IEEE Spectrum have a story on Japanese attempts to throttle back Solar deployments.
Clashing energy interests on the Japanese island of Kyushu have prompted Japan's government to clamp down on solar power development nationwide. While the government calls it a necessary revision to assure grid stability amidst rapidly rising levels of intermittent solar energy, critics see a pro-nuclear agenda at work—one that could stunt Japan's renewable energy potential.
In response to the threat to grid stability Japan’s Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI) is allowing utilities to refuse interconnects from upcoming Solar developments.
On 28 September, Kyushu Electric announced that it had frozen the interconnection of large solar developments.
...
At least four more utilities followed Kyushu Electric’s lead and froze solar interconnections on their grids, arguing that the solar surge threatened their ability to balance supply and demand.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday January 30 2015, @12:49AM
Seem more like a technical argument. Anyone have any reasons to believe this is actually BS?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Friday January 30 2015, @02:06AM
It an actual issue.
With variable sources, you need some fairly big stable and reliable source on line to prevent huge swings in coming on and dropping off of solar and wind sources.
A slight voltage drop causes all these variable sources to jump on the grid. Then with all those joiners, the voltage can actually exceed the set limit, so all those variable sources drop off. The only coordination mechanism is grid voltage, because each little rooftop solar only has that value to go by. (Its more complex than this, of course, but it serves by way of explanation).
So with a big conventional plant or nuke plant on line that can pick up tremendous load very quickly, it can stabilize the entire grid. This is becoming a big problem in Hawaii as well.
Too many wind or solar plants can destabilize the grid, and smarter interconnect boxes are needed, and these boxes need communications so they can be controlled and coordinated by the power utility.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Friday January 30 2015, @02:18AM
See this: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/07/german-utilities-paid-to-stabilize-grid-due-to-increased-wind-and-solar [renewableenergyworld.com]
Some fast storage (flywheel) solutions have been proposed http://wind2water.com/solutions/grid-stabilization/ [wind2water.com]
But the current and most reliable method is having a big producer on line at all time.
(Not only is there the voltage issue but also phase issues, and handling the two-way power flows on distribution grids built to handle one-way power only.).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Friday January 30 2015, @02:39PM
That's the real issue: the cost of upgrading the grid. The people who own the grid don't want to spend money on it just to enable other people to make a profit and squeeze their business. In Germany the people are buying back the grid and bringing it into public ownership to deal with this issue.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by gnuman on Friday January 30 2015, @06:36AM
With variable sources, you need some fairly big stable and reliable source on line to prevent huge swings in coming on and dropping off of solar and wind sources.
Indeed. While distributed solar is not as disruptive to the grid, large concentrated solar installations are not so good. Clouds can play havoc. Currently, there is only one really good complementary energy source that can spin up and down by almost 100% to match variability of solar and wind. That is hydroelectric.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_Japan [wikipedia.org]
Since Japan has an installed capacity of 27GW hydroelectric power, this should be enough to buffer up to 15GW or maybe, maybe 20GW of solar/wind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan [wikipedia.org]
By these numbers, 16% is hydro (capacity). Then 10% can be solar/wind. With additional pumped storage, this could be increased further. But then that still leaves Japan with very large fossil fuel segment (that needs to be imported!) even if Nuclear power were increased to over 30%. But at least, fossil fuels would be below 50% for electricity.
But then wikipedia link has nonsense like,
Benjamin K. Sovacool has said that, with the benefit of hindsight, the Fukushima disaster was entirely avoidable in that Japan could have chosen to exploit the country's extensive renewable energy base. Japan has a total of "324 GW of achievable potential in the form of onshore and offshore wind turbines (222 GW), geothermal power plants (70 GW), additional hydroelectric capacity (26.5 GW), solar energy (4.8 GW) and agricultural residue (1.1 GW)."
which is ridicules and directly contradicts reality (like hydro development is maxed out, as per other link, or having 100,000 wind turbines with 0 backup in case of weather, like no wind or typhoons - wind is 40% effective, at best sites).
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @12:50AM
Fuck you and your human-hating enviro fucktards. Off yourself and your families to help "the environment", hypocrite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @01:04AM
But in advanced cases as yours, a visit to a specialist is advisable.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @01:12AM
Did you know that soylentnews.org can be accessed via https?
https won't protect us users from your garbage, but it might preserve your reputation with 5 I
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday January 30 2015, @03:06AM
Hey man, nuclear is kind of a four letter word in Japan right now. Literally. It's 原子力の.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 1) by gnuman on Friday January 30 2015, @06:15AM
Literally. It's 原子力の.
Really? WTF? We have UTF support on Soylent!!!
(Sorry if I missed that big news :)
(Score: 1) by gnuman on Friday January 30 2015, @06:17AM
Should have been UTF-8. But no edits. But I forgive.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Friday January 30 2015, @11:17PM
Really? WTF? We have UTF support on Soylent!!!
( ﾟoﾟ)
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Friday January 30 2015, @02:50PM
That says "nuclear day", the anniversary of the commencement of nuclear power in Japan. Also, Japanese doesn't have swear words so the entire concept it meaningless.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @01:11AM
so i had sex with a blind and mute lady the other day. she was surprised i would have her at the ripe age of 87, but i could not resist.
she loved to walk around naked in the house, constantly rubbing herself with oranges and giving herself two coffee enemas a day.
she would laugh when you brought up the smell of other women's vagina's, she sure took pride in douching herself everyday with
a dead rat, which i would hunt in full tribal hunter garb, including a penis gourd and camo face paint. she forces me to have
sex with pillows with her photo on it when she travels.
she violently ejects her false teeth after i slap her on the ass and she giggles, knowing what is coming next.
the remainder of the rat is squeezed onto her body and smeared around with special attention around her neck and armpits.
she refused to hunt the rats themselves because she claimed she is too old for that sort of thing, but she can have sex so
what is the difference?
sometimes the rats know what is in store for them, they've spent many a night, frozen from fear, peering through the
vent ducts in the walls, and when i approach them they roll over dead and say in a high pitched tone which i was
able to reconstruct into human language, "i am not the rat you are looking for."
being as old as she is doesn't spook her, once a week she says, "if you put me in a retirement home i won't let you
bone me anymore." her sign language has improved.
suddenly i'm indiana jones.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @01:17AM
Why do I surf at 0
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @01:35AM
In Australia the electric utilities have been getting progressively less friendly towards solar.
So people are responding with ingenuity. [cleantechnica.com] Refuse to accept new grid-tie connections and the utility may well find themselves creating a situation where people barely need them anymore.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday January 30 2015, @02:08AM
They'll have to find other ingenious ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @02:49AM
Chances are the people living in those kinds of buildings weren't going to run solar anyway because there is much less roof space per person so they aren't going to be running into grid connection denials.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mojo chan on Friday January 30 2015, @02:43PM
Most of Japan is not tower blocks. Solar and wind are becoming very popular now, especially in areas where the electricity supply is somewhat unreliable. Due to the geography, weather and constant earthquakes some places can expect a few outages a year, so entire villages have been installing solar and even full size wind turbines. It works out well for them because those technologies both cover grid down-time and pay for themselves in fairly short order, and the only real impediment is the up-front cost.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by gnuman on Friday January 30 2015, @06:11AM
I think that's fine. If your solar is NOT on the grid, the grid has no problem with it. If you do not take power from the grid, that is fine with the grid too.
The problem is large spike of unregulated power flowing into the grid. The entire grid follows a predictable supply/demand curve governed by the laws of statistics. Large solar installations ruin that even worse than wind or distributed solar as they are much more affected by transients, like local clouds. Distributed solar is *slightly* more predictable.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @02:24PM
Yes that spike is a current problem.
Losing customers or at least losing significant amounts of demand for the product you are selling will be a new problem that arises from the heavy-handed 'solution' to the first problem.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Friday January 30 2015, @02:47PM
The problem is massively overblown. Cloud cover is governed by statistics as well, and over a small area will average out even if individual panels move in and out of shadows. The inverters used to tie the panels to the grid are smart enough not to screw it up as well, backing off to prevent dangerous surges. There is some regulation required to make sure people fit appropriate equipment, but that's well established now.
Cloud cover movement is no more of an issue than people turning on kettles or other high power devices. A kettle can instantly draw 3000W, and then instantly stop drawing it. A large solar PV installation, say 8kW, would struggle to create that kind of transient even with heavy clouds and high winds. My EV draws 6.6kW when plugged in, and the local grid doesn't fluctuate when it clicks on or off (I checked, no voltage spikes or sudden variations in frequency).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @07:17AM
I guess eating all the scientific whaling meat caught of fukushima coast has dulled their radioactif brains.
Srsly though, it's japan. they're a sovereign country and can do whatever they want.
i guess it would be up to japanese people to select a non-radioactive government -or- one that declare that sun a "off-limits" wall-plug.
i can just *shrug*.
as for technical "problems".
solar grid-tie cannot blackstart a grid but neither can a nuclear reactor.
both are "augmenting" power sources; that is the grid has to be boot-strapped from a blackstart capable source first (for example hydro).
to wit: if the grid becomes "unstable" then nuclear powerplants are pulled first and rather quickly from the grid.
the perceived problem with solar grid-tied inverters is that they don't have any "brains" and just nilly-willy push out electrical power.
this is wrong!
ofc solar-inverters need to monitor the grid frequency and voltage and have limits after which they either gradually stop pumping out electrical power or stop all together.
bureaucratic hurdles (paper work) also contribute to the perceived grid instability generated by solar: even small 1-5 kW solar project require huge amounts of documentation, thus it is perceived that ONE BIG solar project (farm) is easier and less (document) costly to certify.
the problem with farms is that "free energy" that could be generated by everybody with a roof is again concentrated in a few hands and is actually SOLD to you! read again: free energy sold to you!
and then the farms are concentrated dense electrical energy sources in the mega-watt range that are "turned-off" by a single cloud. sounds un-stable?
these "problems" of solar are "human-made" because of bureaucratic paper"work" required for certification.
if we take a 10 MW solar-farm and split it up over a area of 20 square kilometers then the "single cloud problem" disappears.
to end i propose a simple calculation: if all the (non-solar) power plants can NOW generate enough electricity to power all japanese households then, in theory, the grid would become unstable if all japanese would stop using electricity for one day, because this situation is EXACTLY the same as if all japanese households would exactly produce as much solar grid-tied electricity as they themselves require...
I just think nobody should be burdened with lots and lots of paperwork if they plug-in a fridge and they should in the same manner not be (document) burdened with pluging-in "some solar".
"NOOOO! you cannot -18 freeze that raw fish! you need DOCUMMMENTTTSSE-ESS for that fridge my precious!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @07:31AM
'if the grid becomes "unstable" then nuclear powerplants are pulled first and rather quickly from the grid."
i mean that they "scram" the reactors and they stop producing (augmenting) electricity.
ofc you cannot pull a scrammed nuclear reactor from the grid completly because in a scrammed state it needs electricity to stay cool else it would pull a fukushima : )
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @08:57AM
not a mathematician here. i'm sure someone can come up with a working recursive equation, so here the outline:
1) solar grid-tied inverter have a upper and lower bound set to be certified for sell: 210 Volt lower bound and 250 Volt upper-bound.
a progressive curved is programmed into the inverter. push out max available at lower bound, progressively pushing out less getting nearer to the upper bound.
2) electricity costs to buy/sell if the grid is at 210 Volts is "very high"!
3) electricity costs to buy/sell if the grid is at 250 Volts is 0. yes ladies and gentlemen, ZERO. as in free!
it means that if ther's alot of electrical power usage and the line voltage drops the you can make lots of money producing electricity but it also means that it costs alot to buy electricity. it encourages to produce
furthermore if the line voltage is a the upper bound it means that you won't get much (if any money) if you produce and that you can turn on all your ... whatever devices (ALU smelter?). it encourages to consume.
sure the more "near-equator" places get more sun but need more cooling too? geography cannot (yet) made to be fair ... ask the sahara (sun, no water).
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday January 30 2015, @03:03PM
When I lived in Saga Prefecture 20 years ago nearly every house you could see had solar water heater installations on the roof. I think Asahi made them.
But this story is a sort we're going to be hearing much, much more of the next 3 years as solar becomes cheaper than grid power. It also illustrates the very steep tipping point traditional power utilities know they're hard up against--when you have a grid and centralized power, that grid enforces your natural monopoly. But when distributed power becomes widespread enough your grid becomes a cost center that will drag your balance sheet into the abyss. There was a story not too long ago about rating agencies downgrading utlities' debt in the US for that same reason.
The very interesting thing to consider that as demand drops, utilities will want to squeeze their remaining customers harder to keep their margins up, which will of course accelerate customer abandonment. The feedback loop that creates will be very harsh, very sudden. In the end, industry aka manufacturing will be the only ones left holding the bag, because it's hard to run a smelter using an array of solar panels on your roof and a wind turbine out back. Gonna suck to be them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 01 2015, @01:21PM
actually one of the "cost" of manufacturing is dictated by fossil fuels (which are naturally regenerated over thousands and thosuands of years).
in reality there's no pressing matter to have to manufacture unless of course we are globally threatened by some civilization ending meteorite.
then of course we need to have those 50 tons of aluminum next week for the "whatever device will stop the meteorite".
in any other case what drives the economy faster, bigger and cheap is the source of energy.
if energy would become *free* then there's no race anymore because everything would become cheaper.
the mining of bauxite, transport, feeding (agriculture) of workers, buildings and the manufacture of building materials etc etc ALL require fossil fuels and if we could replace THE WHOLE chain with *free* energy ... well smelt this week or next? doesn't matter.
just to be clear on how "cost" is viewed: most industrial countries have a so-called fiat currency. it is not tied to gold or silver anymore. it is however not fiat at all. it is tied to cost of energy.
previously it was static: gold bars where sitting quietly in some vault and because they were to heavy to carry to market to buy tomatoes, the village agreed to set a fixed ratio of (light) village bank printed paper (=money) to gold in vault.
this also became unwieldy and thus some smart people said that nothing goes without energy and thus was born the "modern fiat currency".
so this is how it works: the more (non-renewable) energy you consume the more the bank can print money.
so for every liter of oil consumed the bank can print a certain amount of dollars.
it becomes obvious that for *free* energy to work that the global financial system needs to be overhauled.
you cannot transform the consumption of a infinite resource into money as is possible with a finite source like fossil fuels.
with a finite source, the generated/printed money/wealth is a direct reflection of "how much fossil fuels have been destroyed".
so even if you don't like PV-solar, the same problem (energy consumption = wealth creation) would arise if tony stark would start selling his miniature ark reactor on the street next week for 50 cents cheap, because it was really cheap for him to built because his source WAS a mini-ark reactor.
thus fusion will always be 30 years in the future ...