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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/one-device-transform-power-electical-grid-inverter>
"From Colorado to Washington, from Ohio to Pennsylvania, coal-fired power
plants are shutting down. The United States is on track to retire half of its
capacity to generate electricity from coal by 2026. That’s a remarkably fast
decline from coal’s peak in 2011 — and a major step in the shift to clean
energy and the fight against climate change.
But there’s a surprising downside to retiring big, old power plants. These
plants help maintain the power grid’s stability. As more of them go offline,
something else must step up to do that job.
An electrical grid is a complex network involving systems that produce power,
like a nuclear power plant or a wind turbine, and systems that store and
transmit power, like batteries and transmission lines. A grid can stop
functioning for any number of reasons, such as a tree falling on a power line
or a heat wave overwhelming the system’s capacity. In the United States,
electricity pulses through the grid like a heartbeat at a standard frequency of
60 hertz. That frequency can shift if demand increases beyond supply or if
something in the system like a large generator goes offline. Even a small
interruption in that 60-hertz heartbeat can cause ripple effects that the grid
struggles to recover from.
Large power plants are designed to help the grid be resilient to these ripple
effects. The inertia of their spinning generators buys time in the event of an
unexpected power outage, and they continuously adjust their power output based
on the frequency in the grid, keeping everything stable. But a power grid that
incorporates large amounts of renewable energy, such as from wind turbines and
solar panels, works very differently. It relies on devices known as inverters
to convert the direct current, or DC, electricity produced by wind and solar
facilities into alternating current, or AC, electricity for the grid. And
renewable energy systems involving inverters don’t behave like traditional
power plants do. “We’re dealing with a completely different physical system,”
says Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, an electrical engineer at the University of
California, San Diego.
So researchers have been looking for ways to keep the grid stable as large
power plants are retired and renewable energy makes up a larger percentage of
U.S. electricity generation. The answer may lie in a special type of inverter,
known as grid-forming inverters. These pieces of electrical equipment, which
range in size from smaller than a microwave to as big as a shipping container,
are specially programmed to work at the interface between something that
produces or stores power — like wind turbines, solar panels and batteries — and
the grid. Crucially, they are able to control the flow of renewable energy into
the grid quickly and responsively, in ways that mimic the control from large
power plants."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
