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by TheJoeMan 10 days ago
Respectfully, I believe you have confused "new" with "state of the art". China is likely using batteries because their battery production is subsidized, Australia's trading partner is China so basically equivalent.

Perhaps a bad analogy, but it seems these battery systems attempt to stabilize by "pushing", whereas spinning mass can also work through "dragging" the phase. So eventually, you will have just a few rotating masses setting the freq and phase, with more and more systems tracking that and pushing, which seems like a recipe for chaotic equilibrium.
2 comments
jillesvangurp 9 days ago
No, they are doing that because they have a ten year head start on the rest of the world. The US & EU not having done their homework is entirely on them. The US is choosing to pump a lot of funding into fossil fuels instead. You could say that China is simply spending smarter.

The rest is just economics. We might suck at making batteries. But we suck even more at making new gas/coal plants or fueling those cost effectively.

Anyway, this stuff is being deployed by the hundreds of gwh per year now. Much of it in China but some non trivial amounts in places like Texas and California as well. As a result, the grid is actually getting more stable, not less stable.

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nutjob2 9 days ago
> Respectfully, I believe you have confused "new" with "state of the art". China is likely using batteries because their battery production is subsidized, Australia's trading partner is China so basically equivalent.

This is comically wrong. You're just making things up. Australia is at the forefront of this new tech due to necessity and some good luck. Scroll to the bottom of this article and have a look at the graph. It shows Australia has 5 times the grid forming battery infrastructure deployed or under construction than China or the US, or pretty much any other country. It is very much SOTA, needed for a grid that is a rapidly changing mix of rooftop solar, hydro, coal, gas and wind spread over a country the size of the continental US. Rotating masses are not going to cut it.

https://arena.gov.au/blog/australias-grid-forming-battery-re...

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