TN Power Grid remains Stable with intermittent Wind Energy

The green energy naysayers have been proved wrong again and again, but they keep coming despite growing evidence to the contrary. The (in) famous Donald Trump has joined the legions of the climate skeptics by taking the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases out of the Paris climate change agreement. Amongst the many wrong reasons, he gave for getting out of the first major comprehensive global agreement to curb global warming was that the power grid becomes vulnerable due to too much solar and wind energy, which is intermittent in nature.

However, countries such as UK, Germany, Spain and Denmark have shown that despite massive amounts of green energy generation, their power grids have remained mostly stable. These countries are further increasing the percentage consumption of green energy generation as the power grid become more flexible. Germany has built new systems and processes to integrate greater amounts of wind and solar energy and has an achievable plan of going completely green by 2050. Denmark already is one of the highest generators of wind energy as a percent of overall power consumption and there has been no issue in managing the grid.

Now even India which does not have a strong transmission grid is proving Mr. Trump wrong and showing that his words have so little weight. Most of Trump’s speeches is “alternative facts” and his climate change views are no different.

Tamil Nadu which is located at the extreme south of India has always been at the forefront of green energy with almost 40% of India’s wind energy capacity. The state has also started to install large amounts of solar energy. The state made a new record when 4600 MW of its 8600 MW total capacity came from wind energy. The total solar and wind energy units consumed was more than 110 million units compared to the overall demand of more than 300 million units. Despite this massive amounts of intermittent energy being consumed, the power grid remained stable, as the state government reduced the supply from its old thermal power plants. Moreover, this increased purchase of renewable energy did not cost the utility, as the wind power being purchased these days is cheaper compared to the overall purchase cost for TANGEDCO. The state continues to expect to buy large amounts of renewable energy in the coming days as well.