The Weather Pit: How Variability in Generation Puts Wear & Tear on Firm Power Resources

Styrian Beaufort on Jan 14 23:31:05

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Shared here on Fnora by permission of the author, B.F. Randall

In addition to reserve power, variability in generation resources is placing extreme stress and premature wear & tear on Firm Power resources. This is because the Firm Power resources are required to turn off and on very quickly. This is known as ramping. CAISO:

The more Weather Power, the more ramping. This is called the Duck Curve. The need for ramping keeps going up because the grid is increasingly exposed to the weather. Ramping and cycling literally wrecks Firm Power resources faster than their design life.

Ramping and destroying Firm Power plants long before their design life both have direct Carbon Costs that could be calculated. How many Lifecycle Assessments for Wind & Solar include these embedded carbon costs? I'd bet a steak dinner it's 0.00%. LCOE! Wind & Sun are Free.

The Duck Curve is not sustainable! Who knew? But it keeps getting deeper every year. We are digging a Weather Pit and it's going to cost a lot to get out of it someday. But first we need to stop digging. Good luck.

See The Above Casio.com PDF

Firm Power means a plant that one can control on demand - Hydro; Nuclear; Gas; Coal; Hydrothermal. Of these, gas plants bear the brunt of the ramping, but that wrecks their efficiency and equipment.

Ramping = the need to turn on Firm Power resources to meet demand or we will have a blackout. Ramping is hard on equipment and spews out a lot of carbon. More is not better. Wind & Solar are not saving anything--money or carbon; quite the opposite.

Another way to look at the Duck Curve is that electrical energy is a service, not a commodity. Wind & Solar are like the Sometimes Uber mobility service I call Floober:

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