Ric O'Connell

The lips were great too!

Such a great film! Classic. Prescient.

If only we had something that could transfer power between regions...? Although the map is looking pretty red everywhere - maybe ERCOT could be exporting?

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Gonna be a long hot night on the east coast. @gridstatus.io

Check out the prices in NYISO - almost $1,500/MWh.

Totally! It was a good point you made.

China just surpasses 1 TW of solar - installed nearly 100 GW just last *month*

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@jmijin.bsky.social War is evil.

We want to make that happen here too. See the recent ESIG paper.

@gridstatus.io - great shot of the heat wave driving up prices across the Eastern Interconnect. But Texas? Doing just fine thanks to solar, wind and storage - prices are muted even at 6:00 Central.

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Also, war sucks.

Yes, but they need a storage buffer. So you can easily upgrade a BESS system (battery) to GFM with just a software update, but wind/solar plant would need a bit of hardware (short term storage).

Yeah, that's not a good translation.

Jeff means IEEE 2800, not 1547

Check out the ERCOT Large Load queue. F*ing wild. 156GW on an 80 GW system, more than *doubled* since December. 20 GW under study (pretty firm!).

6/ Conclusion? Don't jump to them! This was not an inertia problem, but a voltage regulation problem.

5/ The recommendations for Spain to reduce the risk of future blackouts? (1) increase battery storage, (2) increase interconnections to France. Spain will also allow inverter based resources to provide voltage control, not just synchronous machines.

4/ In addition, some generation plants disconnected before they should have - e.g. they tripped offline when they could have “ridden through” the voltage disturbance.

3/The system operator had not provisioned enough plants with voltage control capabilities, and some thermal plants did not provide voltage response - in fact, they responded improperly and increased voltage.

2/ “Lack of inertia” had nothing to do with the problem, just as suspected. The issue was voltage regulation, there were earlier voltage oscillations that the system operator dampened, which further increased voltage. This over voltage then caused several plants to trip, which led to the collapse.

Se presenta el informe del Comité de análisis de la crisis eléctrica del 28 de abril Se presenta el informe del Comité de análisis de la crisis eléctrica del 28 de abril

The Spanish authorities circulated a report yesterday that brings some conclusion to the Spanish blackout story. Turns out it was a voltage problem, not a frequency problem.

urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

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Opinion | The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout Madrid knew solar and wind power were unreliable but pressed ahead anyway.

Now that we know the Spanish grid instability was a voltage control issue, will Bjorn Lomborg retract his terrible OpEd in the WSJ where he blamed solar and wind and a lack of inertia?

I doubt it.

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www.wsj.com/opinion/the-...

Pretty sure it’s chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind, 3GW in Wyoming being developed by Phil Anchutz. Partially on BLM land.

This has to be a carve out for the Anchutz wind project?

Storage. Nice. Looks like Rs acknowledge we need capacity and storage is the fast option. That’s a silver lining here.

Here's Adam Keech, VP at PJM, stating that inter-regional transmission won't help PJM "because other regions don't have excess capacity" - has he not hear of coincident peak?

This is from the FERC conference on Resource Adequacy last week.

Here's a great visual from EIA on Natural Gas prices in the short term. Check out the upper bound!

Darn. Doesn't seem like an energy emergency? US produced more energy than it ever had in 2024..yet we have an "energy emergency" Executive Order?

www.eia.gov/todayinenerg...

Manning to Metcalf was just approved in the CAISO TPP - so likely will take ~10 years to come online.

I know there's a lot going on right now, but NYMEX natural gas futures for January are $5/MMBtu. This is going to mean price increases for electricity for Americans, and is the worst possible time to be slowing down wind and solar deployment by taking away tax credits.

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It was 7% of solar generation last year Jonathan, a little higher than previous years, but will drop once we get some new North/South transmission online.

It's all good. It's just 7% of solar we are curtailing. We have transmission planned that will help (a lot of this is south-north congestion) so don't expect this to get worse. Some level of curtailment is economic and reasonable in a high solar system like @californiaiso.bsky.social