The
fuel security analysis published by ISO New England a few weeks ago is not terribly optimistic that we can avoid rolling blackouts in 2024/2025 if that winter turns out to be somewhat worse than average.
They do make the assumption that Tesla will completely fail to ramp up production of grid scale battery systems, which I think is probably unrealistic, but I think ISO New England's approach of ignoring technological improvements that haven't yet been well demonstrated usually turns out to be right, so it may not be an entirely bad approach.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-moves-from-show-boating-to-money-making-93955/ has some discussion of the Tesla Big Battery / Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia. However, batteries are only really useful for smoothing out mismatches in time of generation vs time of consumption throughout the day, and we do still need to be able to generate enough power during a given 24 hour period.
http://theconversation.com/a-month-in-teslas-sa-battery-is-surpassing-expectations-89770 reports the round trip efficiency of the Hornsdale Power Reserve seems to be around 80%, which is worse than I'd been expecting.
Page 8 of ISO New England's study suggests that we'll probably be OK in the case where all of the variables work out favorably, except that they expect that a bunch of oil fired plants might retire if everything else goes well, and that leaves me wishing for a better explanation of why the Forward Capacity Market apparently isn't likely to keep all the oil fired plants around. Does the pay for performance system leave us with a system where generators might be willing to take the risk of just losing out on their performance payments in the worst one winter out of ten, which might not be what we want if we don't want grid outages in that bad winter?
The top of page 9 seems to be describing a natural gas pipeline compressor or the Millstone nuclear plant as being too big for the grid to cope well with a failure.
Page 16 mentions 30 day a year limit on operations of oil fired generation at several plants, apparently because of environmental concerns. I think we ought to have a regulatory framework that says that if we need to exceed that to keep the lights on, we can, but then for the excess, the oil plant owner needs to pay (from the money that they will have built into their generation price bid) for new renewable generation to offset that which will every year produce as much power as the one time excess oil burning did, and perhaps that new renewable generating infrastructure could be donated to a non profit that would give that new renewable electricity away to low income households that use heat pumps as their primary source of heat in the winter, preferably households located as near as possible to the oil fired plants to compensate them for any negative health effects from burning that oil.
