As the occurrence of power outages have become increasing common, a growing number of people have begun to call for the establishment of reliable multi-power supply systems that can help to prevent the disruptions caused by blackouts.
The world’s recent power outage incidents have already disrupted the lives of numerous people. This includes the major power outage incident that recently took place in Manhattan of New York in mid-July which affected nearly 40,000 households, the eight-hour power outage in Jakarta which took place in early August, and the two-hour blackout in England and Wales during the peak hours last week.
The reasons for the incidents have varied. In New York, the outage was caused by the malfunctioning of the equipment at the substation of the private power company Con Ediso. In Indonesia, the outage occurred right after a tree fell onto a high voltage power line and caused a fire. In the UK, the outage was caused by the breakdown of the country’s two major power generators.
Andrea Leadsom, the former Secretary of State for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy in the UK and a member of the Parliament, remarked that those incidents underscore the need for a multi-power supply system.
For the countries with a heavier reliance on traditional power supplies, the existence of a substantial capacity of gas-fired thermal power and hydraulic power for power-supply maneuvering is necessary to supplement the total power supplied by coal-fired thermal power and nuclear power, whose output cannot be adjusted easily.
As green energy has figured more and more prominently in the overall energy mix of many countries, it is expected to have a lot of flexibility in the maneuvering of power supply. A country can draw on PV power in the daytime and wind power at night, or from the reserves of such power during times of excess output. Tesla’s energy-storage battery system in South Australia, for instance, can supply 100 MW of power to the smart national grid in 140 milliseconds, whenever there is a tripping at the coal-fired thermal power plant in the region.
(Collaborative media: TechNews, first photo courtesy of Shutterstock)