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There will be failures due to random events sure, but there will also be failures due to overloading (which I'd expect to happen either in the morning when people go to work, or around teatime when they come home) ...
I don't think there's (currently) a major issue in the morning, but the early evening peak demand can be pretty high. However, has a power cut due to overloading actually happened (significantly, or at all) yet?
Also I'm not convinced they bother to notify regular customers for short outages even if planned. That may be one of the benefits of going on the "priority" list.
I somehow got onto the utilities' 'priority list' (I presume purely because age) and, as Harry has said, it does seem to work reasonably well. In fact, a little 'too well' in relation to my water supplier, since I seemed to be plagued by text messages whenever they are digging holes in roads anywhere withn 50 miles of where I live
But concentrated on the hours when planned works happen, and particularly the hours in which planned works start and end and hence network switching operations are performed.
I very much doubt that if you plot unplanned outages VS time of day you will see a uniform distribution, but what the actual distribution looks like I have no idea.
But concentrated on the hours when planned works happen, and particularly the hours in which planned works start and end (which is when switching operations that could go wrong happen)
For works done "dead" I would think the phases of a work most likely to cause "more disruption than planned" would be when you try to disconnect a section and/or re-route power and/or move customers onto generator supplies at the start of the works, and when you try to re-energise that section and/or put power routing back to normal at the end.
For works done "live" a problem requiring an unplanned isolation could of-course happen at any time during the works.
I noted today it takes 12 seconds to run up the Dinorwig power station. The large horse lake (MarchLyn Mawr) does hold a limited amount of water, and is 1728 MW, with just 9.1 GWh odd Google says the largest battery in the world is 3287 MWh seems they have missed out Dinorwig which still may be the world's largest battery, and dates back to 1984 when it was opened. But seems to be one of a kind. At least at that size.
I note my own system does not always work as it should
why it used grid power when consumption under 5 KW I don't know. It may be that some data is local and some from server, so the peak may not exist in real terms, but smart meter shows
So it seems for whatever reason my system did not absorb the demand when boiling a kettle that time. But normally it does. There must be 1000's of homes with batteries, which will likely damp the demand until they run out, so as the night progresses more, and more batteries will run out, or switch to charging off-peak, so more likely to get an unexpected demand overnight.
Presented with 2 emergency lights from my wife. I charged it and then tried it, yes it does what it says on the packet. But not really what I wanted, I want something which auto lights in a power cut so I can find it. Says it will last 6 hours, but there are so many options, tried with main light, and less than an hour. It does not say which will last 8 hours long, seems likely the string of lights. It says it has a 4000 mAh battery, but not tested.
The charging/discharging ports are on the back, which means using while on charge not easy, I expect when we want them we will not find them.
Likely will end up in a draw, and forgotten about. I wonder how much tat is bought in case of a power cut, then never used?
Prepare for a power cut
Here are some things you can do to prepare for a power cut:
Oh, come on, do they really need to tell people to keep a torch and batteries, etc?
One's emergency lights kick in. Trivial job these days to add emergency backup to LED lights - power draws are low, Li-Ion batteries are power dense, the old days of shoebox sized units with NiCds in are long gone.
As long as you only need AA or AAA sizes (for some reason which I cannot fathom and have never been able to find out they don't make C or D), you can get lithium iron primary cells with a shelf life of 15-20 years.
As long as you only need AA or AAA sizes (for some reason which I cannot fathom and have never been able to find out they don't make C or D), you can get lithium iron primary cells with a shelf life of 15-20 years.
I presume you mean "lithium-ion", rather than "lithium iron"? If so, I think you may be wrong ....
Although I don't know to what extent is is a significant problem (surely can't be very significant, since they are 'allowed'), flameport recently described a downside/'danger' of lithium (not lithium ion) primary cells due to the fact that, unlike lithium-ion secondary cells (which contain only lithium salts), lithium primary cells contain lithium metal.
The different ways that some non-battery storage systems work is fascinating.
There's a 3GWh molten salt thermal storage system in Morocco, in Alabama they pressurise a salt cavern with air to 1100psi to get 2.86GWh. In Finland they've got a total of 22.6GWh of underground hot water storage. Several places store energy in ice which they use to cool buildings in the day.
No, I don't - I do mean lithium-iron. Lithium-iron disulphide to be precise. There are other, better, lithium primary cell technologies, but the attraction of Li-FeS₂ is that the cells are 1.5V, so they just drop straight into anything designed to use alkaline cells.
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