Puerto Rico energy plan introduces MiniGrids to avoid repeat of Hurricane Maria

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/puerto-rico-energy-plan-introduces-minigrids-to-avoid-repeat-of-hurricane-m/556645/

by howard941 • 7 years ago

207 68 7 years ago

I remember reading some study of hedge fund managers that concluded that despite having access to the same market information manager's behavior differed based on their personal experience. More specifically, managers who got burnt by a bubble burst were more risk averse.

I wonder how many nations will follow Puerto Rico's example before they experience a devastating storm first.

DigitalVerse• 7 years ago

It's a little depressing how long it takes to complete projects like this, but encouraging that they're even trying. So... I guess I feel neutral about this on the balance. Anyone wanna take bets on how delayed and how much over budget they'll be?

rbritton• 7 years ago

The corruption won't help. [0]

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=puerto+rico+corruption+from+hurric...

JackFr2• 7 years ago

Kevin Williamson writing about tunnel repairs in NYC

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/l-train-shutdown-repai...

"There was a terrible storm in 2012 that damaged the tunnel; repairs beginning in 2019 will shut down L Train service for a year and a half, etc. What strikes me as remarkable is that none of these accounts contains any half-serious attempt to explain to the curious reader such as myself why in the name of all that is good and holy it is taking all these years to get from Hurricane Sandy to Hurricane Sandy repairs.

Assuming those repairs are done on schedule nearly nine years will have passed between Sandy and the completion of storm repairs. That’s twice as long as it took the United States to defeat the Axis powers, twice as long as the Civil War, longer than the time that elapsed between John Kennedy’s “We choose to go to the moon” speech and landing Americans on the moon."

jandrese2• 7 years ago

It should be noted that it only took 8 years for the line to be built in the first place.

jacquesm• 7 years ago

This is what could be like:

https://inhabitat.com/japanese-workers-take-just-6-days-to-f...

The side-by-side picture is stunning.

mstade• 7 years ago

That’s twice as long as it took the United States to defeat the Axis powers, twice as long as the Civil War, longer than the time that elapsed between John Kennedy’s “We choose to go to the moon” speech and landing Americans on the moon."

Implying the United States defeated the axis powers on their own is a bit rich – don't you think?

Disregarding the revisionism of your comment, this seems to be a common argument in discussions like this and I wonder why? Isn't it fairly obvious that those ambitious undertakings were either due to significant political will or being forced by danger of death, whereas repairing a subway most probably carries none of that weight? So those responsible must fight tooth and nail to convince the powers that be of the necessity of the work, probably end up being underfunded anyhow, and of course all this requires the responsible (political) parties care enough in the first place.

It seems like a pretty unreasonable argument to me, but maybe I'm missing the point.

macspoofing5• 7 years ago

It's a little depressing how long it takes to complete projects like this

What if this is because those kinds of projects aren't a great solution and yet we're constantly trying to hamfist them in because it 'feels' right. If it was easy and cheap we would have switched long time ago.

Solar and wind are expensive, and they stress the infrastructure because of their inherent intermittency. Battery deployments are also expensive to deploy and to maintain (Li batteries will degrade, but then so will wind turbines and solar panels) and no battery project can bridge the gap in the daily and seasonal fluctuations of power output from solar and wind.

You end up needing to burn fossil fuels to compensate. You'll burn either natural gas, or coal, or some sort of bio-fuel or garbage or ... whatever else, but you'll burn something.

Hydro, geothermal and nuclear are pretty much the only proven power generation sources that can provide city-scale power without fossil fuels - and we're pretty much out of rivers to dam and geysers to develop. And since nobody likes nuclear anymore we're left with no actual solution to carbon emissions. But hey, Green New Deal is a great way to feel like you're doing something!!

Anyone wanna take bets on how delayed and how much over budget they'll be?

Sure. I'll take that bet. It will be a disaster. I also don't believe that they will ever deploy 920 MW of battery storage - which would be by far the biggest battery deployment in the world. And if they do, it won't be worth it.

loudmax• 7 years ago

Sure. I'll take that bet. It will be a disaster.

I understand the "bet" here is figurative, but it's pretty sad to bet on the misery of others. We should have realistic expectations for how this project is likely to work out, but we shouldn't give into cynicism before the project has even gotten started.

You'll probably end up proven right, but in this instance, I hope you're wrong. You should hope you're wrong too.

dghughes• 7 years ago

Would that not be the Jones Act not so much Puerto Rico? Tesla wouldn't be affected by it but any other project that wasn't US-based would be.

I find it amazing such archaic thing as the Jones Act exists. It's like a forgotten laws you sometimes see mocked in newspapers.

hackeraccount• 7 years ago

Why try a different solution? Why not just rebuild the existing grid more robustly so it can withstand damage better?

I'm not saying this wouldn't work but changes in kind are generally riskier then changes in degree.

maliker• 7 years ago

My guess is Siemens is going for it because if you can get the load/generation balancing right, it costs much less than hardening. Might also be more resilient. Only way to fully harden these systems is underground them at 10 (100?) times the cost.

There's also probably some research funding provided by DOE for this because it's a new approach. And if it works, it would be beneficial in tons of other places.

noahl• 7 years ago

Also worth noting that even if you put them underground, you could flood your tunnels, or have an earthquake, or a giant rabid mole attack, etc...

I don't read your comment as ignoring this, but I want to point out for everyone that reliability always has tradeoffs about what events you want to be able to handle and how much preparation you want to do / pay someone to do for you.

durkie• 7 years ago

the energy mix of electric grids everywhere is changing rapidly to include more renewable technologies, and especially so on islands.

puerto rico's grid was in quite bad shape, but it was also originally designed around importing most of its fuel and operating a single (or few) large generator supplying the island. this setup created concentrated points of failure in the event of a natural disaster and also now makes little economic sense given recent advancements in PV and battery technology.

macspoofing5• 7 years ago

Oh come on. Every developed nation concentrates their power generation. They don't all run into the same kinds of issues that Puerto Rico did after a natural disaster. What Puerto Rico went through was institutional failure.

stronglikedan• 7 years ago

Because they've already proven that they aren't responsible enough for centralized control of any critical infrastructure.

TheHypnotist• 7 years ago

That's why the look to privatize it.

Source: https://www.apnews.com/5221fe5a9b1247e1ad1af0e1c35bf5e6

graenxa• 7 years ago

This is such a strange sentiment. Do you ever hear people talk about states this way. Is New York, West Virginia, or Washington ever "not responsible enough" to have control over their roads, electricity, or water supply? Is any country every said to be "not responsible enough."

But this sentiment comes up quite frequently in regards to Puerto Rico.

I live in Illinois. The budget/financial situation is a mess. People may have opinions about what went wrong. They might say "Illinois really needs to do X." But to my knowledge no one is seriously calling for a national intervention or strong-arming Illinois into privatization.

Can you elaborate on why you think the people of Puerto Rico are not to to be trusted taking care of their home?

snowwindwaves• 7 years ago

Because just building power lines is drudge work but building a series of mini grid is high tech and innovative! Which project would you rather work on?

Scoundreller• 7 years ago

I know my doctor prefers the new-fangled “barely tested in rats and for the legal minimum in humans” interventions that a cutie with a BA just educated them on.

dustinmr2• 7 years ago

In addition to what everyone else said, about a year ago I was chatting with an engineer who was in San Juan bidding on work with PREPA. One of the things he pointed out was that the entire grid is ancient. And aside from the typical problems that makes, virtually none of the physical pieces can be purchased of the shelf because they've been replaced by new designs everywhere else.

Every replacement part need requires that PREPA either have the part machined specially, or they need to purchase a production run of whatever the part is.

The conversation left me with the impression that its likely less expensive to simply replace large sections or even re-engineer than to incrementally improve the existing infrastructure.

Vivtek3• 7 years ago

Fun fact: the use of federal disaster funds for any replacement other than as-built components is specifically forbidden by law, because Congress doesn't want disaster victims to profit from a free upgrade. And that is why PREPA components have to be machined specially.

macspoofing5• 7 years ago

Why try a different solution? Why not just rebuild the existing grid more robustly so it can withstand damage better?

OF COURSE that's the right solution but that isn't sexy.

Puerto Rico instead decided: why not be a guinea pig for unproven technology with unknown costs and unknown benefits. Especially in light of issues with PREPA around neglect and corruption and competence.

It seems like the more bloated and corrupt the organization is, the most likely it will engage in these pie-in-the-sky projects.

SEJeff2• 7 years ago

Tesla has been working with Puerto Rico quite a bit on this exact thing:

https://electrek.co/2018/06/03/tesla-energy-storage-projects...

https://electrek.co/2018/04/18/tesla-powerwall-powerpack-pue...

xkjkls• 7 years ago

Have they actually made any progress though? This seems like they just had a bunch of PR statements and empty promises.

toomuchtodo4• 7 years ago

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/25/560045944...

https://futurism.com/tesla-announced-six-new-projects-restor...

A lack of energy resources can have dire health implications, so Tesla will first deploy battery systems at the most critical locations. These include a sewer treatment plant, the Arcadia water pumping station, the Ciudad Dorada elderly community, the Susan Centeno hospital, and the Boys and Girls Club of Vieques.

Doesn't sound like empty promises.

zaroth• 7 years ago

Hopefully they were buying some on the hundreds of Sunny Island MicroGrids being auctioned the last two days from the liquidation of DC Solar!

I was this | ... (insert hundreds of more dots here) ... | close to convincing my wife we should buy a lot of 90 - 275W solar panels (several of those lots sold for ~$4k).

The 25kWh 48v batteries look pretty awesome too, but where the heck I am going to put 2,000lbs of battery?!

EDIT: Puerto Rico is installing MiniGrids, which are an order of magnitude or two larger than the MicroGrids powered by the Sunny Islands, but anyway...

https://cagp.industrialbid.com/m/view-auctions/catalog/id/38...

SenorSourdough• 7 years ago

From the article, it sounds like they will be using some microgrids as well in areas where geography would hinder recovery after disasters.

jgamman• 7 years ago

hate me if you want but i think we should call these milli-grids if they are 2-3 orders of magnitude bigger than a micro-grid...

i admit there will be some marketing issues.

g_sch3• 7 years ago

This is certainly a bold plan. I wonder (doubt, even) if PREPA will be able to execute it.

Segmenting the grid is going to introduce a lot of trade-offs. Smaller segments means that dips and spikes in load are going to create greater differences in frequency, and as such require faster demand response to create the same level of frequency regulation as a larger grid.

Renewables such as solar and wind are already not known for being particularly friendly to grid operations as their output can vary quickly and unpredictably. On a smaller grid, these variances are going to be magnified. They also can't be used for demand response by themselves - you can't tell the sun to start shining on demand.

Batteries can effectively smooth the load by providing operating reserve, but the proposed 940 MW of battery capacity (I couldn't figure out from the original report [0] how much MWh storage they are proposing -- there seem to be some numbers missing) is significantly larger than any other battery-based grid energy storage plan that I'm aware of.

I hope they can pull off this plan, and they are able to make it work for the people of PR as well.

[0] https://drive.google.com/open?id=1oupTRdHXRHzc6UuKUdmFp9eWKP...

duxup• 7 years ago

I wonder (doubt, even) if PREPA will be able to execute it.

Sadly this might say a lot more about PREPA than anything else.

g_sch3• 7 years ago

After looking it up, I discovered PREPA was privatized shortly after Hurricane Maria. So perhaps they have new sources of capital. Though I'm still not sure (or at least not confident) that anyone with a profit motive is going to invest heavily in Puerto Rico's grid.

namibj3• 7 years ago

Solar can be regulated pretty well. If you can get good clocks to the inverters, you could actually lock the output to the fixed grid frequency, using slower, minute phase shifts coordinated centrally to shift load across the grid by artificially creating the speed-of-light phase difference you get over long transmission lines. Without that central coordination you'd rely on the inverters being staggered to shut off at slightly different overfrequencies. This tends to make some inverters run less overall though, creating game theoretic issues you could fix by rotating that shut off slowly over the whole range, creating time averaging.

Alternatively you can use inverters that regulate output power down with increasing frequency. A simple P (of the PID) controller to keep the frequency in check. You'd probably want a centralized I component to be applied though, for reason of preventing long-term phase drift. Just tell the inverters once a day/week what I their control loop should target, and it's solved. This low-bandwidth signal isn't hard to transmit either. Just try to force them to gradually change from the old to the new I, because otherwise you get ugly spiking/oscillations when they all apply the change. It should be slow enough that synchronous machinery on the grid sufficiently dampens any such oscillations.

drcross• 7 years ago

It's interesting to read your comment. Do you work in frequently regulation? Do you think any parallel concepts from the ethernet world could be deployed for decentralised frequency regulation where Carrier-sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) is used?

gingabriska• 7 years ago

But this is today possible using cloud.

Earlier we had power plants designed in the old way because we didn't have computers which could analyze and predict and neither we had the solid state thyristors.

So today you can hookup lots of control systems to cloud.

This is similar to flying wing aircraft which were not feasible back in time but now they are making their way into mainstream.

pjc50• 7 years ago

The problem in PR is not so much the cloud as other kinds of weather - hurricanes. Cloud-based central control is a liability in situations where infrastructure is widely damaged.

manicdee• 7 years ago

You can’t make the sun shine or wind blow but you can generate below capacity to have reserve available on demand, or you can add storage to provide smoothing and contingency.

1GW of battery is only a dozen projects smaller than the Hornsdale Power Reserve. It’s been done, now it is a case of replicating a successful project.

bsder• 7 years ago

Segmenting the grid is going to introduce a lot of trade-offs. Smaller segments means that dips and spikes in load are going to create greater differences in frequency, and as such require faster demand response to create the same level of frequency regulation as a larger grid.

Why wouldn't you make inter-grid (grid-to-grid) interconnects high voltage DC and use a DC-to-AC conversion to produce AC for intra-grid (grid-to-user) connections?

Vivtek3• 7 years ago

The Puerto Rican grid is already partly segmented - Mayagüez was on a minigrid even before Hurricane Maria. The fact that Mayagüez was the only city on the island that retained power after the hurricane was not lost even on PREPA.

(An aside: I first made it over to Mayagüez in the second week after the storm, hoping to find a cell phone I could use for Internet access - National Hardware not only had power but working telecommunications, so I could actually buy a few supplies on my Visa card. And their air conditioning was working. It was literally like walking through another world.)

Adjuntas is working on getting their downtown on a separate solar minigrid. Everybody thought this was a particularly good idea this week, as the power was out downtown on Wednesday.

malchow3• 7 years ago

Any devs interested in this space -- we have a company working on this and hiring; please ping me. Power networks are currently dumb and dataless. This will change!

worstestes• 7 years ago

where can I learn more?

mastry• 7 years ago

Interesting. I spent several years at a small regional power company where we did some initial work on smart meters. That was probably 10 years ago and from what I understand they're still trying to get it all working on a large scale. Are you referring to something more than smart meters?

malchow3• 7 years ago

Yep -- I'm talking about ARM Cortex equipped internet connected boxes -- think residential solar, 5G rollout, small cells -- all on a genuine internet of power.

hobolord• 7 years ago

quite interested to hear more, already doing work in this space

g_sch3• 7 years ago

Hey, I sent you a message via the form on your site! I'm definitely interested to hear what you're up to.

Puerto Rico energy plan introduces MiniGrids to avoid repeat of Hurricane Maria

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