Good Week coming up for Grid Watching

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peakbagger

Minister of Fire
Hearth Supporter
Jul 11, 2008
8,954
Northern NH
Current forecast for New England is 4 days of 100 plus heat index days. Many power plants usually are finishing up their spring outages. My guess is ISO New England is going to be seeing the squeeze around Wednesday.

 
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I've been watching ours since we hit 90s for a stint last month. This is the first year I haven't seen or heard any transformers go bang. Maybe they are finally getting on top of demand. On a related positive note, the new siding and foam board underneath are doing wonders. My downstairs was only 71 when I got home yesterday. Upstairs was hotter, but I don't go up there as much. I threw in the window AC this morning. Its going to be running.
 
Good to see that the foam upgrade made a difference. I am on the fence between a new house or a major energy retrofit on the current house and adding a couple of inches of insulation under the sidng and new siging on top of it it probably the big upgrade to the existing house. Tbe ibggest hassle is how to build out the current exterior clad window frames, they are good quality double pane Anderson casements and moving them out would require a lot of interior retrim work.

The new versus retrofit decision will take several more months so in the meanwhile stay cool.

The ISO charts are green this AM with prices quite reasonable, must be a lot of cheap gas volume out there for the natural gas fleet. Looking at the three day, there are no system orders in place, as long as the remaining nukes do not trip or a big transmission line goes down, it looks like the grid will handle it.
 
Just ran down Nextdoor. Com and there are a bunch of people complaining about low voltage and brownouts. I haven’t had any issues here, but I’m not pulling out the multimeter either, lol.
 
I have a good heat pump in PA, but who knows if the electric goes out! My basement is always in the 60's. We have some camping cots and a futon in the basement if need be. We also have a stream in the back yard that is always cold (it comes out of the ground about 50 yards from our property. We will abide.
 
For the first time in about 5 years I think it will be a boring year for us. With the exception of one coal power plant, our entire existing thermal fleet has been converted to gas. We also had a large 900MW combined cycle plant powered by a pair of Siemens SGT6-8000H turbines come online this winter. On top of the consistent expansion of wind, solar and battery facilities supplies appears to be more than adequate again. Current 30 day rolling average pool price sits at $32/mwh, where normally we'd be north of $100/mwh this time of year.
 
ISO NE was saying they didn't predict any issues for meeting demand - at least in NH. Looks like they forecast more (blue) than was actually used (orange)yesterday.

Good Week coming up for Grid Watching


I found this interesting for yesterday - actual with estimated solar power used (lighter orange) . I assume that "behind the meter" is what households used directly from solar which they can't see. I wonder how they come up with the estimate. The only reason I can think for that weird curve is a lot of people have batteries they run off of at night and then recharge during the day.

Good Week coming up for Grid Watching
 
It looks like our grid survived the week! It makes me optimistic that it might be able to survive the electric push for heating, cars, etc.