Europe still has many megawatts of solar with inverters that disconnect when detecting any grid disruption.
This is the absolute worst thing to do when there is a shortage of power - you immediately make the shortage worse and more grid disconnects.
The real fix is a grid with second by second pricing based on system frequency, and every individual user allowed to set a daily 'spend cap' of euros/dollars, letting them choose how much they are willing to pay for reliability.
Such an market has a huge stabilizing effect on demand, meaning a major incident would probably only have fairly small impacts on system frequency and embedded solar wouldn't disconnect.
You require inertia in the grid to maintain frequency and other stability stuff.
Solar PV is great but is mostly grid-following so cannot operate on it's own. As I understand it you need a minimum fraction of power generation to be large spinning turbines.
I think this problem can be mitigated with add-on rotational mass style kinetic energy batteries or something like that. I don't think variable energy pricing will help if it's an issue with over-demand the grid managers can do rolling blackouts to manage while fixing the supply problems. The grid is just broken at the moment and the solar can't maintain the grid alone.
Large Inverter Based Resources (IBR) such as huge solar parcs, grid-scale batteries or high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) lines can be programmed to behave like rotating generators, or even to smooth out smaller ripples. They also don't necessarily need a leading grid frequency but can be used to generate their own frequency normal to cold-start or resync a grid.
Only "small stuff" IBRs need a leading frequency from the grid and disconnect outside their safety corridor because those usually aren't controllable from some central grid authority. Thus the stupid-but-safe behaviour mandated for them.
That is basically what happens in South Africa today. There are rolling blackouts and rich people with backup generators and batteries are unaffected. It's gotten to the point where richer cities (like Capetown) have their own power sources to mitigate the problem.
The current system is that everyone pays equally for X amount of stability, and for some people they don't get as much stability as they desire (eg. These people in Spain), whilst others pay more money and than they'd like when they would be fine with 5 minutes outages once a year.
That made sense before technology became available for everyone to make their own choice - but that is no longer the case.
Let's skip the technical problems in your theory and focus on the social.
People need power to survive. You know, food, hot water, light, work, internet, mobile phones, entertainment, etc. This requires stability, not second by second pricing.
When you put a chicken in an oven, you want to cook that chicken and eat it, feed your family. Electricity price rising in the next few minutes would mean that you either have to risk disease (chicken staying in the dangerous temperatures until the electricity price drops) or being hungry and throwing food away. This is not how you want society to function.
Believe it or not, but maintaining an electricity grid is a massive undertaking, and the people in charge of it knows the topic much better than you do.
The problem isn't a market problem, it's a physics problem: having a synchronized grid of AC current with many producers over a wide area is a real challenge, even when the underlying issue is resolved it takes a lot of time to add the power plants (or renewable equivalent) to the grid because they must be synchronized.
The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.
Also, nobody in the field disagrees that in the more distributed grid we are seeing today, more endpoint communication and control could lead to more resilience. Whether pricing signals are the best path is a more open question, but they certainly appear to be a feasible option.
> The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.
No it doesn't. The fact that it's being said in a comment full of nonsense tells me that they don't have “above-average understanding”. They probably have read something, once, and now thinks they are an expert, that's literally what Dunning-Kruger is about.
They seem to believe that the equilibrium of supply and demand is all that matters, when it's just one piece of the puzzle and among the easiest to manage. Large, nation-scale, failures like this one are very unlikely to be caused by a lack of supply alone and markets are nowhere near fast enough to help preventing these.
The reason why we interconnect grids has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with physics, politics can sometimes lead to disconnections (like how the Baltic states disconnected from the Russian grid earlier this year) but it comes with great cost and involves careful planning (the fact that the Baltic states remained connected for almost three years after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine should give you an hint of how challenging it was).
The bigger the grid, the more efficient and resilient it is (and managing electric grids on islands is a nightmare), but it comes with a significant complexity and means restarting from zero is harder.
Interdependent grids are usually good: they allow you to average out the effect of a single power station failure over a much larger area, and to amortize prices from a wider area of suppliers.
Don't you realize that the smaller the grid, the more important the instantaneous load variations can be in relative term and the harder it is to keep things running smoothly? It's not a theoretical concern, it's why electric networks on islands are much harder to work with and much more prone to collapse than bigger networks.
It is not. The bigger the network, the more stable it is, that's why countries keep interconnecting with each other despite political tensions between them (no pun intended).
EU electricity market is very similar to it, but interconnected and probably more free market style. A lot of people pay the spot price depending on county and their provider of course.
I didn’t really find anything problematic from an economic standpoint with the Texas power disaster. On the surface, the main problem there was just that a bunch of people were on spot energy plans, in order to save tremendous amount of money as long as the spot price stayed low. This is simply gambling. Those people after some period of savings suddenly cried foul when their gamble went south as prices spiked. The only issue I see here is if they weren’t adequately informed of that possibility. Obviously, the people who got the $2000 electricity bills are going to be the decide they weren’t informed adequately, and I’m sure it was spelled out in a document the size of an iTunes license agreement that literally no customer ever read. But anyway those people had themselves to blame as that plan was not mandatory or default.
This is the exact kind of techbro nonsense that I’ve come to expect from this website. No empathy for your fellow humans and dressed with a side of “computers and code plus finance”.
I thank the heavens that the people who run the electricity system do not share your opinions.
This is the absolute worst thing to do when there is a shortage of power - you immediately make the shortage worse and more grid disconnects.
The real fix is a grid with second by second pricing based on system frequency, and every individual user allowed to set a daily 'spend cap' of euros/dollars, letting them choose how much they are willing to pay for reliability.
Such an market has a huge stabilizing effect on demand, meaning a major incident would probably only have fairly small impacts on system frequency and embedded solar wouldn't disconnect.