Based on an article by Mark Buchanan for Bloomberg
The problem and its impact
The heat wave currently baking the Western U.S. has produced a record high — 133 degrees Fahrenheit — in Death Valley and triggered rolling blackouts affecting millions of Californians. With demand for electricity threatening to exceed supply, the state sought extra capacity from producers in Washington and Arizona, but those states also faced soaring temperatures and spiking demands. Making matters worse, cloudy conditions and faltering winds cut the energy coming from several large solar and wind generators. Power grid managers in California chose rolling blackouts to avoid a more serious systemic failure.
Extreme heat is the proximate cause of California’s current trouble. But behind this lies the increasing pressure that global warming is putting on power systems everywhere. The recent explosive growth of renewable energy sources may help keep temperatures from rising even faster, yet it also makes managing the grid more complex, as it requires integrating diverse energy sources subject to the fickle whims of clouds and winds. Rising temperatures and more extreme weather also make those sources increasingly prone to disruption.
Renewable energy offers great hope for avoiding the worst consequences of a warming planet. Yet it’s a massive challenge to redesign the existing grid — much of it decades old and built for fossil fuels — so it can efficiently utilize this energy. In coming years, the challenge will only be compounded by rising temperatures.
Cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin touched on the problem in her 2016 book “The Grid,” which examined the history of the U.S. electrical grid and the complex interplay of technological, political, financial and cultural forces shaping its evolution. She suggested to me in a recent phone interview that the most pressing challenge is to find ways to run a grid reliably when its power comes not only from central generating stations, but also from millions of distributed generating sources such as rooftop solar panels.
Many areas around the world have seen a surge in renewable energy capacity in the past decade. Yet if many individual sources send power to the grid at the same time or go online together, these coordinated changes lead to voltage surges that can damage power lines and transformers, while dips in supply lead to brownouts and blackouts. Energy generation from natural gas or fossil fuels can be turned on or off on demand, but small photovoltaics only produce energy when it’s sunny.
“One tiny puffy white cloud can produce a dip across a whole region as it moves over multiple rooftops,” says Bakke. “And since electricity use and production have to be balanced all the time, this makes everything unstable. The current grid is simply not made to work this way.”
For this reason, a significant amount of renewable energy capacity hasn’t been incorporated into the grid as it might have been, with California being a prime example. The state passed a law in 2015 requiring 50% of all electricity in the state to come from renewable sources by 2030. However, after lawmakers were pressured by utility lobbyists, the law only counted energy coming from large producers running centralized stations, excluding rooftop solar from individual homes. This despite the extremely rapid growth of such capacity: As of 2015, rooftop solar was producing three times as much as centralized stations.
An amendment in 2018 changed this, allowing the inclusion of essentially all renewable energy sources. The fact that they were first excluded, Bakke told me, reflects the general distrust energy authorities have for smaller-scale energy projects because they can bypass centralized systems management.
“The right path would have been the more difficult one — to ask the utilities to work out a system whereby all renewable power was counted and integrated in the 2030 goal,” Bakke says of the 2015 law. “There’s a ton of rooftop solar available.”
As if the complexity of the emerging grid weren’t enough, the problems facing energy producers will grow worse with as temperatures rise. Mikhail Chester, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, points out that much of the current U.S. electrical grid was built decades ago and designed to cope with temperatures and environmental conditions typical of the past three or four decades. As temperatures rise, the efficiency of both energy generation and distribution is likely to suffer — power lines can’t dissipate heat quickly enough, and components fail more frequently. In a modeling study of Arizona’s grid, Chester and colleagues estimated that every 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperatures will make key power-system components fail three times as quickly and make cascading power outages 30 times more likely.
Hence, there’s an urgent need to figure out how to re-engineer the grid to be more resilient even as the climate becomes more unstable.
“How to do this is the trillion-dollar question,” says Chester, “and there’s no clean answer at this point. The science and engineering are emerging; the question is, Are they emerging and being implemented fast enough?”
As in California, we’re likely to see encouraging surges of success in implementing renewable energy, followed by unanticipated failures, as a diversified power industry — along with millions of individual energy producers — feels its way by trial and error toward an electrical grid able to cope with an uncertain climate future.
What’s clear, notes Bakke, “is that we cannot continue to make electricity from fossil fuels. Because of climate change, it just keeps getting hotter and harder. So we have to find a way to do it with renewables. In California, our efforts are currently failing, and maybe, in the end, we will fail.”
But Bakke is optimistic. “There are so many really smart people working to make it happen,” she says. “But we don’t know if it’s even possible — especially as climate conditions grow worse — to have an electrical grid of the kind we’ve been used to.”
End of original article by Mark Buchanan for Bloomberg
Due to climate change, wildfires are set to become an increasing problem
Millions of acres burn every year in wildfires across the United States, with the worst seasons on record occuring in the past two years. Climate change is blamed for making these fires increasingly worse year-on-year, making things tough for power grid engineers in an increasingly volatile climate reality.
The average wildfire season today is three and a half months longer than it was as recently as the 1980s. The number of annual large fires in the US has tripled — burning six times as many acres as in wildfire seasons only decades ago.
Wildfires are occuring where they were rarely seen before
Temperature averages in Siberia were nearly 10°C above normal for the first five months of 2020. Temperatures in the Russian Arctic region and Siberia continue to break records, thawing the tundra and contributing to an increase of hundreds in wildfires, most in areas inaccessible by firefighters. Siberian wildfires today are breaking out over nearly 3 million acres (1.2m hectares). The smoke cloud is unprecedented, extending over the United States and Canada.
How power lines contribute to wildfires
There is growing evidence that power lines themselves trigger wildfires.
High winds are a key contributing factor, vegetation contact, where high winds blow trees and branches onto power lines, sparking fires. In other cases, wind can snap wooden distribution line poles, causing live wires to fall onto nearby dry grass, setting it on fire.
California is particularly at risk because of drought conditions that have turned its forests into tinderboxes from August to November, when high winds are common. The Redwood Fire burned more than 36,000 acres, destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses, and lead to nine deaths.
Introducing VECTO System – real time notifications the moment problems arise
Developed in Cape Town, South Africa, VECTO System is an innovative grid management system developed to meet Africa’s steep energy challenges. It is a solution in two parts – a device installed across the network, and a software platform that visualises the data and provides real time notifications when network performance moves out of accepted safety thresholds.
Each VECTO System device is a linux-based edge computer, which process data locally as it enters the device, while simultaneously streaming it onwards a central data store. With a built-in GPS clock that is time synchronised to within ±100ns from absolute time, the full fleet of devices work together in perfect harmony, delivering the full picture of network performance.
The VECTO 3 edge-computing measurement device records and reports on a comprehensive set of RMS, phasor, harmonic, environmental & synchrophasor data, encompassing over 9,000 parameters.
VECTO System’s data visualisation platform — VECTO Grid OS — reports and interprets the data for the end user. Available for all smart devices, VECTO Grid OS will notify the appropriate team members at the moment anomalies occur on the network. If storm clouds suddenly begin to form over the city and solar supply drops rapidly, VECTO Grid OS will send emergency push notifications and emails in real time to the people who matter.
Beyond emergency notifications, VECTO System’s unique capabilities can also:
- Provide interaction and control down to the mini-substation level, providing engineers and operators with unprecedented visibility and remote management of the entire enterprise.
- Predict, detect and prevent wildfires caused by high voltage power-lines.
- Provide detailed information and insights through an ongoing forensic record, enabling long-term decision making and informed capital investments.
Keen to know more?
VECTO System is set to change the way the power grid is managed. If you’d like to see more of what the system is capable of, speak to us.
