Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobblehead
Actually, what I was thinking was more along the lines of everyone is happily generating say 40% of their own power. The power generating system only needs to maintain 60% of the work (but still must be able to pick up 100%). What happens if a dark weatherfront crosses teh province, or it is at night and the wind suddenly dies down, and the generating facilities need to now generate 90%.
How long does it take to get up to that capacity? What if the wind is gusting - does that cause the wind generation to fluctuate a lot?
I guess I'm thinking that since you can't store AC and most people/electrical systems require a fairly steady power source, that a power system were any significant portion of the power generation comes from a highly variable/unreliable source would hace unique and challenging issues.
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You can actually bring up capacity quite quickly in Alberta. When I was involved in the industry there were a lot of gas generators that would sit idle, waiting for price spikes. As soon as there was one (which, in the first few years of deregulation there was a lot of) they would fire up and feed into the grid at market price. You were looking at a matter of minutes to bring them on. We would also monitor load throughout the night, and found that you would see the load at
maybe 50%, so the chances of actually needing to bring on any generation was quite slim. With net metering, you would actually decrease price spikes as not only would people be feeding back into the grid with a solar panel or small wind turbine, but chances are they're not using a lot of power at that moment either. IMO it would greatly reduce spot price for power, and in the end reduce everyones power bills. It's a great idea, and I have no frickin idea why it hasn't been done in Alberta.....one of the only provinces/states in NA with a "true" deregulated electricity system.
There are also lines running East-West from Alberta, so in the event that we ran out of capacity we could purchase power from BC and Saskatchewan. I think that only once in the last 6 years did we ever hit 100% capacity, so it's not really a common occurence. The BC lines were used mainly to rape Alberta in the beginning of dereg, but that's a whole different story....