We setup a 25kw setup recently in Pakistan but ran out of money to have inverter and batteries for it. So far they have been up for a couple months, none have exploded yet.
Yes solar panels and most renewables can be turned off easily if there is too much energy on the grid. The term for this is “curtailment”. Some energy sources can’t be turned off easily, like nuclear, large coal plants, and combined cycle gas turbines. So you will tend to turn off the easy things before the hard things.
The only major problem here is that this upsets the capitalists that own the generation; they don’t want to pay for stuff that isn’t producing money at every instance that it could be producing money. There are no real technical reasons why you can’t curtail wind and solar plants whenever you need to.
Worth noting that a large amount of “renewables bad” you’ll see is fossil fuel propaganda too, so be careful there.
Would a nuclear or fossil fuel turbine power plant just tear itself apart if disconnected from load at speed? I vaguely understand that the load provides a sort of magnetic resistance on the spinning generator. Without load they would they spin too fast? Or is it a matter of there not being any easy way to dump the power by doing something useless with it like just melting sand or smth?
Yeaaaah, I hate that. A lot of the structures that everyone says are shite seem to be propped up by “solutions” that create and perpetuate the problems they “solve.”
You can cut it, but how? If you don’t have a system in place, thousands of private home will be injecting power into the grid because they don’t know any better. In extreme cases it could overload the grid. Not really explode, but cause voltage spikes, trip breakers, and ultimately (and somehow ironically) cause a blackout as the grid protection mechanisms kick in.
I Germany all new installations need to be able to be remotely controlled to prevent grid feed in when there’s too much production.
Disclaimer: hobby self-taught solar panel enthusiast, not an electrician or grid engineer.
Yeah the remote connection to the local utility would be the obvious answer.
People with Nest systems can enroll into “Energy Saver” programs that start the AC at 3pm to cool the house early for the energy spike at 5pm when many get home from work. All you get is a minor credit per year.
If that shit works they can setup a system for solar.
I’m ignorant of the mechanism of solar panels and electrical grids…do they just explode if they are set up and not draining power?
Because why can’t you just cut the inflow of electricity on a signal? I’d appreciate actual answers.
We setup a 25kw setup recently in Pakistan but ran out of money to have inverter and batteries for it. So far they have been up for a couple months, none have exploded yet.
Yes solar panels and most renewables can be turned off easily if there is too much energy on the grid. The term for this is “curtailment”. Some energy sources can’t be turned off easily, like nuclear, large coal plants, and combined cycle gas turbines. So you will tend to turn off the easy things before the hard things.
The only major problem here is that this upsets the capitalists that own the generation; they don’t want to pay for stuff that isn’t producing money at every instance that it could be producing money. There are no real technical reasons why you can’t curtail wind and solar plants whenever you need to.
Worth noting that a large amount of “renewables bad” you’ll see is fossil fuel propaganda too, so be careful there.
Would a nuclear or fossil fuel turbine power plant just tear itself apart if disconnected from load at speed? I vaguely understand that the load provides a sort of magnetic resistance on the spinning generator. Without load they would they spin too fast? Or is it a matter of there not being any easy way to dump the power by doing something useless with it like just melting sand or smth?
Yeaaaah, I hate that. A lot of the structures that everyone says are shite seem to be propped up by “solutions” that create and perpetuate the problems they “solve.”
You can cut it, but how? If you don’t have a system in place, thousands of private home will be injecting power into the grid because they don’t know any better. In extreme cases it could overload the grid. Not really explode, but cause voltage spikes, trip breakers, and ultimately (and somehow ironically) cause a blackout as the grid protection mechanisms kick in.
I Germany all new installations need to be able to be remotely controlled to prevent grid feed in when there’s too much production.
Disclaimer: hobby self-taught solar panel enthusiast, not an electrician or grid engineer.
Yeah the remote connection to the local utility would be the obvious answer.
People with Nest systems can enroll into “Energy Saver” programs that start the AC at 3pm to cool the house early for the energy spike at 5pm when many get home from work. All you get is a minor credit per year.
If that shit works they can setup a system for solar.