leymed

I think your interpretation is correct. The voltage control is done at the high level of the grid, meaning the control covers bigger generation stations and major substations. Even if it’s small generator, rotating machinery, you won’t have strict voltage control other than its own AVR. The problem I see here is that we embed smaller individual generations at the lower level, where they pump the generated power to the grid at the medium voltage level. When you have majority of your generation at this level, you won’t have strict control over voltage and even frequency, I assume. I’m still digesting the report, but what I am after is whether they really neglected it and if it is not possible to do voltage control with 50% generation coming from renewable and through medium voltage level, aka lower level.

Hoping this forces universities to change their archaic PhD system, to adapt something similar to european system. Then people who really have passion for a field and want to have normal job do their research, without working for labs as a cheap labor.

This book is geared to prepare you for functional analysis in a fast pace. It won’t take you so far in applied math, engineering or ML. Considering this, not sure the title is “right”.

You can still find books that use the same approach and covers more.

Those are actually good questions.

Engineering grid and PV installations acknowledge that the generation may be lost, so you are having contingency plan by means of transferring or picking the load. You're going to lose power for short time if you didn't do this properly.

Actually due to the nature of PV generation, no sun no generation, it is reckless to just rely on PV. If sun is shining that is great, there'll be generation. However, daily peak consumption coincides with less day light. So during planning the target is the extreme cases (statistically estimating demand), in other words you do load flow studies for extreme cases. This helps to see your capacity limits.

In parallel to this you should consider electric grid as a layered system. PV generation at house is the lowest level, so less impact. So when it is lost, or neighborhood or town lose PV generation it will impact nearby station, which is couple MW if not kW. So when you lose PV generation and you planned your system for extreme case, higher level of generation or substation will take control of it.

Losing GW solar does not mean you're losing that amount power in small geographical region. You have to divide that into so many small parts. Also, PV generation at GW level is too high for small region.

Hope this explanation helps. It is because how power flows, governed by rules of physics. Bottom line, if hacker wants to affect a grid they should target higher level of grid, PV panels on the rooftops will not help their cause, they are end of line.

My point is hacking into home PV inverters doesn’t affect grid stability, you can’t penetrate into grid in that way. At worst we’re talking about losing power for a short time at those homes. When the demand is planned for a region you specifically exclude PV for load flow studies.

Reading through comments I saw a lot of comments confusing cloud security with electrical safety of a system. Electrical protections are completely separate from communication line/ internet, has to be hard wired. As the size of plant/substation increases the automation and control system (again completely different thing from electrical protection) has its own internet system. Burning down substation, exploding transformer through solar panel is very very unrealistic.

On top of that PVs installed at homes are insignificant to cause such troubles. As the size of installation increases, you will have different connection agreement and certain requirements. You can't install 15 MW and connect through inverters that are used at home, which is 100 kW at most. Even 15 MW is insignificant change for a grid.

In greater scale, meaning power plants not the PV installed at houses, these things are taken more seriously and after purchase of equipment the control and automation of plant are in your hands. For example, Woodward, ABB have products with capacity up to 0.5 MW of single inverter.

Micro inverter for each panel would be very costly. In 1 MW plant you will have around 4000 panels, communicating with that amount electronic devices would be a headache.

That makes sense, I'm in EST.

Just to clarify and understand what happened, I believe right after the trip some generators all around the grid picked up the load (unless UFLS was activated) immediately (around 7:03), we can call these generators support system. Then around 7:05 batteries kicked in with 468 MW, as a support to support system.

Those links are very informative. Can you elaborate on Ancillary Services Monitor and Energy Storage Resource Action dashboards? What’s the installed capacity that supported?

Also your original post link states event happened at 7:02 AM, your links here points to 8:05 AM. Can you explain this?

You’re correct that the system is statistical, and it’s planned accordingly. However, we cannot omit the fact that it’s the running turbine that responds faster to the unpredictable nature of the grid. The backbone of the grid, aka the baseline plants, are extremely responsive to unpredictable nature of the grid at a greater scale, with enough amount of safety margins to bring into service under unusual circumstances. I really don’t see, at least what we have in hand rn, that happening with solar or wind. Without strong baseline you’d experience supply demand imbalance, in engineering terms frequency decay, voltage collapse.

I think you’re missing the point how turbine-generator works. The rpm speed has to stay the same, meaning the rotor speed doesn’t change. As long as you don’t have closed circuit you’ll waste that mechanical energy. If you meant starting from stand still position, then you’re right it takes couple minutes to pick up the load.

With that said, turbines responding in couple minutes are more reliable as a baseline when you’re planning load flow of as big as country or wider area. The basic reason is that you have source of energy under your control such as nuclear, water, gas, coal. You cannot have solar, wind as your baseline, I don’t want sound dramatic, but it’s kind of suicidal to do that. Solar’s ramping is not a win when you consider greater scale.

My understanding engine is a device governed by laws of thermodynamics, whereas motor is based on electrodynamics.

Always thought calling car engine a motor is incorrect, shouldn’t be used interchangeably. In my experience machinery would be common name for both in engineering terms, not daily usage.