Averages Don't Keep The Lights On

Here's a story that will scare you right to the core.  The Midcontinent Independent System Operator says its system is volatile.  What does that mean?  Check out this article.  It's what the mainstream media isn't telling you.  As more and more variable generators are built, it's getting harder and harder to keep the lights on.

And there's this quote, which probably deserves some sort of speaking truth to power award:

“I caution you about averages,” Schug said. “Our extremes are much higher.”

That's right!  All the "reports" and "studies" that claim we can run our country on 100% renewable energy are based on averages.  Because renewables only produce when conditions are right, they are averaged together to produce an average amount of generation on paper.  But MISO doesn't operate the grid on paper.  It must balance load with generation in real time.  Extremes happen in real time, not averages.  As MISO continues to lose fossil fuel generators that can run when called, and replaces them with renewables that only run when they want to run, the amount of available generation MISO can call to serve load shrinks.

Wayne Schug, MISO’s vice president of strategy and business development, said a growing renewables fleet and rapidly changing weather is driving increasing volatility and an “inability to deal with it.”  

By 2030, as little as 57% of the RTO’s fleet could be dispatchable, staff said. Dispatchable resources accounted for 84% of the fleet in 2020.

Schug said that since 2017, average daily output swings and forecasting errors have grown by gigawatts and percentages points, respectively. He said while the grid operator continues to get better at output forecasting, the expanding wind fleet has blotted out any signs of improvement.

If we're cutting the amount of dispatchable generation,  what are we also doing to cut load?  Not a thing.  We're actually trying to add to load by switching to electric cars and heating.  We're trying to add the entire energy load currently carried by natural gas and oil to the electric grid.  A grid that already has trouble keeping up!

Reality is screaming here and nobody is paying attention.

Moeller said that for three days in 2020, MISO’s entire wind fleet in the upper Midwest failed to generate a megawatt. He also said unexpected cloud cover could make a solar farm “disappear within three minutes.”

Joundi said MISO is working with an aging generation fleet more prone to outages with increasingly uncertain return-to-service dates. He said the footprint’s current rate of generation retirement — propelled, in part, by state and federal policies — is outpacing members’ capacity replacements.
Staff expects the number of emergency near-misses to rise every year, Joundi said.

Joundi said that the control room now manages more intra-hour instability and intensifying “wind droughts,” where wind output drops off below forecasts.

Director Mark Johnson asked staff to invite a control room operator to a board meeting to address their recent experiences dealing with grid volatility.

I think we need to institute mandatory control room field trips for every blithe young environmentalist who insists we can become completely carbon free in just a few years by relying on wind and solar.  Ditto for the lazy journalists who parrot this political prevarication because they're simply afraid that the monster they have created will cancel them if they tell the truth.

The averages only work on paper.  The big idea that we can build a "national grid" to instantly ship excess renewable generation anywhere in the country also only works on paper.  Renewables are not dispatchable.  Importing power from other regions to keep the lights on during renewable volatility can only rely on dispatchable generation, like that produced by fossil fuels.  But as we build more renewables and shut down more fossil fuels, we continue to make our power supply more and more volatile.  You can't "borrow" power from a region that doesn't have enough to share because its own renewables aren't producing.  If making a regional grid even 50% reliant on variable renewables like wind and solar requires the grid to import vast quantities of electricity from other regional grids, what's going to happen when all the regional grids are at 50% renewables?  Who is left to supply the power at times when no region is producing enough, like after dark?  You cannot rely on wind to pick up enough after dark to carry the entire solar load, and it's dark from coast to coast for a significant number of hours every day.  Batteries, you say?  Not mature enough yet.  They can't store enough power, are very expensive, use many rare and toxic elements mined by slave labor in countries that hate us, and are not recyclable or sustainable.  Wind and solar alone just can't cut it.

It's simply fantasy.  Crazy, destructive fantasy!

And then the lights go out.

Don't ask an environmentalist or academic if we can provide 24/7 reliable power from 100% renewable energy sources.  That's like asking a heart surgeon to fix your electric car.  Ask someone who actually dispatches power and balances the grid.  These folks are performing increasing acts of magic to keep the lights on and nobody is listening to their warnings because they prefer to revel is fantasy and "averages."

Is it going to take rolling black outs for this story to be told?  Or will we just be asked to "suck it up" to save the planet when it does?

“We face a rapidly transforming energy landscape,” CEO John Bear told directors during a Board Week meeting, warning of a delicate load-supply balance.

He said when MISO introduced its ancillary services market 12 years ago, “load was the only thing that was moving around.”
“Everything else was pretty static and predictable,” Bear said. “Where we stand is not sustainable, and it’s not safe. We have a lot of work in front of us.”