Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

Certainly a power network has to handle millisecond disturbances, but the bigger problem with green energy is the issue of having not enough power for hours or days. That requires nearly 100% fossil-fueled hot standby, or impractical masses of batteries.

Really, nukes and natural gas power plants are clean and just work. That's why greenies hate them.

Hi Carlos,

For those of us that can't follow spoken Spanish at all please can you precis what he said was the root cause of failure? Options seem to be:

1. France-Spain interconnect failure
2. Cyber attack
3. Human Error
4. Exceptionally "Rare" atmospheric phenomena
5. Flying pigs/unicorns [delete as appropriate]
6. Other

Reuters still hasn't picked up on it at all. Latest is here:

I'd stand a bit more of a chance chance with a text based page. Thanks.

A major interconnect line was attacked by The Jolly Green Giant.

production dropped 15GW in 5 seconds, all the grid batteries in Australia combined is about 1/5 of that ....

Mains electrical generators are *synchronous*, so they all run at the same speed. The frequency of the whole system can drift up and down a bit according to the balance of generation and demand. Major power stations are set up to collectively adjust their power to drive the system frequency towards the right value. This is done by regulating the amount of steam, water, gas, whatever, to the turbine, and by changing the generator field excitation. If the installation hits some limit, power, power factor, frequency or dF/dt, it trips, which may then cause further parts of the system to trip also.

Minor plants, <100MW or so, need not bother participating in network frequency control and just produce whatever power they are capable of. They still have to remain synchronous with the network, of course.

The coupling between power and frequency for the European network is of the order of 20GW/Hz. Obviously, keeping frequency is a collective effort. The time constant is of the order of several tens of seconds. The short-term (~daily) frequency stability is of the order of tens of mHz. The long-term stability, barring black outs, is much better, because linked to atomic standards.

Jeroen Belleman

The Wall Street Journal just published an analysis. The authors are Spanish.

How the Lights Went Out in Spain The country flew too close to the sun — which is to say it relied too heavily on unreliable solar power.

The following link should not require a subscription.

.

Joe

The problems are largely self-inflicted (or self-fulfilling prophecies) created by those who fear allowing renewables on the grid. In Australia they were so fearful of solar power being fed into the grid under unusual circumstances like islanding, thay they set a very tight limit requiring the solar inverters to shut down if the frequency dips slightly below nominal. So, once lots of PV was installed, when a coal-fired generator fails and the frequency dips, some "dangerous" PV power shuts down too, causing the problem to get worse, "just to be safe". It isn't an inherent weakness of the technology, it is a direct consequance of regulations written by those who fear or oppose renewables. Fortunately this particular problem was recognised and new inverters are now no longer required to shut down when the frequency dips within the foreseeable range.

If the specifications for the inverters are written based on sound engineering and simulation of the grid behaviour rather than fear and ideology, it would be quite feasible to alter the algorithm in the PV inverters to help stabilise the grid frequency. For example, you could make it simulate what a spinning generator would do, or very likely something much better.

There is nothing magic about the current from a rotating generator that cannot be exactly replicated by an inverter that synthesises the same waveform and produces it with power semiconductors instead of a steam engine. Especially domestic single-phase inverters already incorporate enough capacitance to buffer the PV energy supplied to them, so as to supply a sinusoidal current to the grid, and this storage allows it to shift the phase of the current relative to the voltage however required in order to help stabilise the system, if only it were allowed to and required to by regulations.

Or that's what the fossil-fuel industry funded denialist web-sites will tell you. John Larkin ignores pumped hydro storage, and vanadium flow battery storage, which can cope with rather longer low=power periods than lithium-ion battery storage, because his denialist web-sites ignore this inconvenient point.

Natural gas power plants dump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. If John Larkin knew more science, he'd know that this means that they aren't "clean". You can modify them to burn hydrogen, which does make them clean, but using electricity generate that green hydrogen wastes a lot of energy. It's probably worth doing to sustain a decent back-up capacity, but it isn't cheap.

Nuclear power stations are inflexible - you have to run them pretty close to constant output. And they aren't clean - the radioactive waste that they produce has to be managed for hundreds of thousands of years, and while there are schemes for doing that, nobody has yet set up any kind of long term repository despite the fact that we've needed them for some seventy-odd years now.

Greenies don't actually hate them - this is just denialist web-site propaganda, uncritically recycled by John Larkin.

Australia has a population of 27 million people - a lot fewer than Spain

- and we haven't yet got as many grid batteries as we will need. Roof-top solar is pretty popular in Australia, and people are starting to buy Tesla Powerwalls and the like so that they can use the power they generate during to day to keep the house lit and powered up overnight.

Eventually the utility companies will get around to integrating this storage capacity into the grid structure, along with parked electric car batteries. Nobody wants the utilities to use it all the time, but exploiting it as emergency back-up would be sensible.

The Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and his newspapers do publish a lot of climate change denial propaganda. This seems to be more of it.

It's the climate change denial perspective. The fossil-carbon funded climate change denial propaganda machine is quick to exploit any opportunity to lie about renewal energy.

Thanks Joe.

That sounds plausible. Icarus syndrome! There must still have been some initial transient event that tipped the thing over the edge though.

A perturbation big enough that the inertia in the remaining mechanical kit was not enough to prevent a rapid large frequency deviation enough to make PV arrays drop off grid pretty much all at the same time.

A countermeasure that they should have done a long time ago is stagger the dropout points on big PV arrays so that they don't all give up at more or less exactly the same time. A few should be paid extra to drop off early so that the whole system behaves more smoothly.

The link to France which was exporting power at the time failing might well have been that trigger. Only time will tell. One thing is certain the reports that governments get about green energy are complete junk. I have been studying the UK ones very recently.

The UK NESO ones are utter garbage with scenarios in them that are so totally divorced from physical reality that they are useless to decision makers (who mostly are mostly lawyers and bean counters anyway).

NESO ETYS2023 Ten Year study showed all the seasonal network overloading problems and how even with the "improvement" plan the worst overloaded North-South choke point would *continue to get worse* out to 2033.

ETSY2024 all that tricky overloading info has been conveniently excised although the summary heat map on p6 still shows that we are screwed!

I hadn't realised that the French government have deliberately limited

Do you not have a realtime display of your power usage? It can be quite informative. I got one decades ago when they first became available. It paid for itself in about a year. I also have one that sits between a wall socket and an appliance - that also paid for itself PDQ.

Main vampire loads were several abandoned old transformer based wall warts behind furniture warm to the touch.

Worst offender by far was the TV which kept its TDVT decoder on power continuously by default consuming 40W rather than 4W in standby. A delve into the maze of twisty passage all alike that passed for its settings menu sorted that out once I knew about it.

My 24/7 base load for fast internet connection is about 30W. White goods, electric clocks and other IOT hubs take another 30W. Alarm is

Garage lights which are old fluoros are the last remaining power hog - they clock in at 500W when they are on.

Most of them with modern soft power switches are reasonably efficient. The odd one isn't - my previous PC sound system unless run *very* loud used the same amount of power whether it was "on" or "off" and it used a physical switch. I never bothered to look how they messed that up!

Again UK tends to be much smaller 6-8 cubic feet being a more normal size. We have a couple of 10 cu ft freezers one in the garage.

Unless you do a lot of 3D rendering it is worth trying out the performance of Intel on chip graphics - for 2D work (apart from video transcoding) they are often as quick or quicker.

That is about the same in the UK for modern build. I tried to bribe the installer of my smart meter to replace my original 60A fuse with a 100A one but he said he was obliged to replace like with like. Upgrading to

Our peak domestic load seldom goes above 6kW (immersion heater and kettle at the same time) - unless I am arc welding as well.

I don't disagree that inverters at least on the bigger systems could be made to behave a lot more like a system that has physical inertia.

I don't think it is viable for home units though since they are made down to a price and the robustness needed to oppose a frequency drift is not insignificant. They would be like a flea trying stop an elephant.

The load is very stiff though so only the biggest inverters can hope to fight it and survive. AFAICS the electronics should be able to track frequency OK. Transformers tend to object if the frequency gets too low.

All bets are off once the magnetic core saturates.

Inertia. Not magic but physics. A store of energy that can be drawn on instantly for several seconds. Only an inverter with a massive energy storage system could match that; domestic systems can't.

Fluorescent tubes are rated at about 10 Watts per foot. Does that mean you have 50 ft of fluorescent tubes in your garage? It must be blindingly bright !

I don't agree here. Since the power injected into the grid by large installations is regulated by looking at the frequency, once the grid gets dominated by, say, solar PV power, they'd better make sure it behaves the same way. Of course, any single small unit can't have a noticable effect, but collectively, they can!

Jeroen Belleman

I'm convinced it's becoming necessary for small domestic systems to servo the injected power to the grid frequency, just as is done for large power plants. There is no need for massive storage; Each contributes what he is able to. I *do* think the dP/dF will need to be adjusted by some central authority to keep a stable system.

Jeroen Belleman

But it isn't actually doing anything. Stabilising the frequency is all about feeding in more mechanical energy to compensate for the extra load.

You can feed in electrical energy from a battery quite a lot faster, and get a correspondingly better result, if you've got the right elaborate control algorithm.