Thread: Grid can go 75% renewable

Originally Posted by Homestar

I’ve seen 2 - both in the garage. I wouldn’t want one hanging on my wall that’s for sure. I’ve got a spot outside away from the house if prices ever come down like they promise.

Having seen the damage an 18v battery on charge did when it went wrong… I’m in strong agreement with you.

And they just hang them off an interior stud wall as well - not like it's on the bricks or anything remotely fire resistant. House would be gone before you knew it if one was to go up - but as usual it will take one or two to go nuclear before they introduce regulations around their placement.

My mate in Coffs who has 15kW of lithium batteries has put the whole stack in a garden shed several metres from his house, which seems sensible.

One for the grid data junkies.

NZ had a national electricity grid emergency last night. It was a very cold night. Snow to low levels and even sea level in the South Island. Snow falling in many places for the first time in a long time in parts of the North Island. A very cold South West wind, gale force in some regions. Damned cold.

Settled weather on Tuesday for most of NZ as polar storm moves away | Stuff.co.nz

The National Grid came under huge pressure from added heating demand.

National demand for electricity reaches all-time high, cities plunged into darkness to reduce load | Stuff.co.nz

Widespread power outage in the middle of winter - thousands affected - NZ Herald

We can download 5 min, 30 min and 1 hour data from our grid operator, Transpower.

Load Graphs | Transpower

See real time data here:

Power System Live Data | Transpower

I downloaded the 5 min data and chucked it around in excel. The data for the whole country and for specific Grid Zones from the 8th (whole 'normal' day profile - left of the charts) to the 10th Aug (so it included the anomalous 9th Aug data - middle to the right) looked like this. Bit of an issue.

NZ, North and South Island load profiles 8 - 10 August 2021.jpg


North Island Zone load profiles 8 - 10 August 2021.jpg

That's interesting. Did you have blackouts?

Here's an interesting explanation of how EVs can be used to stabilise the power grid.

Energy stored in electric car batteries could power your home or stabilise the grid — and save you money
Energy stored in electric car batteries could power your home or stabilise the grid — and save you money - ABC News

Originally Posted by DiscoMick

That's interesting. Did you have blackouts?

We didn't here at home but we noticed some flickering in our lights from time to time. We are within the Bunnythorpe Grid Zone. The national grid crosses Cook Strait (on the DC cable link) and then heads north from the Haywards Hill switchyard (where the DC to AC conversion takes place) to the Bunnythorpe switchyard. It then branches off west, north and east from here. The areas west, north and east of us is mainly where they pulled the plug on cities and towns. Wellington, Kāpiti Coast, Palmerston North, Taupō, New Plymouth, Taranaki, Hamilton, Napier, Hastings, Auckland and Whangārei. While they were cutting power to areas, they were also ramping up generation so the graphs shown represent the combined impact of blackouts and generation ramping.

Basically the evening peak was lopped off large areas were in blackout...

Quite an event in an otherwise fairly stable grid. Last such emergency was around 10 years ago. In the last few years, the growth of housing and population (and hence load) in the north and east regions is quite pronounced.

Did you notice the very large anomaly in the morning load in Auckland? Instead of a rise to a peak and then the usual drop it went to a huge level (approx 300MW higher than normal) and flattened out at that level. Quite unusual.

Originally Posted by DiscoMick

That's interesting. Did you have blackouts?

Here's an interesting explanation of how EVs can be used to stabilise the power grid.

Energy stored in electric car batteries could power your home or stabilise the grid — and save you money
Energy stored in electric car batteries could power your home or stabilise the grid — and save you money - ABC News

Just need some EV’s on the road now to make that happen.

Originally Posted by windsock

One for the grid data junkies.

NZ had a national electricity grid emergency last night.

In an interesting follow up to this today. Genesis energy, our main thermal electricity generator refused to fire up an extra boiler when it knew cold weather was coming and the reasons being given is that it saw the hydro and many of the wind farms in the North Island were generating at capacity. However, the gale force winds pushed weed into the intake zone of the Tokaanu hydro (240 MW capacity) near Taupo and then the gale force winds dropped to near nothing so the wind generation of the North Island (709 MW capacity but not all were online) fell a bit suddenly. Capacity shortage and no spinning reserve to back up the high renewable penetration levels.

This could become the case study on the absolute requirement of spinning reserve in a grid with high renewable penetration.

Power blackouts: Genesis Energy didn'''t generate extra power despite freezing cold, PM says situation not good enough | Stuff.co.nz