Comment on Australia struggling with oversupply of solar power
486@lemmy.world 3 days agoWhile that is true for power plants with spinning turbines, it isn’t true for solar power. There is no issue at all when you don’t consume all the energy that a solar panel could produce.
Tobberone@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Please expand! Why is this not an issue with solar?
If i remember correctly the person i learnt from works as an aggregator for “small” (typically <1MWh) batteries that cooperates on the frequency regulation market.
486@lemmy.world 2 days ago
With spinning turbines, the issue is, that you need to maintain a constant speed of the turbine at all time. That rotation speed directly correlates with the mains frequency. That’s either 50 or 60 Hz depending on where you live. If the load increases by a lot the frequency drops and the turbine speed decreases, when the load decreases, the opposite happens. The people maintaining the grid have to make sure load and supply are in balance to keep the frequency stable and the trubines within their operating parameters.
Compared to that, solar panels have none of these constraints. For one, the output DC voltage not AC, and secondly they don’t mind at all when there is no or very little load. So you can easily simply disconnect solar panels when there is too little demand without any issue. You can’t easily do the same with a power plant with a turbine.