Most here know that the US electrical grid is stressed. Europe is as well.
The Netherlands has been an enthusiastic adopter of electric cars. It has the highest number of charging points per capita in Europe. As for electricity production, the Netherlands has replaced gas from its large North Sea reserves with wind and solar. So much so that it leads the way in Europe for the number of solar panels per person. In fact, more than one third of Dutch homes have solar panels fitted…
The problem is “grid congestion”, says Kees-Jan Rameau, chief executive of Dutch energy producer and supplier Eneco, 70% of whose electricity generation is now solar and wind. “Grid congestion is like a traffic jam on the power grid. It’s caused by either too much power demand in a certain area, or too much power supply put onto the grid, more than the grid can handle.”…
Damien Ernst, professor of electrical engineering at Belgium’s Liege University, is one of Europe’s leading experts on electricity grids. He says it is an expensive problem for the Netherlands to solve. “They have a grid crisis because they haven’t invested enough in their distribution networks, in their transmission networks, so they are facing bottlenecks everywhere, and it will take years and billions of dollars to solve this.”
Prof Ernst adds that it is a Europe-wide issue. “We have an enormous amount of solar panels being installed, and they are installed at a rate that is much, much too high for the grid to be able to accommodate.”
Huh. And in lots of places the issue isn’t “renewables”, it’s “too little power of any kind”
When Microsoft opened a data center in central Mexico last year, nearby residents said power cuts became more frequent. Water outages, which once lasted days, stretched for weeks
Nearly 60 percent of the 1,244 largest data centers in the world were outside the United States as of the end of June, according to an analysis by Synergy Research Group, which studies the industry. More are coming, with at least 575 data center projects in development globally from companies including Tencent, Meta and Alibaba.
As data centers rise, the sites — which need vast amounts of power for computing and water to cool the computers — have contributed to or exacerbated disruptions not only in Mexico, but in more than a dozen other countries, according to a New York Times examination.
In Ireland, data centers consume more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity.
Sounds like Ireland (and others) could use more electricity, not less.
Yes. At the same time it makes a difference what kind of energy. Some excerpts from the BBC article…
As for electricity production, the Netherlands has replaced gas from its large North Sea reserves with wind and solar…This is all good in environmental terms, but it’s putting the Dutch national electricity grid under enormous stress…
Prof Ernst adds that it is a Europe-wide issue. “We have an enormous amount of solar panels being installed, and they are installed at a rate that is much, much too high for the grid to be able to accommodate.”
…the financial incentive for people who feed their surplus solar electricity into the grid is being reduced to almost nothing. In some cases, people will even have to pay to feed solar power into the grid.
The article is saying that they need to build out the infrastructure to effectively utilize all this additional energy that they are getting from renewable sources. You appear to be making it sound like the need to cut back on renewables.
I think there are two things going on here. One is what is familiar to board readers here – upgrading an aging grid in a time of increased demand. Number two is redesigning their grid for the high(er) penetration of intermittent sources. They need to at least slow the renewable growth so that their grid can handle the new paradigm.
OK, I admit to being overwhelmed with articles that say something like this, but I cannot (or perhaps refuse) to understand it. Here’s why:
When I am producing more solar than I can use, I feed it to “the grid”. But in this case that’s my neighbor 100 yards away (who doesn’t have solar, as the vast majority of home do not). By doing that I’m replacing the need for electrons to move from the power production plant, across miles and miles of wires to reach his house (and mine) so it seems that I am doing the grid a favor.
Now with solar that is most likely to occur somewhere in the middle of the day, granted, and that is not when demand is the highest.
But where demand is the highest, generally early morning and late afternoon (after 5pm) solar is essentially irrelevant, so my grid impact has to be practically nothing. If I didn’t have solar, the main power plant would still have to produce just as much for those peak times, and that’s where the grid stress is, no?
I acknowledge that if there is a lot of solar production midday, it still can’t possibly be more than the power provider is used to providing - at least not yet, what with solar being such a small fraction of the total mix. And if it changes that mix, particularly at peak solar times, so what? Much of what is produced is “load following” anyway. The amount of “base” production is fairly small if you don’t include those things that could be load following, particularly natural gas and other petroleum. There are base producers which are harder to ramp up and down (coal, nuclear) but a significant fraction of our current baseload is base only because we choose it to be.
Meanwhile I think I’m helping the grid by providing power when I can. Can anyone explain to me why this is wrong?
Instead of thinking about electrons think about water molecules. What does the in and out flow do to your water pipes that were designed for flow in only one direction?
