still thinking through wind vs the other sources and I think I need to argue myself back in the other direction.

Wind didn't have the rapid change of the others, but it was not particularly the rapid change that caused the problem in this particular event (it could in others), in this event there was sustained deficit of power generation and wind decreased as much or more than any of the other sources during the 3 day period.

Let's think about those other scenarios.

Texas was "seconds and minutes" away from catastrophic months long blackouts, officials say

What they're saying is if the operators did not take prompt action to reduce load by initiating partial blackouts, then the entire Texas grid could have gone down, tripping every generating plant offline. I imagine grid frequency would decay and generator underfrequency trips would occur (we have underfrequency trip somewhere around 58.5hz I think). Once generating plants start tripping on underfrequency, then the underfrequency condition just gets even worse until everything trips. Underfrequency poses an overexcitation V/hz hazard to transformers and generators but I think there are sufficient protections built in to trip these machines before damage. So even without equipment damage you are still left trying to bootstrap the grid back up using plants with blackstart capability and building out from there, having to parallel areas that were recovered independently. I'm not sure if months long is accurate but I can easily imagine weeks long and a heckuva lot worse than it was. Perhaps if a few more large plants had tripped at almost the same time early AM on 2/15 there wouldn't have been enough time for the operators to react to save the grid. But wind by its nature is smaller separated plants so while they did experience a very large drop from 9GW all the way down to almost zero over a 24 hours period, it was not such a rapid change that it would contribute to that worst case loss of grid scenario.




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(2B)+(2B)' ?

 

[LionelHutz]

There are books on the blade design. There are multiple things to balance, but more or less as blade count goes up the rated power rpm or design rpm goes down. So, you have to balance the wind speed vs rpm during the design. The rpm is important because a lower operating rpm makes it harder to turn the mechanical rotation into electrical power. So, you balance the diameter and rpm to get an optimal tip speed ratio all the while ensuring you aren't moving the blades too fast because the faster they move through the air the more they get damaged by airborne debris.

From what I've read, 2-blade designs would be ideal from a generation point of view, but they move much faster so more blade damage over time and harder to balance and harder on bearings plus they apparently have a shudder due to gyroscopic effects when yawing.

Lots of people believe otherwise, but adding more blades to "fill in" the blade circle doesn't capture more wind or make more power.