EEI 2023
Jack Joyce is Regional Executive Director, Americas at Reactive Technologies.
The Edison Electric Institute held EEI 2023 in Austin and brought together industry stakeholders from all over the United States. The consensus is that the electric industry's transformation to low and then to zero-carbon electricity must include technological advancements to get there. That is why technology leaders also attended and brought their solutions with them. Public Utilities Fortnightly presents conversations with innovators, where high tech meets energy tech to allow resilient clean energy to be delivered to utility customers.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: You're with Reactive Technologies. What are you bringing to the market?
Jack Joyce: Reactive is the only company that provides real-time measurement of grid stability. On the transmission system, that's interpreted as inertia.
A lot of people don't understand what inertia is, but it's a measure of grid stability. As you add more renewables to the grid — some don't like to admit this — but it's a fact that grid stability goes down because inertia goes down.
Solar is an inverter-based resource. Wind turbines are asynchronous generators, so they do not generate inertia, unlike traditional generated fossil fuel plants, where you have synchronous generators with spinning mass that have inertia.