By cfact
By David Wojick
The North American Energy Reliability Corporation (NERC, Rhymes With Jerk) has just published its some output. NERC is a quasi-ecernal authority under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Ferc, also rhymes with Jerk).
Nercs mission is to keep the American network reliably, which it clearly hasn't done. The nonsensical language in the SRA explains this mistake. There is a deep error with which NERC can systematically avoid saying how bad things really are.
This error is the dangerously misleading use of the word “normal”. Here is a good example (of many). Their basic knowledge is that “all areas as adequate expected resources for normal peak load conditions are rated in summer”.
This sounds very calming, as does the entire report. The mistake is that there is no “normal” summer conditions for a certain day, week, month or season. They have really average conditions, and these are rare, not normal.
Here is an analogy to get the point. Suppose I work in the city center and eat for lunch in many different locations. Maybe I eat Arbys twice a month. It would be wrong to say that I usually eat at Arby's because I eat less than 10% of the time there. “Usually” implies most of the time.
In the same way, the average weather occurs in less than 10% of the time, so it is wrong to call it normal. In addition, the weather is often worse than the average in terms of the network, sometimes far worse.
Therefore, nerc should truthfully say something like this: “All areas are likely to have appropriate resources for normal summer conditions, but it is very likely that the conditions are getting worse, including far worse.”
This is not calming at all, since it is clearly careful how bad things really are.
The report evaluates the forecast generation capacity and demand by dividing the country into 23 different evaluation areas. That sounds good, but in any case they use average weather, which makes the whole show completely unrealistic.
Here is a simple example of what you ignore that I happened to live through: Wintersturm Elliot in 2022. I am on the territory of PJM, the largest US regional transmission operator.
According to the long -term reliability assessment of NERC for this year, PJM had a reserve margin of 30% based on the average weather. Elliot's bitter cold wiped this edge, and PJM hardly escaped the power failure. Elliot's cold extreme was not either. Pittsburgh's low was -5f, while it was -22f 30 years ago.
Summer is also susceptible to far average events, and reliability is about these events, not average events. We have a lot of weather data and know how to carry out probabilistic analyzes. In each of the 23 rating areas, nerc should tell us the probability of serious events for stress stress. This would not be happy figures, and the message would be anything but calming.
In the case of weather forecasts, a minor chance of storm can be the most important forecast. Nerc actually waves her hand by listening some of the things that can go wrong. Example: “…… above the normal electricity requirement, periods with low wind and sun exit as well as heat events with wide areas that disturb the available transfers and the availability of generator disorders can briefly supply risk areas.”
The estimate of the probabilities for bad things in every evaluation area could begin to enable us to evaluate a real reliability. All we have now is a page to the page as it will be when everything is beautiful.
In addition, their involvement of solar and wind to cover the question of tops is ridiculous. Here you will find a role model among the most important findings: “In the meantime, the growth of the solarphotovoltaics (PV) and the battery-free resources has accelerated with the addition of 30 GW namesake solar PV resources and 13 GW new battery memory.
Summer peaks are usually heat waves with peak times between 4 a.m. and 6 p.m. if there is no sun output. Batteries can buy a few hours, but these heat waves are usually several days of events that make batteries worthless. They are also stagnating high -print events with low wind without wind output.
If NERC takes on a large solar and wind performance to meet the top requirements, your results are ridiculously unreliable. The combination of the use of wind and solar with mere average conditions makes this so -called reliability assessment very misleading at best.
We need a realistic reliability assessment.
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