If everyone wants to have solar on their roof and batteries to back themselves up I'm all for it.....but disconnect from the bulk electric system and survive on your own. What is happening here is they want their cake and eat it too. That factory way way more than likely has a load of greater than 30 MW (I don't know the exact load but the climate control for a building that big has to be 30MW alone). So this massive structure can't support itself....so what they want to do is lean on the grid when they want but make their own when they want. In other words all the thermal/nuclear facilities that have to exist to keep it stable can't run routinely or as designed then get blamed for every event when they aren't perfect despite the fact wind and solar missing is always the reason for scarcity in texas....as in 100% of the time. Texas didn't have problems till we abandoned thermal development and went all wind/solar for new build. The approved project list is public....anyone can look it up. (some may remember from the old board when I said Pickens Plan was a farce because he never had a single approved project on any grid and anyone could have looked that up at any time....and it never happened) There is just now a couple of thermal projects for years there were none. Well now we are dependent on the weather and unstable. Another public notice you can all look up ERCOT has an AAN in place this Wednesday when the weather is going to be high in the 80s low in the 60s just a run of the mill day......wanna know why? Long range wind forecast missed and the grid could be short. ERCOT's solution....force thermal units to come back from outages early or delay them to accommodate.....or make themselves less reliable and eat cost to accommodate the non-dispatchable power. It doesn't work folks. As long as it depends on the weather it won't. It's been a massive subsidized money grab and we are all starting to pay for it directly as opposed to it just going on the deficit pile. Power prices in Texas went relatively unchanged from the 90s till 2021.....not anymore. ERCOT has listed an 800 MW coal facility commissioned in the 70's by name as plant they want to bring back to be winter ready. There goes your carbon footprint.
The voltage and frequency thing could be a possibility at an extreme cost. Batteries can help and almost instantaneously but the problem is if you use them they are in constant states of discharging and charging thus you can't count of them for their full capacity for the times they say they can provide. So you are planning reserves for a day and think you have 20K of battery with say a 12 hour life and when the time comes you have 14K for 9 hours. That gap is a big area going black. Solar can help if you throw a capacitor bank or static frequency converter on at the addition of millions in cost but it can't do more in output than it already is.....so you could use a device to convert the source from pure MW's to less MW's to control an event but you can't ask the sun to shine harder. Wind is actual turbines but tiny ones......you can again put very expensive devices at farms but you can't increase output and without them they are slaves to the grid due to their size.....even if in the coming years they double in size this will still be a problem.....so the grid droops and all the tiny turbines make a little less energy and make the problem worse you are getting 10K MW from 3000 windmills and they all make 0.3 less MW and now you are another 900 short when you need help now ....voltage starts screaming and they all increase 0.3 and you are burning the lines. And while you can back them off, and this routinely happens, you can't turn the wind up. You also can't count on renewable resources for restoration of areas impacted by storms/load sheds/local outages. If you have 2500 MW of load to get back quick after a hurricane you can't put that on wind assets that could vacillate by the hour and can't handle large influx loads and the shock they put on the system. Inertia....thats what holds it together big spinning generators or large dynamic sources....till we make batteries that can handle the shock of large load changes and discharge over days and install 10s of thousands of capacity of them it's large generators. So in this incredibly fast changing world we should be looking to things that have the potential to work not dumping money at things that never will.
30 MW is a hiccup....it doesn't move anything. ERCOT peak is 85.5K....so %0.04 percent is what we are talking here and it's the biggest rooftop installation in the world. You have to grasp the scale. And this is just sunny windy Texas....the whole nation is a completely different ball of wax.
