This is most certainly true. It also skips over the impact that resources have on each other and the challenge of keeping and strengthening that "good portfolio of resources." A few thoughts 🧵 - ThreadSky

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timwyant.bsky.social • 21 days ago

This is most certainly true. It also skips over the impact that resources have on each other and the challenge of keeping and strengthening that "good portfolio of resources." A few thoughts 🧵

Reposted from Jesse D. Jenkins

The power system remains reliable when a good portfolio of resources all play their correct role on the grid.

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timwyant.bsky.social•21 days ago

FERC and NERC have been warning us for some time about falling resource adequacy on the grid, and that trouble is even more pronounced in the face of increasing load grow. Retiring coal (and previously some nuclear) have left smaller reserve margins, and those margins are also more correlated.

timwyant.bsky.social•21 days ago

In PJM, the ELCC of gas was adjusted down somewhat because increasing gas use was creating common mode failure risk. We saw this play out in Texas when the gas supply system failed to bring fuel to a large number of plants, and thus load could not be served.

timwyant.bsky.social•21 days ago

Right now, much of what is trying to connect to the grid is solar, storage, and some wind in a few locations, but these resources do have lower ELCC. Almost everything else is gas gen, which will only increase the risk of common mode failure mentioned previously.

timwyant.bsky.social•21 days ago

The big risk I see with the way we incentivize VRE resources is that we can make our electricity system uneconomic long before we make it clean enough and reliable enough to meet requirements. Recent PJM reductions in max capacity payments further reduce incentives to bring new capacity online,

timwyant.bsky.social•21 days ago

As @ember42.bsky.social has pointed out before, we can get ourselves in a situation where value deflation reduces incentive to bring new VRE online and depressed market prices over an increasing number of hours makes it harder to bring non-VRE gen online.

timwyant.bsky.social•21 days ago

Outside of utilities and individual loads signing PPA's with generation, I don't see much in the way of policy that gets at this problem.

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