Having worked at UKAEA Culham 2013-18, I know these guys have the best control engineers in the business, and if anyone can develop a system to stabilise our worryingly wobbly power system, they can.

Whenever I look at the [1]UK grid frequency , it often looks rather "bi-modal". That's the "buttocks distribution" visible in the histogram on the bottom right. This means it's continually oscillating around its 50Hz control point and rarely staying very close to it. It's a classic problem in control of non-linear systems, and it's the sort of thing those UKAEA boffins ought to be able to sort out. (The EU grid doesn't have this problem, apparently. It stays pretty much bang-on 50Hz, but it's a much bigger grid with a much higher "minimum inertia")

If the grid ever goes too high or too low frequency for too long, or changes frequency too quickly, it can cause parts of the system to trip offline, leading to a cascade failure and a large-scale blackout. This problem is made worse when there's a lot of wind and solar energy on the grid, because there is no grid-synchronous spinning turbine to provide inertia (wind turbines are not usually grid-synchronous - they run at variable speed for max efficiency). Just like an engine without a flywheel, it can stall or spin out of control very easily.

We can use batteries for frequency response instead of flywheel stored energy - but if the power electronics and control systems are too slow to respond, they can make the situation worse, rather than better. Hopefully this advanced control system can fix that. (i'm in an optimistic mood today, must be something the coffee..)

However, I'm sure they know that the best control systems in the world won't compensate for the fundamental transmission-line bottleneck between Scotland and England.. Or the enormous problem of oversubscribed local low-voltage distribution networks. Resistive losses "P_r = I^2 R" is after all, basic physics. It doesn't take a Plasma Physicist to know that you can only shove so many electrons per second down a given cable before it starts to heat up, waste energy, and fail. There's no way we're all moving to Heat Pumps and EVs without a LOT more pylons, substations and local under-the-road cables, even if we had the generating capacity.

So I'm all for this, so long as it doesn't detract any investment in physical infrastructure, i.e. we need more pylons, more substations, and ideally, HV-to-the-kerbside.

[1] https://mainsfrequency.uk/cgi-bin/plotdayer?date=1677763123&average=y&actual=y¢re=y&grid=y&50hz=y&dist10=y

...but it's a much bigger grid with a much higher "minimum inertia"

Or we could just ditch 'renewables' because they're the root cause for why our energy grids are increasingly unstable, and more expensive and complex to manage. Inertia is one of the big challenges because 'renewables' typically don't provide that, so oscillate all over the place. Some of this could be improved by adding inertial buffers, like batteries, or even the ginormous flywheels groups like the AEA have used in fusion and other experiments. But these solutions all increase the cost of something that's already expensive, and is always going to be intermittent by comparison with other generation types.

We need to do something, and so far in the UK that "something" has been too little, too late, and largely renewables. But the issue of grid frequency with said renewable sources is solvable, it just needs a bit more consideration in how you design the inverters so they offer a "synthetic inertia" that can help pull/push the overall grid towards the correct nominal frequency value as spinning turbines naturally do:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/squared/dispatches-from-the-grid-edge/solving-the-renewable-powered-grids-inertia-problem-with-advanced-inverters

Sure, that would fix the problem.

Ideally, what we need is more nuclear power, so that we can have stable power without the CO2.

But thanks to a regulator being run by people fundamentally opposed to and terrified of nuclear-anything, nuclear is horribly slow and expensive to build.

If only UKAEA could have spent the last 50 years on researching better fission designs instead of all that fusion, I do believe we'd be in a much better place. But then we closed Dounreay.. And how the oil companies must have celebrated that, i'm sure..

BTW for the link to work in my earlier post you have to remove the HTTPS. Apparently the Reg sticks that on all links

-> Ideally, what we need is more nuclear power, so that we can have stable power without the CO2.

How about the cost? By the time you say the words "Hinkley Point C" the costs will already have gone up YET AGAIN. It's already billions over budget. One way or another the tax payers will pay for this.

There are already flywheel based systems called rotating stabilisers on the UK grid

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/070720-uk-rotating-stabilizers-to-use-100-renewables-to-help-grid-security-statkraft

@Jellied Eel

I am for nuclear in comparison to oil and gas, but I just cannot see any intelligence in dumping 'renewables' at all.

Have a look at the Nordic grid. Sweden is constantly able to export electricity like mostly Norway too due to wind and hydro.

Finland is very dependent on nuclear due to less hydro and wind but still get at times as much from wind and hydro.

https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/

And here the French grid because it's well made.

https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energy-source

Why son, that's the Sheffield Fusion Power Center crater. Created back in 2042 when they relaxed regulations for fusion power and let AI power up three fusion runs at the same time.

You can't criticize the AI Dad!

Oh no son, I'm not. All hail the AI and the many benefits it brings. Now let's get back to the hovel before it gets dark. We still need to build a fire to keep the mutants away.

One of the challenges real time software development is that it tends to be very conservative and a couple of steps behind CI/CD best practice.

The lack of common frameworks means that most RTOS applications are closely coupled with both OS and processor architecture.

Something like this could provide a good abstraction layer to build truly portable RTOS application. However it would depend on its capabilities. for example it is not obvious whether it has a security layer, which is pretty critical to modern RTOS projects

> one of the challenges is software going out of date or the vendor not supporting it anymore

However, that is only one component. Although the fusion software is designed to run on multi-platform systems, as the article tells us, that only applies to those multi-platform systems that exist today. While it might still be possible to buy or get spares for today's multi-platform systems in 20 years time, there is no guarantee that the fusion libraries will be compatible with the hardware or operating systems that people will be producing in the 2040's.