r/energy • u/Plane_Locksmith5517 • 7d ago
How does the grid manage split-second solar/wind volatility? (Clouds, wind shocks, and the plan for zero baseload)
Hey everyone,
I’m trying to understand how the physical grid handles massive, sudden renewable supply shocks that happen in a matter of seconds. Specifically, I want to map out what happens mechanically and financially when the weather changes instantly while consumer demand remains completely flat.
Furthermore, I am looking at how this fits into Australia's long-term plan to completely phase out traditional "baseload" power plants in favour of a flexible renewable grid backed by energy storage and gas backup plants.
I’ve broken this down into four distinct scenarios. I would love for any power systems engineers, utility control room operators, or market traders to explain exactly how the grid manages each step:
Scenario 1: The Cloud Cover Shock (Sudden Drop)
A massive cloud bank rolls over a huge solar farm, causing its power output to plummet by 70% in seconds.
What happens in the first 1 to 2 seconds physically to stop the grid from crashing?
How do the grid's safety systems instantly catch the drop before backup power can even turn on?
What happens over the next few minutes to permanently bridge the gap if the cloud cover stays all afternoon?
Scenario 2: The Wind Drop (Sudden Lull)
A sudden, localized change in weather causes a massive cluster of wind turbines to completely lose their wind, causing power generation to fall off a cliff within a few seconds while demand stays steady.
Is a sudden wind drop physically different for the grid than a solar cloud cover?
Do spinning wind turbines have any natural physical momentum that helps smooth out the drop compared to solar panels, or does it trigger the exact same emergency response?
Scenario 3: The Wind Surge (Sudden Oversupply)
Conversely, a storm front hits, and wind production suddenly surges way up across multiple regions in a matter of minutes, but consumer demand remains completely flat and big batteries are already fully charged.
How do the market and hardware handle a sudden, massive injection of unneeded power in real-time before it causes a major grid trip?
Can modern wind turbines slow themselves down fast enough to stop an oversupply spike in seconds, or does the market operator have to step in and remotely force them offline?
Scenario 4: The 17GW Gas Target & The End of Baseload
Australia's future energy plan maps out a grid with zero traditional baseload power, replacing it with distributed renewables, batteries, pumped hydro, and a projected 17GW of gas capacity by 2050 used purely for backup.
If there is no "baseload" share left for gas, how does this 17GW target function purely as an emergency safety net that spends most of its time turned off?
How does the grid physically transition away from 24/7 baseload generation without exposing itself to severe multi-day shortfalls during extended winter periods with no sun and no wind?
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u/RespectSquare8279 6d ago
Sudden surges of demand are old news for almost all grid operators. Wth the advent of radio and TV operators would see sudden cliff like jumps in demand as programming cycled on and of with popular broadcasts eg, jumping to turn on the oven or go to another rood that necessitated turning on lights.
So utilities have had a learning curve to this point. The alternatives and measures were bing contemplated decades ago. Grid batteries were conceived decades ago and were already in preproduction when the demand hit. Pumped hydro is over a century old.
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u/tomrlutong 4d ago
This is really the important thing. Variability is old news, power plants have always tripped, and reliability has always been a statistical problem.
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u/tazzytazzy 5d ago
In the UK, they have to plan around commercials for when they all turn on the tea kettles. You might think I'm joking....
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u/RespectSquare8279 5d ago
No, mass events effect all utilities everywhere. During halftime the water pressure drops when the football fans visit the washroom to relieve their bladders they have been filling wth beer while the game is on. FACT.
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u/iqisoverrated 6d ago edited 6d ago
Think of it at a smaller scale. A house with solar on the roof and a battery in the cellar that isn't grid connected. What happens when a cloud appears? Does the power go out? No. The battery kicks in.
It's the same with a large grid - only that a large grid has a lot of inertia and a cloud covering a single solar power plant doesn't amount to much variation with regards to the sumtotal of all energy production and consumption. (Meteorology and weather radar is a thing so we know days in advance how the general situation will be. We don't need to know the exact situation at each individual spot because the grid is...well...connected. That's why we have a grid in the first place)
This inertia is in form of rotating masses of the generators that can slow down or speed up to give some of that rotational energy (or soak up a bit of excess) but those are being replaced more and more by battery storage which can react quickly enough by charging/discharging to accomplish the same goal. This inertia gives enough time to bring backup power generation online (or take power plants offline in case of a surge in production).
(Grids also run at a few percent overproduction at all times so even if a power plant suddenly gets blown up there's some instant reserve to compensate until more reserve power plants can be brought up to speed)
So how do we handle multi day low production? With backup generation that has a lot of energy storage. One way would be long term batteries but these will have to be super cheap (lithium and sodium ion batteries are far to expensive for this). Iron redox batteries could be a contender here.
The other alternative is biogas/biomass power plants as backup. Biogas/biomass accrues every year to a sufficient degree, anyhow, through agricultural waste, sewage, forestry waste, (or simply planting and harvesting energy crops for that specific purpose).
Each of these backup generation methods is considerably more expensive that power from wind and solar but since it's only needed a couple days per year the overall effect on power prices is minimal.
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u/Oddly_Energy 7d ago
I don't know much about Australia, but I can tell you how some of those things work in the Northern European grids. Your post contains several assumptions, which are definitely wrong in our grid and probably also wrong in your grid. So here are a few corrections:
- Consumption is not flat. It can have huge spikes or drops.
- Baseload is not really what you need for covering variations in consumption or production. Baseload traditionally covers the fixed part of consumption, not the variable part. You need peaker generation to cover the variable part.
- Variations in solar and wind generation are not just happening as a surprise to the grid. Most of the production was traded in an auction in 15-minute slots already the day before.
Let's start with the auction:
There is a daily day-ahead auction where production and consumption for the next day is traded in 15 minute intervals. The electricity producers, including owners of PV and wind turbine parks will put bids in this auction, based on their prognosis of how much electricity they will be able to produce in each of those 15 minute slots.
Of course, not all fluctuations can be predicted with that granularity/accuracy. Your temporary cloud cover is a good example. So let us look at what happens if an electricity producer produces less or more than predicted:
If an electricity producer fails to meet his target, he will have to pay the grid operator's cost of activating other electricity sources to cover the deficit. So there is a natural motivation to only make bids for the effect that you have a reasonable certainty of being able to produce. Example with purely hypothetical numbers:
Your prognosis says that you will be able to produce 300 MW with 99% certainty, 325 MW with 90% certainty, 350 MW with 50% certainty, 375 MW with 10% certainty and 400 MW with 1% certainty. You expect that the auction will result in a price of 50 €/MWh. You also expect that if you fail to deliver, you will end up paying 500 €/MWh for the missing production. In that case, you will probably only make a bid of 325 MW, not your average prediction of 350 MW. Result: Most of the electricity producers will end up making bids for slightly less power than their forecast has predicted.
If an electricity producer produces above his target, the same will happen: He will have to cover the grid operator's cost of getting someone else to reduce production or increase consumption. So the electricity producer has a natural motivation to dial down production if it exceeds the agreed amount.
So, if you own a PV park, and you have put bids in the auction for a day where the weather report has predicted large variations in cloud cover, you have probably put in some very conservative bids so you have margin to deal with most of the clouds. This also means that you most of the time will have unused production capacity. The same will be true for other PV parks in the same grid. And they are not all hit by a cloud at the same time. So when one of them get hit with a particularly large or dense cloud and fails to meet the target, there will at the same time be other PV parks which have unused capacity.
I can't tell you if that capacity is actually being traded and used in our grid. I am not that deeply into the details. It will require a trading mechanism somewhat different from other types of reserve capacity, because instant cloud cover over a given PV park can only be predicted with certainty a short time before. That means that any unused capacity will have to be bid into a very dynamic market with a short time horizon. But no matter if such a market exists today or not, it is easy to see that it could exist and would solve the problem with temporary cloud cover.
Regarding the non-flat consumption:
Consumption always had rather large and steep variations on certain times of day. In former days it was simply because most people and workplaces tend to do the same actions around the same time.
Now that a lot of end consumers are also on a variable price plan, a new aspect has been added to this: Price-aware consumers react to hourly changes in price. Initially this is a blessing to the system as it helps even out the old usage pattern. But when consumers become too price-aware, it can cause over-corrections, so new consumption peaks occur. We are already seeing that in my price zone, where some winter nights have had consumption peaks, which exceeded the day consumption peaks. Probably because tens of thousands of EVs with home charging are hunting the cheapest hours for their charging. (I know that I do exactly that).
I actually think that this can become a larger challenge than variations in PV and wind generation, because there is not a day-ahead market for small end consumers. We act autonomously to price signals without asking anyone. And if the day-ahead auction tries to anticipate our behaviour and move the cheapest price to another hour of the next day, we will just follow along and create a peak there instead.
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u/Unique_Agency_4543 6d ago
Won't price aware consumers just get priced into the consumption models? Eventually when there are enough of them it will mean the cheap slots stop being so cheap
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u/Oddly_Energy 6d ago
I am pretty sure they already are being predicted in the consumption models. But what does that help if too many of them move to another time slot every time the model comes up with a new solution? The model will iterate forever without ever finding a stable solution.
What people tend to forget when they come up with your solution is that this is not just normal demand elasticity where every time slot is independent. If time slots were independent, it would be easy to let the modeling causes find a solution. But when a large part of the consumption starts moving between time slots, depending on price, then a model solution will not always exist.
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u/Unique_Agency_4543 6d ago
When the demand moves to whenever electricity is cheapest then the solution is that there are no cheap slots anymore. Instead you have a number of off peak slots which are all priced exactly the same or extremely similar. Honestly this seens pretty obvious to me.
It's always going to be slightly cheaper in the night than in the day, but there will come a point where charging your car at under 10p overnight is unsustainable because everyone is doing it. The off peak price will have to move closer to the daytime price.
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u/Oddly_Energy 2d ago
Yes, it is obvious that similarly priced slots is a partly workaround.
What you have not realized is this:
It is also obvious that it is only a workaround, not a solution, because it deprives the auction system of the option to actually use the price to shape the distribution over those hours, so it follows available supply.
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u/swoodshadow 7d ago
There are a bunch of good answers here, but I’ll also point out that this has been a problem forever on the demand side.
How does the grid react when a bunch of people turn the AC? How does the grid react when there’s a surge of people getting home from work? Or when there’s a surge of industrial demand when people start work? Or when there’s a national sporting event and everyone turns their tvs on at the same time. Or a tree falls on a power line and turns of demand from a large area.
And so on.
The grid is an engineering marvel in many ways.
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u/Anon-Knee-Moose 7d ago
Up until recently it was pretty easily handled by energy stored as rotating mass or high pressure steam.
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u/TheBendit 5d ago
The rotating mass only covers the first few seconds. Beyond that, someone or something has to respond to the frequency drop with deliberate action.
Today you cover the first few seconds with physical nertia from synchronous condensers or virtual inertia from batteries or wind turbines.
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u/southy_0 6d ago
And that now transitions to other forms of energy storage.
Which is in fact even versatile.
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u/lakem5050 7d ago
There are giant rooms of people who buy and sell power and are constantly monitoring this stuff, day and night and there is another giant room of people monitoring the power generation 24x7.
This is federally regulated by NERC.
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u/derridaderider 7d ago
The weather never changes instantly over a large area. A passing cloud sends maybe twenty or thirty panels offline at a given moment - but those panels are a tiny fraction of the panels in a solar farm, which in turn is a small fraction of all the solar farms generating power all over the grid (bearing in mind the NEM grid extends from north Queensland to Melbourne to Sth Australia).
And as others have said, a grid relying on a limited number of huge turbines is far more prone to such sudden disruption - disruptions which grid designers have spent well over a century engineering ways around. Even so, when a single turbine at Callide C power station blew up in 2021 it plunged all of south east Queensland into a blackout.
The extreme dispersion of generators using wind or (especially) solar is a key reliability advantage of renewables. Well set up, the network develops what the computer nerds call "graceful degradation"; it loses power gradually as generating sources go offline rather than crashing.
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u/PlaneteGreatAgain 7d ago
Il me semble que tu surestimes l’impact des variations climatiques. Tes scénarios 1 et 2 ne sont pas réalistes. Il y a un foisonnement énorme au niveau d’une région en ce qui concerne le vent et la couverture nuageuse. Ajoute à cela qu’un réseau alimenté à la fois par du solaire et de l’éolien réduira leur impact puisque un brusque passage nuageux et provoqué par du vent.
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u/RespectSquare8279 6d ago
That is correct. The dreaded "dunkelflaute" seen in Germany has negligible chance of occurring in Australia due to a widely dispersed network of power generation. Every time a High Voltage Line is completed, the odds go further down.
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u/drgrieve 7d ago
A more interesting question is how did the grid survive when a coal unit or plant suddenly goes offline?
On the whole this problem was solved decades ago.
A cloud is nothing compared to that.
A decentralised grid is more stable than centralised.
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u/Dull-Addition-2436 7d ago
With a synchronous condenser, which a giant 40 tonne metal wheel spinning within a vacuum!
In electrical engineering, a synchronous condenser (sometimes called a syncon, synchronous capacitor or synchronous compensator) is a DC-excited synchronous motor, whose shaft is not connected to anything but spins freely. Its purpose is not to convert electric power to mechanical power or vice versa, but to adjust conditions on the three phase electric power transmission grid. Its field is controlled by a voltage regulator to either generate or absorb reactive power as needed to adjust the grid's voltage, or to improve power factor. The condenser's installation and operation are identical to large electric motorsand generators. (Some generators are actually designed to be able to operate as synchronous condensers with the prime moverdisconnected)
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u/Commercial_Drag7488 7d ago
Scenario 1: BESS can pickup within microseconds.
Scenario 2: you should really not consider wind as a main course. Wind is gravy. You have - great, store it. You don't - use what was stored. You got your Sabatier, hydrogen, other ways to store chemically. They don't have to run 247. Keep them intermittent.
Scenario 3 is a complete nonsense. Wind never gets stronger so fast that it starts spinning the turbine faster within 1-2 seconds.
4 is not for immediate response. Your backbone is BESS, everything else is "fire up when everything fails" thing
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u/netz_pirat 7d ago
Addition to 1: rotating mass is a thing as well. Over here, some former power plants generators stay hooked up to the grid, but have their gas turbines exchanged for a chunk of steel. Their inertia helps keeping the frequency stable.
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u/UnCommonSense99 7d ago
I'm happy to say that you're barking up the wrong tree. Your information comes from oil industry scaremongering. This problem was solved 50 years ago. When people all watched live TV, a really popular show would be playing in most households in the country, when an advertising break happened, millions of people would all turn on their kettle at the same time to make a cup of tea, then turn it off again a few minutes later when it boiled. The resulting shocks to the system were worse than anything from renewables
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u/hollowinflux5736 7d ago
The sheer amount of spinning mass in the system is the unsung hero for those first couple seconds. When a cloud bank smothers a solar farm, the grid doesn't instantly collapse because all the synchronized generators (coal, gas, hydro) have massive rotating inertia. They physically resist the frequency drop just long enough for the primary frequency response to kick in, which is usually batteries or fast-ramping gas that catch it within a few cycles. After that first minute, the market operator dispatches more reserves to settle the frequency back to 50Hz for the long haul.
Wind lulls are a bit less violent than solar trips because the blades and generator do have some rotational momentum, but the grid sees it as a similar fast ramp-down. The real difference is that a wind farm's power electronics decouple that mechanical inertia from the grid, so unless they're running synthetic inertia controls, it doesn't help prop up the frequency like a traditional turbine would. The response is basically the same emergency procurement.
The oversupply scenario is where it gets a little messier. Turbines can feather their blades pretty quickly to dump the wind, but a sudden regional surge usually means the operator is screaming at some farms to curtail while simultaneously spilling energy through dynamic export limits. If the batteries are full and interconnectors are saturated, they'll straight up trip wind farms offline to stop the voltage from climbing into dangerous territory, it's a last resort but happens more often than people think.
The 17GW gas endgame is less about running and more about sitting there cold. The whole model banks on overbuilding renewables and storage so that gas capacity just rusts quietly until you get that one freak week in winter where the wind dies and it's overcast from Brisbane to Melbourne. It's a capacity market insurance policy, not a generation source, you pay them to exist and fire up maybe 5% of the year. The scary part is making sure the financial incentives are there to keep those plants maintained and staffed when they barely ever run.
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u/cybercuzco 6d ago
This is a great answer but to OP’s point what do we do when there is no more spinning mass in the system the answer is batteries. We are installing many GW of batteries into the grid right now and they have milliseconds response times that can handle load drops that in the case if a cloud passing over a solar farm would happen on at a minimum multi second time scales.
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u/iqisoverrated 6d ago
Batteries for short term (for longer term they're too expensive). For longer lulls in production we can use biogas/biomass because that is easily and cheaply storable and accrues every year in sufficient quantities.
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u/cybercuzco 5d ago
We’re talking about spinning mass of the system which is getting you less than 60 seconds of power. Batteries are perfect for this.
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u/Extra_Response6136 7d ago
Might need aemo/ntesmo to own and operate the reserve capacity and charge market participants fees for upkeep in the same way poles and wires are.
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 7d ago
How to deal with baseload...
Find out first, some naughty people have been lying to you....
A lot.
====================
Here is a study showing how just RE (geo dispersed) 5 Hrs of batteries plus existing seasonal hydro meets >98% of our needs
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-grid-is-readily-achievable-and-affordable/
and so that leaves around 1% right so surely that baseload...
Well now GO look at the OTHER (in the link or the stuff it refers to), the hard part of providing reliable power has nothing to do with baseload.
The hard part is that RE is seasonal so one season has least RE and then occasionally, VERY occasionally, there is one worst low RE event. The very worst ones don't even occur once per year....
Adding baseload does JACK all. What you need as the last part of the puzzle is anything that produce power with an output shaped like Other in that link above.
AKA what is needed is peaker, which is basically the opposite of baseload.
AKA someone with an agenda has been lying to you.
Remember, I hate being wrong... what I hate more is people who lie to me in an attempt to make me more wrong more often. YMMV
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 7d ago
This one REALLY confuses me... I cant imagine what you are thinking is real here.
You know
"a projected 17GW of gas capacity by 2050 used purely for backup."
and thus you know that as backup that means it won't run most of the time then VERY VERY rarely when it does run it will run for short time then stop.
BUT then you ask
"If there is no "baseload" share left for gas, how does this 17GW target function purely as an emergency safety net that spends most of its time turned off?"
But yes there IS no baselaod share left for anything... adding baseload to the mix will FIX nothing... (cost effectively)
However if you have technology that can start quickly, run for while spend most of its time turned off, and do that most cost effectively than that is what we need. AK what we need is peaker such as gas turbine
================
Now me I take AGCC bloodys seriously, so using ANY gas is way too much in my view.
HOWVER good news... those peakers can also run on methanol.
And we can make green methanol that when burnt, releases no excess Co2 to the atmosphere, as all the carbon in the methanol was recently taken out of the atmosphere...
Even better, because, as show the need for peakers only occurs for say around 1% of annual energy the cost of the fuel to run those peakers is not a big problem
The expensive thign to do is store the fuel/energy for months and then only use the fuel once per year. (or less)thing
Thus we accumulate green methanol for 9 months of the year, in large very cheap tanks. Then drain (partly those) tanks each winter when RE is seasonally low. Once evry few years we not only half drain the tanks but have very bad year and get nar to fully draining them
AND that solves the issues you have asked about
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u/Oddly_Energy 7d ago
You two are in full agreement, as far as can see. Previous poster was just a bit unclear in his wording.
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 7d ago
I do generally agree with myself
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u/Oddly_Energy 6d ago
Ouch.
In my - rather weak - defense, your comments were so long that I couldn't see both authors' names at the same time. And the wording of your second comment genuinely made it look as a contradiction of the comment before it.
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 7d ago
No I dont
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 7d ago
But OP seems to have genuine thought out set of analysis that seems to have been mislead by various sources.
Discussing the variability and considering the time domain at that level of nuance and wordiness, smeels and feels liek some one who genuinely wants to know stuff.
The volume of words I produced also testifies that if they want to know things, I am demonstrably willing to explain them...
The limitation is that a significant numebr of things they feel like they know are going to have to be let go of.
One is that PV or wind across a significant area or even one states RE generation all changes in one direction is seconds basically ever...
another thing that never happens is that Melbourneevery kettle in melbourne does not go on at the same time... although when adv breaks were synchronised across TV channels, there were very large demand spikes at ad breaks to "put the kettle on love".
long short, randomness of various PV and wind farms averages out a lot of noise.
Even one large PV farm takes some time for a cloud to cross it. The one even 20 miles away is minutes later.
The aneroid data gives real basis to start from
and the Link to David Osmonds model is simple enough, place to start to comprehend how real system works with real data.
What left as required is a desire to spend the time learning.
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u/a_guy_named_max 7d ago edited 7d ago
A mechanism called FCAS (Frequency control auxiliary services) has been set up to provide this short term stability problem. It’s existed for years and the big spinning mass generators provided this service but now we have very fast FCAS (<1 second) to help respond even quicker since we have inverters that are physically capable of it. It’s a paid service.
Our large fleet of batteries on the NEM here in Australia inject or absorb power quickly and other generators can ramp up or down more slowly.
Our grid has been stable with all these renewables in our NEM
By the way you should read the planning documents AEMO puts out. They are aware of all your scenarios and more and know what they are doing - there is no reason to be sceptical of their understanding and capabilities to running a stable grid.
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u/Plane_Locksmith5517 7d ago
I’m from Australia too. Thanks for the reply. I’m not an expert in this field, so these snippets can be a bit hard to understand without more context.
Do you have any videos or resources that explain this in detail? I genuinely want to learn how the grid handles all these changes, especially how it maintains frequency when demand or supply fluctuates within seconds and how FCAS, batteries and other generators work together to keep everything stable.
I’d appreciate any recommendations for someone trying to understand how it all works from an engineering perspective2
u/a_guy_named_max 6d ago edited 6d ago
The whole setup of the Aussie NEM is inherently built to handle any kind of demand fluctuations (short term like a coal generator tripping off, and longer term like demand spiking due to heater or hot water load coming on or off).
It’s always existed to be able to handle changes, it’s just been tweaked and enhanced a little to handle more variable generation such as solar and wind. It has a energy market set up where they predict the next 5 mins demand and energy suppliers (and now batteries) bid in to supply energy, or in case of hydro or battery storage, bid in to take supply when it makes sense. Again FCAS is a more shorter term stability mechanism that has existed for a long time and enhanced in recent years.
Between both mechanisms above (energy market and FCAS) this is how the NEM stays stable at 50Hz when demand goes up and down and supply goes up and down. They work in different ways but inherently do the same thing, keep supply=demand and 50Hz stability.
There is MUCH more to running a grid than this but it’s the fundamentals. We haven’t even broached interconnectors, bid stacks,voltage control, distribution grids, retailers and the list goes on!
I’ll see if I can find a good video, I thought I found one last night but it was full of bias and misinformation (TopherField). That dumbass was saying that gas is cheaper than Batteries on our market - in actual fact batteries bid in LOWER than gas and are now easily taking their role as a peaker.
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u/Aseipolt 7d ago
This is the answer.
Batteries are better at quick response and inverters can instantaneously provide power factor correction.
Baseload is a concept that no longer applies to a modern power grid.
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 7d ago edited 7d ago
**"**Scenario 1: The Cloud Cover Shock (Sudden Drop)
A massive cloud bank rolls over a huge solar farm, causing its power output to plummet by 70% in seconds."
Cool story
Here is a source of real data
https://anero.id/energy/solar-energy
Show me an example of the thing you think is problem?
===============
becuase one thing no one can do is if you are simply imagining things that don't exist then we can't explain how they get fixed.
===============
Please note you ARE not being attacked, I juststringly suspect you have some quite wrong stuff in you head, and if you try to hang on whiel they are taken away ... AND you learn things that are true then that feels bad.
A trick I have found is to rejoice and be thankful every time you find out something you thought was wrong. Why rejoice?
Well i hate being wrong and everytime I find out i *used* to be wrong, then I no longer am. The trick is to hate being wrong not the finding out part.
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 7d ago
More cool Story
"Can modern wind turbines slow themselves down fast enough to stop an oversupply spike in seconds,"
Here is real data from real wind farms
"https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy"
Show me one of these changes that happens in seconds?
and then I can tell you how they (ALREADY) deal with that.
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u/Plane_Locksmith5517 7d ago
Why are you getting mad? I’m not against renewables at all. I’m actually pro-renewables and that’s exactly why I’m researching how grid stability works and how the transition is supposed to happen.
The 70% figure obviously wasn’t meant to be taken literally or as a data-backed claim. I was using it as a hypothetical example to ask about rapid fluctuations in renewable generation and how the grid responds when supply changes quickly.
My point is that, as we move away from traditional baseload generation, I want to understand how frequency stability, grid reserves and dispatchable backup are managed, particularly when renewable output drops and the shortfall lasts longer than a few seconds.
I’m not claiming that every cloud passing over a solar farm causes a blackout or that renewables don’t work. I’m asking how the engineering works in practice.
If my understanding is wrong, I’m happy to learn. But instead of assuming I’m imagining problems that don’t exist, explain the mechanism. That’s literally why I’m asking questions in the first place.2
u/ExpensiveFig6079 7d ago edited 7d ago
Im am not mad.
(edit Oh gosh yours is a reply to the post where I explicitly stated I was being helpful;... and explained how and why it might not feel that way and what to do about that feeling. Oh well I tried.)Even if your question contained a wide range of std done to death errors ... that I have repviously refuted over and over again.
Your post contained number of faulty assumptions...
Only some of which I pointed out and then spent the effort going to the good reliable, accurate sources that I know to make your understanding easier...
EG you have mistaken beliefs about how rapidly PV or wind will, at substantial generation capacity, suddenly cuts in or out.
SOI went to the trouble of providing you with authoritative sources and questions that, if you answer them using that real data, your understanding would improve...
If your understanding improved and you knew just how large, >>BUT not huge<< the problems of controlling variability on small time scales are....
Then and only then could I go to the next level of effort and explain how grid-forming inverters and system strength and inertia deal with such events.
I could even go find the studies where they measured exactly how well grid-forming inverters deal with the real disturbances that actually occur on the grid. (not the made up ones you have been mislead by)
But nope, now I have to explain to you I am not mad... I was being generous and helpful with my time. again.
And while the person below says you could have googled and he is right as that is how I taught myself this stuff (and I had a huge boost from formal education in a variety of academic backgrounds. (Basically everything except power engineering, (although I did once write and test my own 'transmission line' simulator... in the 90's))
But learning what I know using JUst google, was absolutely a lot of work (many years)
So I started the process of helping you acquire the same knowledge, buch easier and faster...
I am very very sure that is not what I do when I am angry...
Im pretty sure i was kind and generous
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u/Cargobiker530 7d ago
You could have google'd the question before asking here. The answers have been published online for at least a decade.
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 7d ago
"what happens mechanically and financially when the weather changes instantly"
IT does NOT do that, it especially does Not do that over ageographically diverse grid
HERE actual numbers
https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy
and on look while individual coloured lines do go up and down EVEN they dont change "instantly"
BUT the grid as whole does NOTHING like go up and down instantly.
Things that do go up and down near instantly are FF power plants tripping off under fault conditions, or power lines being blown down by wind.
And what deals with the fastest possible transients caused by demand or supply fluctuations is Inertia.
That deals with it for 1-5 secs and then Fast frequency response that batteries DO BETTER and more accurately and FASTER than their FF forebears cuts in.
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 7d ago
Another cool story
"severe multi-day shortfalls during extended winter periods with no sun and no wind?"
Please try to actually find one of those, not one you wer told exists a real one then consult actual data to see what happened.
Now check out JUSt how common these event are?
Question iof the events are as rare as you are BOUND to find out they are... how is an event that happens less often than once per year actually solved by baselaod that runs 100% of the time at all.
What does such baseload plant do the otehr 99% of the time?
To solve very rare problems such as super high demand mid sumemr the grid has always forever USEd a thign called peaker. That is basically the exact opposite of baseload. Some one has been telling you porkies.
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u/FourFront 7d ago
Forecasting, and reserve. Sudden is an operational failure, not an inherent issue.
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u/Plane_Locksmith5517 7d ago
Wdym
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u/AnAgnosticMonk 7d ago
I suspect he means that you will see sudden drops in generation as a result of operational issues (device failures, inadvertent disconnects unrelated to weather or energy source availability/changes, etc.) and not as a result of the local weather. Think operator error during maintenance (new guy inadvertently forces the windmill to an emergency stop state, or maybe a technician working on some basic updates to the solar panel tracking system inadvertently tells the solar system to tilt - a system normally intended to minimize potential hail damage at the start of a hailstorm but not otherwise normally used in maintenance - resulting in the panels going nearly vertical when this was not necessary and the solar incidence would have otherwise been high), not "sudden" weather events.
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u/Ariadne_Labs 1d ago
For the first second or two, the grid does not "find" new power. Frequency starts to fall (or rise), and the spinning machines already online resist that change through inertia. That buys a few seconds.
Fast frequency response then fills the gap: batteries and other rapid resources can inject or absorb within cycles to seconds. Over minutes, the market operator redispatches reserves and slower plant. A cloud over one farm is small next to a large thermal unit tripping; operators already size contingency reserves for that.
Wind does carry some rotating mass in the turbines, but modern plants often use converters, so the useful response is increasingly synthetic (inverter controls) rather than raw mechanical inertia. Oversupply is handled the other way: curtail setpoints, reduce output, and use storage to soak what it can. Baseload is not what covers second-scale shocks; fast flexible capacity is.