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Morgan98's avatar

Another aspect of the expansion needed, is all those solar panels on houses feeding into the grid. All those EV's backfeeding into the grid (under some proposals). These will work at what is called in the industry the distribution level (generally 69kv and lower). In fact the stuff running by your house is generally around 13kv, but I digress. My point is, the distribution level was not, is still not, designed for "back feeding" into the system. It was designed to deliver one way. It has been able to take minor back feeding ...say 3% of power (if that). That's ok, but under some of proposals...30% or more (at times of high demand) its not designed for. Nor is it easily modified for such power flows. Also, the back office accounting for such "back feeding" needs to be upgraded from current practice (ie. Net metering a'nt gonna work). Also such large #'s of relatively small power generators need to be tightly/quickly controlled by the local/regional utility so that voltage/frequency problems are kept to nominal levels. This again goes back to how the original grid design was for the economies of large centralized power plants.

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Brian Katz's avatar

Great essay, thank you. Very informative about the challenge of going “full” renewables and its impact on transmission lines. I am sure there is an equally bizarre analysis on storage capacity for renewables as well. Two issues we never hear about from the propaganda machine.

The challenge: public utilities are loosing profits (which are reinvested into The Grid) from power generated from carbon that is being replaced with renewables (which are not produced by the public utilities). Putting The Grid at risk. Somehow this needs to be figured into our “transition” from the past to the future state. And nuclear is the wild card here. IMO, the US needs to model itself after France, which gets 70% of its power from nuclear. I’ll never buy an EV unless I can charge it with electricity generated from nuclear.

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