I’m sure that you’ve seen the arguments both for and against “green” energy but what is usually lacking in those arguments is how these things actually work and what their effect is on the power grid. So in this essay imma mansplain the basics of how the power grid works and how the renewable energy systems effect the grid and actually cause inefficiencies in the power grid itself.
Green energy itself is not green at all. Its actually very destructive to the environment and if you’re willing to see this then go do some research on lithium mines and lithium processing, wind turbine blade decommissioning, lithium battery disposal, lithium battery fires, and the number of birds killed by wind turbines.
I do have to say though, one really cool thing about wind turbines is when they fail. Wind turbines don’t disappoint when they decide to stop doing what they do in rapid fashion.
So. As far as my bonifdes go, I am not an electrician or electrical engineer. I am, however, a power plant operator and maintainer by trade and have trained many others how to operate plants for over 25 years. I know a thing or too at the practical and operational level about this stuff because I’ve done it, studied it, and taught others.
Ok… so green energy is not complete bullsh*t, just mostly… at least for the time being. There are applications where small scale green energy is a good thing and could actually be useful. Home solar and wind power is not necessarily a bad idea, I’m actually a big fan and would love to have an off grid power system for my home. But just because something works at the individual residential level doesn’t mean that it is a good idea that will work on something as large, intricate, and fragile as the national power grid.
Change is inevitable and will happen naturally enough when there is an actual need for the change. But, introducing new and complex technologies too quickly to an already fragile and complex system will cause other problems to arise. Change should be introduced incrementally so that problems can be solved as they arrive, unless you are one of the Global Warm-mongers who believe the lie that global warming climate change is about to destroy the planet any day now because the US and Western society has been the most successful and most free society for all who participate in that society in the history of mankind is responsible for enslaving people with capitalism which has led to people being happy, well fed, and productive to minorities being oppressed (even thought they can go to college and get paying great jobs that would allow them to have a prosperous future) because of systemic bad stuff and because of this oppression, mass amounts of plant food carbon dioxide are being generated that is going to melt the ice caps, burn the forests down, change the weather, get trump reelected… or whatever it is that the Climate Marxists are trying to make everyone believe.
The Grid
The power grid works on a Alternating Current or AC form of electricity. This was the brain child of Nikola Tesla and is a really complicated thing that no one fully understands. What electricity actually is is some thing that is theoretical, unless you’re Tesla. That dude got it but Tesla wasn’t your typical nerd. He was more of a super nerd or something. He probably would’ve appreciated Star Trek And Star wars at the same time or Marvel And Justice League equally… just saying. We do know how it works and what it does but we don’t really know what it is. For this discussion, it doesn’t really matter anyway since I don’t know what it is and I’m the one doing the writing.
There are some terms that we need to understand before moving forward:
Voltage: think of this as the “pressure” that an electrical system operates at. Voltage is controlled by voltage regulators at power plants and has to remain constant from the generator but is somewhat variable at your house because of the components that electricity has to travel through in order to get to where it is needed.
Amperage: Think of this as the amount, or volume, of electricity that is flowing through the power lines. The more work an electrical thing does, the more amperage (volume) of electricity it needs to to do it’s thing. Amperage is controlled by making slight variations in the operating speed of a generator.
Power: This is expressed in the term Watts and refers to the amount of work that a system does over a length of time and is a function of amperage and voltage. Power is what we usually think of when we think of electricity. We ask something like “how much power does a thing use?” so that we can relate power usage to dollar signs but this is technically incorrect.
Dirty Power: This refers to power that is variable in voltage and amperage. These variations are caused by inductive loads (electric motors, transformers, generators, curling irons, electrical appliances, electric vehicle charging stations), circuit breakers, transmission lines, and other things that I’m forgetting. To imagine this, think of ripples on a pond created when a rock is thrown into the pond. The bigger the ripples or the more numerous the ripples, the more dirty the power.
Load: this refers to the amount of power being used by the grid.
The power grid here in the US is the most complex piece of infrastructure in the world. Every powerplant in the county is connected to one another and they are all synchronized together in order to share the electrical load demanded by the power grid. Synchronized means that the generators operate at the same speed and in time with one another. Because of the nature of AC power, these generators being synchronized with one another is imperative.
Significant changes on one part of the grid can affect the entire grid as the grid seeks to maintain balance. When a load is applied or removed from the grid, a disruption occurs that puts everything out of whack but the grid will work to return to balance as power is applied or removed. The balance on the power grid refers to the amount of power being generated vs the load on the power grid. This is maintained by adding more generators to the grid or by removing generators as the load varies through out the day.
The grid becomes unbalanced every time something electrical is switched on and off, this is just part of the nature of the thing. Small loads don’t really affect the grid individually but do when added together at the same time. This causes peaks and valleys in power usage through out the day and these variations are predictable for the most part. In order to account for these peaks, generators are added to the grid before the time of the anticipated peak. This is usually accomplished at regional control centers and power plants where automation and operators continuously monitor the grid and make adjustments as needed.
The main thing that we are interested in here is controlling power production. This is what we need to regulate in order to maintain a steady power grid. Power is controlled at the power plant by manipulating voltage or amperage (mostly amperage) at the generator. Relatively small amperage changes are normal but large changes can disrupt this balance and cause generators to operate erratically. That is normal too and the grid is designed to handle that and return to stable operation.
All AC generators on the grid are synchronized with one another. They are all doing the same thing at the same time within their respective capacities. Regional variations on the grid cause the generators in that region to react to the changes but this can cause the generators to react to each other. This dirties up the power produced somewhat but will settle down so long as something else doesn’t cause further disruptions. It’s just part of how the thing works.
The load on the power grid fluctuates through out the day, usually peaking in the morning, then falling somewhat during the day, peaking again in the evening, and then falling to a much lower level at night. Adding and removing generators is how the load on the grid is managed. When more power is needed, more generators are added. There is some predictability to the grid load and generators are usually added and removed based on that predictability. In order to achieve a level of efficiency and reliability to the grid, precise control is maintained over the grid and over the individual generators which are supplying the grid.
Ok… so what does that have to do with “green” energy? It has everything to with it. Wind and solar are the main sources of green energy and these sources are capable of producing tremendous amounts of power, but these can’t produce power at a predictable rate. Engines are precisely controlled machines and so the method of producing power is controllable and reliable. The method of producing power in green energy systems is nature and this is not predictable and reliable. We know the sun will rise, but we don’t know when clouds will move across a solar panel or for how long they will hang out there. We kinda know when the wind will blow but we don’t know for how long, from which direction, and at what speed it will blow.
The unpredictability of these environmental factors are the biggest problem to grid stability. It’s not production levels, its predictability. Wind and solar do not provide that with any consistency. It’s not that these systems don’t produce adequate amounts of power, its that they produce power at varying levels of power and some of these variations can be large enough to affect the stability of the grid. This makes for dirty power which has to be “cleaned up” in order to maintain a steady(ish) power grid.
This is done using engine driven generators. The way that the power plants clean up the power is (basically) through doing the opposite of what the dirty power is doing. If the power spikes then generators slow down. If the power supplies drop then the generators speed up. They do this by either regulating the voltages produced at the plant or through varying the speed of the generators, which changes the amperage produced by the generator.
In order for a power plant to maintain it’s most efficient level of operation, all generators on line need to “share the load” as equally as possible, they all need to be doing the same amount of work. When generators are sharing the load, they are all producing the same amount of power, approximately. Managing how much power is produced by a generator is accomplished through slight speed changes. If a generator needs to produce more power, but at the same voltage, then then speed of engine driving the generator is increased a small amount. Increasing engine speed decreases efficiency because a significant amount of fuel is needed to accelerate the engine to the higher speed required for the demanded power output. Even though the speed adjustment may be less than 10 RPM, the amount of fuel needed to make that adjustment can be considerable.
It takes time for these engines to accelerate which means that power production will lag while the engine is in the process of accelerating. If the power demand of the grid decreases while the engine is accelerating then the engine has to decelerate to a new operating speed. Dirty power creates a wave that the generators have to chase in order to smooth the wave. The generators will always lag behind this wave because the generators react to the power demands of the grid. While we don’t notice this in our daily lives, the power plant operators notice it.
Battery banks may smooth out some of these variations but charging batteries is not a constant load process, especially if the batteries are constantly charging and discharging in a unpredictable cyclical way. Charging batteries produces a variable load on the power grid as well. Batteries start out charging fairly quickly but then the rate of absorption slows down and so does the charging rate. The battery can only soak up energy at a certain rate and when that rate is exceed, well the battery can overheat, catch on fire, or explode. In order to maintain a steady state on the grid, these battery banks would need to be charging and discharging constantly and won’t be able to reach full capacity, unless multiple banks are used. Turns out that this is the plan but the problem with this plan is that there isn’t enough known lithium on the planet to create the battery banks needed for this idea to work.
Ok so you may be thinking that none of this matters to you because you don’t see this going on in your life. You turn the lights on, plug in your device, wash your clothes, and other things with reliability. Well… it is effecting you because all of these variations result in higher fuel consumption, higher emissions compliance costs, and more wear on power plants. Every one of those things effects your power bill and the reliability of the grid. There have been instances where wind turbines have created so much energy from storms that the grid couldn’t handle the power and had to open circuit breakers in order to protect the grid, resulting in blackouts. These higher operating costs hinder sensible technology advancements that may actually improve the reliability of renewable energy sources. Renewable energy sources can be a good thing but the integration of these technologies has to be done slowly and over time.
Technology will be able to over come some of these issues in time but the development of these technologies must be done incrementally and not all at once. Each step that we take in adding complex electronic systems to something as critical as the power grid makes the grid more delicate. This opens up security issues and reliability issues but creates other issues. Technology is expensive to develop and must be paid for through rate increases or through government subsidies, which ultimately are paid for through tax increases or reduced services by some other part of the government. More advanced technologies required higher skilled people to operate, maintain, and repair and we already have problems with getting enough qualified people to operate and maintain the existing technologies. There is nothing free and progress is no different, no matter what the politicians and the highly educated morons running the sociology departments of universities will lead you to believe.
Conclusion
Well that’s it for this one. My goal in writing all of the above was to hopefully give the reader some idea of how the grid works and what affect these alternative generation sources can have on the grid.
This is really a complex topic and took longer to write than what I had originally thought it would take, mostly because ADD kicked in and I went off on a tangent about how generators work and then got lost in what I was writing. This thing had gotten twice as long and much more complex before I realized where I was going…
The thing about this topic is that there is so much more to the national power grid than what can be described in a simple essay and certainly more so than we are lead to believe. I have found that most people don’t really know how our infrastructure works and how fragile these systems are and thought that a brief over view might appreciated by some.
As I tried to explain these things in the most basic way I knew, I realized where the limits of my knowledge were. That’s not a bad thing in my opinion as I am always looking to learn and grow my level of knowledge and have found that writing is a great way of doing that. You realize quickly what you know and don’t know when trying to mansplain a complex subject in a simple way.
At any rate… Please feel free to comment, like, share, and subscribe. Thanks for following along, I hope that you have a blessed day. See y’all next time.
Fair Winds and Following Seas,
Nate
Reliable electricity is taken for granted in the US. Rolling black outs or scheduled daily black outs are normal for grids that are not balanced or maintained. Think of much of the third world.
i liked it, i am curious to know how dirty the power sent into my apartment is,
whether the wiring in the walls is conducive to human health, or not.
i have thought about writing a letter to the ceo of the power company
requiring proof of their safety.
'nothing is free', hmmm i disagree, balance, stability comes in time
and what has been offered to humanity by our Creator is vast beyond comprehension..