“From the inception of distributed electricity to when renewables came on board, we had 100 years. The world had 100 years to get electricity right. Meanwhile, we’ve had just two decades to go from the idea of large-scale wind and solar to getting it fully functional in the grid.”

Its so fuckin crazy! They don't even mention all the blocking and undermining fossil fuel companies have foisted upon us. I wonder how quickly we could have done it with good faith market actors.

If anyone understands what they mean by rooftop solar becoming unstable from the use of large scale grid forming batteries for system restarts, i'd love an explanation.

I'd have assumed an inverter being used in this way would be 'on the other side of the battery' so slightly separate/disconnected from the system of solar panels charging the battery.

However, researchers discovered that during the early stages of system restart, the use of large-scale grid-forming batteries as the primary source may cause rooftop solar to become unstable. This happened at lower penetration levels when compared to the use of traditional restart sources.

These studies concluded that although a battery is more flexible than a coal or gas generator, or even a hydro generator, to accommodate changing load, they don’t initially provide the same system strength to rooftop solar.

“We originally subscribed to the idea that the best practice for re-energising a transformer during restart was to maintain a strong system capable of supplying that massive inrush of current to get it going,” Sorrell said.

“But what we found was the current-limited nature of grid-forming inverters might actually be helping in these circumstances. Because those inverters, they’re ramping to their maximum current and then they’re staying at that level for longer, resulting in these transformers being gradually re-energised over a second or more.”

This inherently gradual re-energisation from the inverters allowed large transformers to be re-energised without tripping network protection mechanisms more reliably than traditional rotating machine restart sources such as coal, gas or hydro. The current-limited nature of the inverters, although generally seen as a drawback of the technology, may be beneficial in this situation.