[TXSchnee]

After living under ERCOT for 24 years, I firmly believe everyone who owns a house should install solar + battery back up or a whole house genertaor. Until the entire grid system in the US is updated for both production and transmission (which is the issue here) there will be issues every where with power shortages. While people may say that is not realistic due to costs, this is a forum board for a vehicle that starts over $100,000. My 9.55kWh solar panel sustem and 3 powerwall backup was $86,000.

[Crazy1323]

Texas is a great example with ERCOT and how this would work on a larger scale. The “grid” in the US is divided into three systems. The eastern, western, and Texas. (Texas did not want Federal Regulation which is why ERCOT exists).

On each system everything is connected and in sync. Think of it this way, in each system imagine every generator is connected to the same, really long shaft. The balance of demand equals production must be maintained across that whole system.

To take this as an extreme, oversimplified example, if I turn on a big motor in Arizona (and every power plant stayed at the exact same output level) theoretically every single power plant in the western United States would slow down some immeasurable amount.

In a more realistic scenario, if a power plant in Arizona were to be down for maintenance or it was cloudy over a big solar farm, all the rest of the power plants in the western US could work a tiny bit harder to make up for it. Or if wind isn’t blowing in Colorado it may be blowing hard in Nevada. The grid can spread the demand over a big area to make up for it.

Where Texas got in trouble during the winter is that the issues effecting one power plant were also affecting the others, since their grid is smaller, taking out one power plant is a much bigger percentage of the total.

This is where those battery backups come in handy. Those backups help people balance the load on a smaller system that is more sensitive to changes in demand. Now if someone with one of those battery systems turns on a big motor the operators at the power plants can see “hey, we are having a big draw” and either increase production if available. Or they can let the customer draw from their battery. Either way, it lets the power plants have more time to react and plan accordingly.

The batteries don’t even have to be chemical batteries like we normally think of. They can be any means to store potential energy. There are people experimenting with literal lakes.

When the system has excess capacity they pump a “metric shit ton” of water from a lower lake to a higher lake to use that excess power. When demand is high, they let water out of the upper lake to the lower lake, through a turbine, to generate electricity. Infrastructure for EV charging is part of my job, so I find this stuff pretty interesting.

[TLK]

Originally Posted by subterFUSE

There is a power capacity issue in some parts of the country, like California. That state cannot keep the lights turned on during the hot months. They have rolling brownouts all the time, and rationing of electricity. Add a few million more EVs to the mix and this is going to be a disaster.

Wrong. It’s been a couple years now since there were rolling black outs in California due to hot weather demand. Last year there were none, and this year none so far, even with this years forest fires. Please try to do at least minimal research before presenting falsehoods to try to support your position.
Part of this is the high level of solar adoption in CA, as well as battery installations to help power the grid in the 4-9 pm high demand period where solar production falls off.

A

[HMN]

I have a feeling BMW may pull a reverse uno move and bring back a big bad M5 with a V8 in 2030..