What happens when there's a sudden change on the electricity grid 🌎 ?
There's a 720km long cable going under the sea from near Newcastle in the UK, to near Stavanger in Norway. It's used to move power between each grid, when it's cheap / abundant in one place and scarce in the other. It can accommodate about 1.4GW, which is the power consumption of a reasonably sized city.
If there's a sudden change in demand/supply on the grid (and in this case, the UK was using 1.4GW of Norway's nice clean hydro power) - it can make the system unstable.
Think of it like long bicycle with lots of saddles and pedals. A group of people are cycling up a hill together. Everyone is pushing at a steady pace and the wheels are spinning nicely at 3000 revolutions per minute. An eagle swoops down from the sky an grabs one of the cyclists off the back of the bike. The other cyclists feel it immediately. The bike slows down. To correct for that and keep the bike moving at the same speed, they have two options: push the pedals harder, or quickly take a turn onto a less steep road. The cyclists represent the supply side (either locally, or or via interconnection with other grids). The speed of the rotation of the axle is the 3000 rpm (i.e. 50Hz) nominal grid frequency. Moving the weight of the bike (and the cyclists themselves) up the hill is the demand side. The cyclist being removed suddenly causing a change in speed is the trip event on the interconnector. Pushing the pedals harder is like switching on batteries (same for traditional fossil fuel power plants), taking the low road is like Demand Response, where the pressure on the grid is reduced temporarily. All of this happens within a fraction of a second after the frequency event, as you can see from the timestamps on the heat map below. If the grid doesn't take action, the bike slows down and the lights go out.
As we add more renewables (wind + solar) and load (data centres + EVs + heat pumps) to the system - it gets a lot harder to keep the system balanced. EpiSensor is working on the world's most advanced IoT infrastructure for the energy transition.
Our sensors monitor frequency and power consumption locally and react within a fraction of a second to reduce load or dispatch batteries.
That supports the stability of our electricity grids, keeps the cost of balancing supply/demand low for consumers, reduces greenhouse gas emissions by helping to accommodate more renewables to the system, supports the electrification of transport and heat to improve air quality, and will be an important component in the data centre arms race so we can unlock the secrets of the universe with AI. That's what we're building at EpiSensor.