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Reddit mentions of The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
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Reddit mentions: 1
We found 1 Reddit mentions of The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future. Here are the top ones.
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| Release date | September 2016 |
Pro renewable energy here: Renewables HAVE made the grid unreliable. The antiqued grid requires electric load balancing to operate. Meaning, that you have to put as much power into the grid as is currently needed or it can overload. Too little power and you have blackouts.
Before renewable energy was commonly used our grid was charged with a steady, predictable load of electricity coming from various power plants around the country. At 5pm when people would leave work and go home to fire up their Air conditioners, TVs, lights and oven to cook dinner, the power plants could steadily increase electricity output to meet the demand with supply and not have to worry about blackouts or overloads.
Now imagine a nice day where all the solar panels are soaking up sunlight and converting it to electricity. Wind turbines on the breezy West Coast are lazily spinning, also adding electricity to the grid. There is also a handful of power plants supplying electricity to top off our power needs... then with not much notice the skies clear, and on the west coast a big steady wind starts hitting the shores and working its way over the hills and to the mountains. Solar output is instantly doubled, those lazily spinning wind turbines start chugging, and tons of electricity hits the grid at the same time.
The spiking excess electricity is now risking overloading the grid. Too much electricity shoots through transmission lines somewhere which causes them to trip like circuit breaker. Now the same amount of electricity is still coarsening through the grid, and with a line that shut off, a million homes are now in the dark. The electricity those homes were just using is now in the grid because there’s nowhere for it to go. More transmission lines are overloaded and a chain reaction of tripped transmission lines and blackouts happen.
The unpredictability of renewable energy is a big strain on our archaic grid. It wasn’t designed for that type of use.
Source: This book
https://www.amazon.com/Grid-Fraying-Between-Americans-Energy/dp/B01I5SY176