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> The substations or feeders that are tripped off are not currently determined by real-time metering - instead they are pre-allocated based on their typical demand. This means that the system operator does not really know how much demand will be disconnected at any given time.

This is wild. From a amateur technical perspective, it would only take a cheap hall sensor inside the transformer to have a pretty good guess of how much current has been flowing to the load.

Hell, put the hall sensor onto a board with a micro controller and a LORA transmitter and stick it to the outside of the feed line. Seems like an incredibly cheap upgrade to get real-time load data from every substation.

by pjc504 hours ago|

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The board is not the expensive part. It's the getting reliability qualified and then having staff fit it to every substation, arrange the data links, and construct the dashboard.

I also wonder what the realtime requirement is. Data from a minute ago is fine .. except in this kind of situation, when things are changing very quickly.

by remus3 hours ago|

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The nice thing about frequency based regulation is it's an inherent property of the system, so as long as you're connected to the grid you've got the info you need to decide when to turn on or off.

If you're monitoring real time power consumption you then need a whole extra infrastructure to communicate this info back and forth. Of course you then have to consider how you're going to keep that extra infra online in the event of power issues.