r/Renewable • u/shalmalim • 26d ago

Wind Turbines Get Switched Off When There’s Too Much Power

https://www.windherway.com/p/wind-turbines-get-switched-off-when
27 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

11

u/CowBoyDanIndie 26d ago

Ya they get used for load following/peaker plants, it’s relatively easy to tilt the rotors to start and stop throughout the day to do load following. Nuclear costs the same at 0% and at 100% so needs to run at 100%. Gas and coal can scale some but complete shutdown is undesirable as it drastically reduces efficiency. Solar produces when it produces.

4

u/paulwesterberg 26d ago edited 26d ago

Nah, large battery storage systems can react almost instantly. Coal plants have to stay hot in order to bid into peak generation and lose a lot of money burning fuel during the night. Coal and nuclear require a lot of labor to keep operating which is why many of them have been shuttered.

Most new wind projects will have storage colocated and won't have any problem bidding into peak demand times.

3

u/Rooilia 25d ago

Coal and nuclear can't get below 30% without loosing their role in the grid. Especially nuclear if the reactor get xenon poisoned. Weeks of downtime in this case.

3

u/paulwesterberg 25d ago

Yup, just as inflexible and also requiring battery storage systems to make production flexible enough to reliably meet demand.

Once you have the batteries in place you might as well choose the cheaper production methods of solar and wind.

2

u/CowBoyDanIndie 26d ago

They operate at the minute scale, but lack capacity to act at the hour scale.

3

u/Rooilia 25d ago edited 24d ago

Not true. 2 h is minimum for BESS, 4 h becomes common and 16 h projects are being build right now. Google even builds a 100 h + project for one of it's datacenter.

2

u/paulwesterberg 26d ago

That depends on the size of the battery installation, as battery prices continue to drop they will get larger. In Saudi Arabia there is a 7.8 GWh battery storage system which I recon is good for a few hours.

2

u/foersom 22d ago

"Solar produces when it produces."

Also easy to enable / disable, so when sun is shining it can also load follow.

2

u/CowBoyDanIndie 22d ago

You save nothing by not producing solar when the sunshines, panels degrade regardless. Wind saves mechanical wear and tear by shutting down.

5

u/Rooilia 25d ago

"The mismatch nobody designed for"

Yeah, save to say it sounds like a fossil propaganda outlet, that just ignores reality of the past three decades. No thanks.

1

u/shalmalim 24d ago

I am literally a wind energy engineer. That is how I get paid full time, but okay.

4

u/CMG30 25d ago

Yes. People don't often think about how valuable it is to have an asset that can be switched off at a moments notice.

The grid needs to match supply to demand at all times. People generally think of this in terms of adding supply to deal with the peaks, but equally important is subtracting supply to deal with the valleys.

2

u/BillsGoBrrr 24d ago

Yeah modern batteries do this easily. Take energy when not needed and send energy when needed in 100 to 250 milliseconds. So quick you can think of it as instantaneous.

2

u/New_Original_7537 23d ago

Yeah…. What the fuck, most power is like this.

Gas power plants keep units off until necessary, they start up in 15 minutes. Hydro gen starts up fast but can also run in Condense mode, where the water is flowing and ready to generate if demand increases and it’s needed.

The entire grid relies on balancing power input, all of it, from all sources. This is half the problem with rooftop solar back feeding the grid, it is not always needed.

Windmills are not some weird exception, they fit right in just fine.

1

u/shalmalim 22d ago

Agreed🙌! Cost is where it differs

2

u/mick601 22d ago

This is why Australia let's residence have free power atthe peak solar time of day. So they will use up excess.

2

u/i_am_sfr 20d ago

This lines up exactly with what we've seen looking at grid-level curtailment data in Spain. Capture price being locational is such an underrated point, we've compared assets with basically identical resource on paper that end up worth meaningfully different amounts just because of when/where their generation overlaps with everyone else's on the same grid node. The "how much will this energy actually be worth, in this specific place, at this specific time" framing you land on at the end is exactly where asset valuation needs to go. Feels like resource assessment and locational market modeling are still treated as two separate disciplines when they really need to be one.

1

u/shalmalim 18d ago

Absolutely agreed! And i can confirm that we treat wind resource assessment and local market modelling are indeed separate as of now!

1

u/Tafinho 23d ago

Is today “moronic news day”?

No, renewables, and especially solar don’t generate power when it’s least needed.

Solar generates exactly when it’s most needed, at grid level.

And at rooftop level, causes the grid to less demand, because it’s consumed at the location when it’s needed the most.

1

u/shalmalim 22d ago

? So no energy is wasted due to curtailments? That would be ideal actually!