what makes the job of balancing the grid a challenge. Explain. using the context below in 3 sentence
Inside a $38 million control room near Albany, a team of seven employees of the New York Independent System Operator is always on duty, monitoring electricity zooming through the state’s grid and coming in from and out to neighboring grids.
Nyiso (pronounced NIGH-so) is one of 36 entities responsible for the Eastern Interconnection, one of the country’s three main grids extending from the Rockies to the East Coast in the United States and Saskatchewan to Nova Scotia in Canada.
Unlike water, electricity can’t be stored in a bucket. While batteries are improving, most electricity is used the instant it is created.
The team constantly calculates how much power is needed and which plants can produce it at the lowest cost. Every five minutes, a computer system directs plants to dial up or scale down production to ensure enough electricity is available to keep the lights on without overloading transmission wires. If the system is out of balance or the flow of electricity is destabilized, it can damage equipment or cause power failures.
Operators undergo psychological evaluations to ensure they can handle stress, and they spend weeks every year inside simulation labs preparing for a hurricane or cyberattack. Still, the No. 1 enemy is tree branches, as Gretchen Bakke pointed out in her book, “The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future.”
In 2003, the country’s worst blackout started with a sagging power line in Ohio that shorted out after touching a tree branch. A series of human errors and a computer problem plunged about 50 million people into darkness from New York City to Toronto and cost the United States economy about $6 billion.
Jon Sawyer, the chief system operator for Nyiso, said that today, computer systems receive 50,000 data points about every six seconds, and operators monitor regional activity on a 2,300-square-foot video wall. Mandatory reliability standards have been put in place for the thousands of entities involved in the operation of the country’s electric systems.
The biggest daily variable is weather. Storms can flood equipment, and bright, hot days can cause transformers to overheat and customers to crank up air-conditioners.
Leaning on solar and wind means a greater dependence on weather, just as weather patterns have become less predictable. Nyiso has developed sophisticated tools using climate data to predict how much power each wind farm will generate and to find ways to balance the system if the wind suddenly dies down, Mr. Sawyer said. It is working on methods to track cloud cover and other conditions that affect the output of solar panels.