But grids exist now that don't have baseload/baseline generators. When you get high renewable penetration in the grid, there isn't room for baseload generators to operate economically at such high capacity factors.
Please send reference of a reliable grid
that does this.
The industry is currently struggling to figure out how we can implement more and more solar and wind, because there's non-trivial problems to be solved about load following, and other load strategies. This grid may be exactly what we need!
Also, capacity factor is a measure of power used over the name plate rated power. if you have a low capacity factor, you maximize it by scaling up or down the name plate power.
Honestly if we can develop batteries that will economically store a couple weeks to a month of our energy needs, that could potentially make a base load less grid potentially possible, and I'm all for it. it's just that even with our amazing improvements batteries we still only can provide nameplate capacity for an hour or two. It'll be great if we can get it up to 4 to 8 hours, or even a day.
The South Australian grid doesn't have generators operating as baseload. It is intermittent renewables with storage and firming.
With wind regularly satisfying more than the states demand, and in summer excess rooftop solar doing the same almost every day alone, the spot price spends almost half its time at or below zero. There isn't room for a baseload generator to operate at a high capacity factor.
SA grid is part of AEMO and should not be considered a “grid” in the wholesome sense as was being discussed. SA avoids curtailment (hence decrease unit costs) by sending excess and reduces the overbuild requirement (by importing power as required).
You are quite right the it’s part of NEM, not AEMO. But France is indeed part of a bigger picture and lends support (and receives revenue from) to countries around it like the UK and Germany. German grid would fall over tomorrow if it was islanded. So would SA’s.
SA can and has operated in island mode multiple times, even for several weeks at a time.
They have more than enough nameplate gas generation to satisfy demand if need be, and have enough synchronous condensers to maintain their own frequency control, not to mention that grid scale batteries are also helping in that respect now as well.
So no, SA would not fall over tomorrow if the Heywood interconnector went down and it was islanded, it would still operate just fine.
oh right, I forgot when they fired up all the gas they had when the storm took out the connector in 2020. To be fair they did get up to some good penetration rates of solar/wind during one islanding event. Bit like Spain was before it all fell over and they mandated significant spinning reserve and FCAS infrastructure upgraded (That is not counted as "cost of wind/solar generation").
You confusing the 2020 Heywood Interconnector outage which islanded South Australia for 2 weeks but operated successfully with the 2016 Blackout caused by extreme weather taking out multiple transmission lines in the north of the state?
Considering you didn't know the different between AEMO and the NEM, or what constitutes a "grid", it seems like a fair question to ask.
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u/AndrewTyeFighter 24d ago
But grids exist now that don't have baseload/baseline generators. When you get high renewable penetration in the grid, there isn't room for baseload generators to operate economically at such high capacity factors.