The gas company finally figured out how to deflect their responsibility in the matter: they say that the generator owners “didn’t register” their generators, but… now that it has been a year, has the gas company done anything to improve service capacity?
Anyway: the tie-in with Starlink is, anything like this works great until everybody tries to use it all at once at high capacity. When all 53,000 residents of Grand Island Nebraska decide to stream different high definition videos all at once? A good fiber system can handle that, Starlink? I’m curious…
It’s something that’s only possible because of the scale a grid works on. It also helps to have generation like hydro, which can ramp up and down very fast.
I believe Florida’s recent build-out of utility scale natural gas plants is driven, in part, by their ability to ramp up and down virtually instantly.
However, the linked story is about a residential neighborhood where lots of homeowners installed individual natural gas powered generators for their homes. Then, when the public grid failed in a hurricane, they all switched on their “whole home, natural gas powered” generators at once for the first time and the natural gas supply to the neighborhood was nowhere near up to the task of delivering all that fuel at that rate.
Read this quick before the people selling generators get it buried: https://www.wtsp.com/article/money/consumer/south-tampa-generators-fail-during-hurricanes-teco-peoples-gas/67-144d70da-bb27-496c-8928-ab7e61a53b00
The gas company finally figured out how to deflect their responsibility in the matter: they say that the generator owners “didn’t register” their generators, but… now that it has been a year, has the gas company done anything to improve service capacity?
Anyway: the tie-in with Starlink is, anything like this works great until everybody tries to use it all at once at high capacity. When all 53,000 residents of Grand Island Nebraska decide to stream different high definition videos all at once? A good fiber system can handle that, Starlink? I’m curious…
Keeping the electrical grid balanced with varying loads is so hard I’m amazed it works at all.
It’s something that’s only possible because of the scale a grid works on. It also helps to have generation like hydro, which can ramp up and down very fast.
I believe Florida’s recent build-out of utility scale natural gas plants is driven, in part, by their ability to ramp up and down virtually instantly.
However, the linked story is about a residential neighborhood where lots of homeowners installed individual natural gas powered generators for their homes. Then, when the public grid failed in a hurricane, they all switched on their “whole home, natural gas powered” generators at once for the first time and the natural gas supply to the neighborhood was nowhere near up to the task of delivering all that fuel at that rate.