 your host, Guillermo Salva Diaz, Respectless on Energy here on Tink Tech, Hawaii. And today we'll be talking about batteries and inverter-based resources for grid forming, right? Can we use grid storage to recover from a blackout? And again, I'm your host, Guillermo Salva Diaz. I am the Director of International Services for HSI, the Health and Safety Institute, Industrial Skills. And my background, of course, I mean, for disclosure, I've been in the electric utility industry for over 30 years. I worked for a rather large investor-owned, really integrated utility in a Southern state, Florida. So I definitely have had a lot of experience given black start grid forming training, blackout restoration. So one of the new resources, right, that we're looking at quite in detail now is the use of batteries. Definitely a lot of changes here and a few utilities have looked to explore that, but there's still a lot to learn and a lot to experiment. So we'll talk some more about that. Today's presentation, really, is brought to you by the US Department of Energy, the DOE, and in partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratories. So the DOE has furnished one of the reports that they had, which of course is available down in the link at every one of the slides. But if you wanna go and take a deeper look, it's certainly really, really interesting reading. So I'm just gonna give you the highlights of the particular presentation or their report and try to walk you off of it. Okay, next slide, please. All right, so what is black start, right? And usually before we get into the black start, let's just talk about the majority of the system, the grid, the bulk electric system, right? And everything connected to the transmission grid is currently has a lot of synchronous generators. And for the most part, for the last many decades, it has been synchronous generators. What does synchronous generator mean? Well, it's generated with a lot of spinning mass in Russia, metal, magnets, iron, copper, spinning in there. And of course, it's spinning at 60 hertz, meaning 60 cycles per second. And that's the frequency here in the US. Well, the parts of the world, Japan, half of it, parts of Europe, they run at 50 hertz, 50 cycles a second. But what does that mean? If you have like a simple two-pole system, it's going to be spinning at 3,600 RPM, right? Now, when you look at what's been traditionally the components that make up the grid, usually they have been just synchronous generators, which means they're all running at the same speed, at the same phase angle, right? Meaning that they're all a phase over here is a phase over there, running at the same frequency and at the same phase angle. So that's what they mean by synchronized, right? And whenever a generator wants to come online, they usually have to like synchronize it, which means you have a lot of synchronizing relaying and protection equipment and breakers and switches that will go ahead and do a sync check before they close the breaker on that device to make sure that it's closed right at that point where it matches the rest of the grid, right? Meaning, not just frequency, because you can have something spinning at the same speed, but it's way off, way off not matching, or what you also wanna have, for example, that they're matching together with the same phase angle and the same frequency, pretty close to each other, right? So they have to be exact, but they usually within a plus or minus certain percentage. All right, so another way to start with synchronous generation means I've, right now, for example, the present power system, there's some of them have a lot of, a lot of the black start resources out there, for the most part is what happens when all that goes dark, you know, all of a sudden becomes the energy, so you have a huge blackout and nothing is running. Well, you have to start from scratch, right? And I'm sure most of you are familiar with a simple generator that we have in the backyard in a garage and pull it out, turn that thing on and support KW generator to run a few air conditioners in your refrigerator, some lights. Well, that thing, for example, is small. It has only one generation of a load and you're not going to connect that to the grid because it's isolated. The difference here is that most of these generators that we use for grid forming eventually have to tie to the energized grid, but it's an isolated portions of the energized grid. So when you have a larger generator, usually a hydroelectric is one of the larger types of blackout restoration resources out there. They can start almost immediately. They always have fuel available, which is water, right? Well, water pressure spins that turbine and then that turns a generator so they can start it and stop it rather easily. And those have a lot of rotation or inertia. We'll talk about what that means as well in a minute. But then you also have a lot of smaller units. The ones I am more familiar with in my experience have been those smaller combustion turbines or smaller diesel generators. That those can be synchronized to the grid when the grid is nice and healthy and running, but they have that capability to be able to restart and then energize that bus and energize the station, help to bring other systems online, pick up a little bit of load and balance that as they begin to form the grid in that regard, right? So in a lot of cases, right, these are usually smaller, smaller generators. There are some bigger ones out there between 100 and 200 megawatts or a little bigger. But for the most part, they tend to be small because you're starting small. And some of those are gonna be as small as a diesel powered reciprocating engine diesel generator that has about maybe 12 megawatts or sometimes even smaller than that. Other cases you have other combustion turbines that burn natural gas, which we have quite a bit of those, those tend to be like similar to like a jet engine, right? And then you have others that also run a liquid fuel, meaning there's no pipeline. It's just the liquid fuel is stored on site and that is what's burned for that regard, right? So you have different options when it comes to, presently, when it comes to grid forming. Not a lot of storage when it comes to batteries. Now, when I say hydroelectric, keep in mind that you also have the capability of maybe using what they call pump storage plants. And in one of the previous episodes, I did talk about pump storage having that capability, right? Which is, and in this case, no different than hydroelectric, except here you have a finite amount of time and output from that reservoir water resource, right? Eventually you will run out of that water because waiting for the end of the day to go ahead and pump that water back up to the reservoir. So that'll be a pump storage plant. And those can also serve as a grid forming or what they call a black star generation. Next slide, please. So now we're changing, right? So what's going on with the future of the grid? And right now, currently, how the grid is changing. So right now we have, you know, what we ideally would like is to have a more diverse mix. We may have something as powered by coal. We would just still out there, they haven't retired them all yet and it's gonna be a while before they do. I gotta be honest, there's pressure to do that, but, you know, you can't replace base load with just solar panels. And then of course, but we're also seeing a great amount of renewables on the grid, right? And that's one of the pressures that we're seeing in the system, right? The more solar we get, the more, what do we get? The more problems that can cause in the sense of variability, which then in turn affects reliability. Now, as you get rid of that base load generation, which is stuff that's always there, always on and dispatchable with something that's variable and you have no control over that dispatch, then you run to some some problems when it comes to reliability due to the variable output. Now, one thing to remember, right? Base load generation is not useful for grid forming and that is an important point because these larger generators that are normally base loaded units, I mean, I'm talking about big coal units, big combined cycle plants, those take a long time to start. And when I say long time, it can be anywhere between several hours to maybe a couple of days to get them going. So in some cases, right, like some of these fast start combustion turbines, you can maybe get them on in about maybe 15, 20 minutes. That's great, but then it seems to be a lot bigger. So the only large generator that's really useful for like black start that's big is usually hydroelectric. But the rest of them, usually black starts have to be smaller units that can be started quickly because they don't have a lot of inertia to get spinning, right? Plus again, when I say more inertia means one unit that's big is spinning. And when I say spinning, meaning it's got a lot of mechanical torque and then pushing electrons out. And as you get more of those in the system, the more of those you have synchronized running together, the more inertia you have. When why is that a benefit? Well, you're able to pick up more load without having to feel a sudden hit. Imagine many, many cars or actually many locomotives pulling tight together, pulling a load up a hill. Or if you have one locomotive running at like 80%, the moment you have some change on that load or change in slope, then that locomotive's gonna struggle whereas you have five locomotives or six locomotives all running at 10, 12%, they have a lot more capability and then a lot more torque behind it because they have a greater operating rate. So it's a lot more than sharing the work is a lot better than a few of them trying to share a lot of the work and almost the capability limits. So that's why that's the analogy I can think of when it comes to inertia, right? They're able to do it with a lot less effort because they're doing it together. So when you'd start to get rid of that inertia and you're using other resources, now you're getting into the problem of them not being that responsive to a fault and meaning that if you have a sudden change in demand in the system, they're unable to recover as quickly which will take us to the next topic when it comes to inverter-based resources, right? So these batteries, for example, what you're seeing now, there's a lot of them out there in the system, not as much capacity as the solar or the wind, but a lot of them are being installed along with these renewable resources. So what happens here, right? So as long as you have enough storage or charge in this battery at any given time, it's a reliable resource for a black start. But this battery, of course, if it's under 50%, it will not be as useful as a battery as almost 80% charge, right? So that makes sense. Starting from scratch, you have to pick up some load and there's no way to recharge it until everything is in, you get somebody, something else running that's just producing megawatts that's not reliant on stored energy. As another example, why wind at this time is not a good grid-forming application. Maybe if you've got batteries to start the grid again and then you begin to accept power from a wind farm at a certain level, you might be able to charge that battery a little bit, but then you have the challenging variability, right? You can't really quite control the amount of power coming out of that wind farm in part of it going back to the battery and you don't have enough load to balance all of that. So again, not a great application. Here's where you would need actual load that you can control and generationally, you control the output rate carefully. So along with these, all these batteries, for example, whether it's solar or wind or battery, they all have inverter-based resource, which means that all these devices are producing a DC output from the actual source, going through the inverter, which then becomes a clean, nice AC signal that is being put out at a frequency 60 hertz and then you have to synchronize that to the rest of the grid. In this case, most of them are not designed to connect to a dead bus. So really synchronize, really specialize IVR controllers, right? And which can pick up a dead bus and can also start picking up load from that particular device. So quite a bit of a challenge in this case when it comes to that. And a lot of the manufacturers aren't quite there yet or they say they can, but then the generator that's tied to it will warrant it. So quite a few hurdles to actually get across when it comes to this particular application. Go ahead and next slide, please. Okay, so here we have the present versus the future grid configuration. And it kind of talks about what we talked about in the previous slide about how things look like right now. So you have the present, you see all the generators up there. You have the cooling towers, you have a smokestack, you have houses, you have factories. You have a few wind farms, a few solar sites. And then off to the left, you see that, you see a generator, a few inverters, not that many of course. And limited application at this time, right? Not a lot of solar. In the future, you're going to be seeing a whole lot more inverter based resources. Some are smaller than others, some are bigger than others. A lot more wind, a lot more solar, a lot fewer generators. And that's where the concern comes to me, right? Where I'm seeing a lot less base load and a lot more reliance on these renewable resources that are variable and a lot of greater reliance on these inverter based resources, which in itself, sounds great, but it has a couple of challenges. So as you can see, you've done away with a lot of generation, you've added more load and you really have a lot less of those generators in place and a lot less of that base load in place as well, on the diagram on the right. So next slide, please. So in this case, right? You're looking at, for example, what happens in these power stability concepts. And when you look at the present classical framework, the current system, you have a lot of generators with a few inverters. It's just what you got to think of in mind. Whereas on the future system, you have a lot of inverters with very few machines that are spinning, meaning that you're not gonna have a lot of inertia in the system. And that's really where the problem comes in. And in this case, right? The ability to handle changes in frequency and voltage are going to be a little bit challenging, especially when it comes to a rotor angle stability, cycles and seconds. Now, we're looking to see whether research will go on these regards, but one of the things we're definitely worried about is the ability to be able to withstand or write through a fault or be able to write through an excursion. And we'll talk about this some more in the next few slides. Okay, next slide, please. And this is basically one of the controls where we talk about inverter-based resources, whether it's grid following or grid forming. Right now, most of them are just grid following. So they are, the assumption is that the grid's always on, always energized, and you're gonna tie in and synchronize to a healthy grid, right? And the interesting thing here is that it needs to have a voltage reading, right? To be able to also see, calculate, deliver power, deliver real and reactive power as P and Q. And the interesting thing here is that you always have a problem with instability, right? Cannot operate 100% power electronics penetration, meaning that it's gonna have a problem respond when you have a lot of like, of these IBRs out there in the system. If you have a fault, a lot of them will tend to just want to like trip off and not operate and not, because they try to protect themselves in this regard. So they can't handle these write-throughs. So, and that's a grid following control system because they can actually have the, they have the luxury at this time to be able to kind of like back off and take no part in a grid disturbance event because they're relying on the assumption that there's a lot of like grid stability out there brought to you by inertia, which at this time, we're losing more and more of them being replaced by these like IBRs. So that you see it here and it's a problem, right? They're assuming you have plenty of stability out there thanks to these, the inertia, system inertia. But the problem is as more of these IBRs you can align, you're gonna have fewer and fewer spinning machines, which means you lose that inertia stability. So the next option is grid forming control, right? And grid forming control here on the right, on the columns and those rows on the right, right? Here it's the main difference that it can black-start a power system, right? And theoretically it can operate 100% power transfer penetration. So it can coexist with grid following, right? So you can have some of these like inverter-based resources leading, whereas some of the other ones are just following it, following the lead. It's just a matter of settings, software, having the correct equipment set up, right? And again, this is not really standardized. This is more of a specialized application and with anything specialized, you know what happens, right? It's going to be more expensive. And not to mention the fact that anything that is classified as grid forming in the system will also have a certain unique compliance requirement. It's NERC EOP-005. And that one has a certain extensive amount of, that NERC standard has I think over 18 requirements. A lot of those are on black-start and they have a lot of testing and a lot of training requirements that are involved that are definitely a concern. On top of all that, there's also a certain burden of compliance when it comes to SIP standards like critical infrastructure protection, whether it's physical security or it is cybersecurity. So again, that becomes very burdensome in that regard when you look at a black-start power system the black-start capability for one of these IBRs would make it almost cost and effective to actually put that in service and operate it commercially as an invertebrate resource. That's another concern that you have, right? It's cost. So operating grid following becomes very, very profitable. When you do grid forming, now you have a whole new set of standards you must abide by, then that changes the economics calculus of whether you want to be in this business or not. So it's interesting change. All right, next slide please. And here again is an illustration brought to you by from NERC back from 2017. And here they're talking about what's happening with system inertia in the Eastern interconnection. We're not even talking about WEC, we're not talking about ERCAT. We're just talking about the Eastern interconnection. And it shows you the long-term trend, right? Going, and right now we're way past that final year of 2020. So we've lost more of that than that we can imagine. And this actually, the long-term versus the short-term, it's actually a lot worse than we see in this graph. So we've lost quite a bit of inertia because of all the early retirements of all of these like coal-fired or older gas-fired plants that, for the sake of climate change, then we're replacing that with some of these like battery or wind. So, and that becomes an issue because you can see here, losing to that inertia on there is going to be a concern when it comes to being able to be able to ride through certain disturbances, which takes us to our next slide. So there's another standard PRC 0024, and there's a new version out now. This is actually a little old dash three is a new version. And what they did here is they actually did a really nice separation, so you could tell the difference, but when you look at the voltage right through, looking at, for example, the horizontal is time, the vertical axis is a per unit figure, meaning one per unit is right down the middle of both curves is like 100%. Point 1.1 is like 10% above, 0.9 is like 10% below. So ideally they want you to stay for, and really it's a short period of time. I'm talking about like 10th of a second, the second and a few seconds where you have an excursion in voltage. So if you have enough of a voltage excursion, these inverters need to be able to ride through some of these areas, and you see it says no trip zone over there to the right. On the graph on the right, I'm sorry, here it talks about, for example, over voltage right through an envelope, which means you're looking at your measuring, for example, those transient high voltages that you encounter sometimes, and these are in the millisecond trade, right? So that's the expectation at that time for these inverter-based resources to be able to survive, for example, those transient voltages for a machine that's spinning around, plenty of inertia is where they even be an issue, right? But they have to create these standards and these like parameters for these inverter-based resources in order to prevent some of the issues that have already been experienced where we lost 1,000, 2,000 megawatts in one shot. And that happened in California and a couple in Texas that were rather severe, right? And that almost brought them out in a blackout, but they had to shed a lot of customer load. So that's an example. Let's go to the next slide. So here you're looking at, for example, the one I care about a lot is the Easter, which is like in purple magenta. You see how you have, for example, time and seconds, that is a logarithmic scale and you're looking at frequency. So you can see how the amount of time, there's a narrow band when you don't trip and it's rather generous at first, you know? But then once you get like those excursions, you can't be on that on those edges for far too long over time. It gets a little tighter, especially in the Easter and the connection. I see Quebec and ERCOT, well, Quebec is very generous, right? But then ERCOT is generous and then it's not up until the 1,000 second mark. So definitely with the near version of the standard, what they did was they separated all these graphs so you can have a better view of what it looks like. But the point is that you look at seconds, milliseconds, several seconds, right? Of a frequency excursion, it's pretty forgiving, but the reality is that when you have a lot of these in the system and you begin to lose, you have a significant frequency excursion, most generators, regular spinning machines will trip when they go below 58 Hertz, right? And so that tells you where you could be in that particular regard where these devices are being asked to stay on and right through at a wider type of excursion for a lot longer period of time. Many factories have already set it up and they've agreed, but as you can see, it becomes a challenge. So next slide, please. So how do we get to this, right? How do we get to the point where we have matured the technology enough to the point where we are, we are looking at one of the key steps in getting there and it's gonna be a long time to get. So the first one here on the right is grid forming inverter. So now we're asking, okay, what do we need to find out? We don't even know what we don't know right now. Trying to develop what direction you wanna head when it comes to R and D, that's research and development. The next phase of that will be in the right grid forming validation demonstration. So here, we move beyond theory and simulation and we actually have actual resources that we're going to build and test. And then once we're a creator rather standardized and the format that we agree with, we standardize that and then we began to manufacture and develop tools for the practitioners to be able to study it better. And at that point, you move on towards wide grid forming adoption, which means now you've agreed on a benchmark or a standard and you begin to apply that in the industry. Having the same problem with SMRs, right? Small mind you to react. We all can't agree on a design that we can go ahead and implement, right? And solve this problem of supply chain. So again, looking at what we're looking at when it comes to wind and next slide, please. We're looking at the wind and solar and synchronous AC systems as percentage of capacity in mega orders. And you're looking at this brought to you by National Renewable Energy Labs, right? And we have right now a system size. The bigger the system, somehow the smaller the percentage of capacity in that system. But you know, there's a smaller systems. When you look at Hawaii, there's one in Australia, one in Maui, one in Canary Islands, those tend to be, they have wind and solar are rather a big component of their system is comprised of renewable resources, right? Which is in itself a big concern because as much as they have, for example, capacity that's that's baseload, they have almost as much of it is also as renewable resources, which is becomes highly, highly variable and puts them at risk right in this case. My next slide, please. So in this case, again, how many years will this take? And it's gonna talk about where we're at in each of the trends, one of three years, right? Yeah, it's also right now we're present we're trying to figure out what we don't know and what we want to find out. What are three years from now? We're trying to figure out how to like resolve those issues. Three or six years, we're gonna go ahead and start really we're gonna begin to form them first on microbrids, which is really where these islands like Hawaii, for example, become a really good testbed for this and they're the first ones to benefit from these particular grid forming IBRs, right? And then beyond six years, is that when you begin to see it in the large scale and bigger boat grids and also in the mainland across the nations? Next slide, the final slide. So again, same thing, but looking from a bottom of top approach right where we're at and eventually where we'll be. And some of them say between 10 to 30 years is where we're finally gonna get there with grid forming across the grid. I think you'll see it, you see it sent everywhere else and spied deployments. I think by then we'll see a lot more nuclear in place as able to start and shut off and be the dispatch a little bit easier. So again, we're gonna be, the places you might see this deployed first is gonna be in the islands like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Samoa, the Canary Islands where you see some of them already in place. And then eventually as they get refined you'll see them go into larger island grids and then eventually after three plus years you'll see them go into like larger mainland systems. So that is all we have for today. Hopefully we kind of like talked a little bit scratch the surface of some of these inverter based resources and how they are likely to be used for grid forming or blackout restoration or black start. Clearly we have quite a long ways to go but hopefully this touches on a few topics that we still have left to discover. Tommy, thank you again for signing in, take a look and please feel free to leave any comments or send messages, I'll try my best to respond to them. And again, thank you for joining us here on Perspectives on Energy brought to you by ThinkTech Hawaii and the Health and Safety Institute. Thank you again and have a wonderful afternoon. Bye-bye now.