Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

One consequence of using a lot of solar power is that interconnected networks get bigger hence less stable.

A lot of mid-sized natural gas power plants (or, eventually, small nukes) would allow regions to be independent when they have to be.

They are older ex-industrial ones in pairs and 8x 6' so not a bad guess. Four are immediately above the workbench which also has natural light.

There is no reason why a larger network should be less stable - if anything it should become more stable the more kit attached to it.

The only caveat is when the magentosphere goes haywire like in the Carrington Event of 1859 and then long wires at high latitudes like in Canada can get fried. That is a realistic mode of failure for our very electricity focussed world. GPS going bad will also cause chaos.

Big transformers have *very* long lead times.

The networks have been continent wide for long while now. The newer national interconnectors and offshore long distance lines are DC now!

There are schemes to build vast solar arrays in Morroco (pretty good location for them) with DC links into Europe and even to the UK!

Tesla must be turning in his grave. (presumably at 60Hz since he was American).

Installing solar PV in the UK is highly profitable but a wasted opportunity since at our high latitude there really is no huge aircon peak in the mid summer afternoons and we get too much cloud.

It is a double benefit in a lower latitude country to have solar panels on the roof since it shades the roof from direct sunlight slowing heat ingress and provided power as well.

Sun barely makes it above the horizon in the UK for 5 hours in mid winter if it isn't cloudy. Solar powered "smart" road signs invariably fail on frosty winters mornings. Ironically they say "please slow for the dangerous bend ahead" - they work fine in mid summer but in mid winter they wreck their batteries. Guess when there is ice on the road?

In the US solar and other Distributed Energy Resources are regulated by utility company or grid management company Source Requirements Documents, which all require inverters to be listed as tested to UL1741:

UL 1741 - Standard for Inverters, Converters, Controllers and Interconnection System Equipment for Use With Distributed Energy Resources

There will always be such a transient, never the same twice, and very often of natural causes (nobody to punish), so the system must be able to ride through all such events.

In other words, if the focus is on finding somebody to punish, the power system is already doomed.

It's like the wildfires in California and Hawaii - there is always a trigger, such as lightning, even if there are no careless humans to be held responsible.

That requires a vast bureaucracy, which will soon achieve uselessness if not tyranny. Only a rule that the set points must be somewhat random, according to an agreed probability distribution, could possibly work in practice. But it's simpler to design the system so such set points don't matter.

Big hunks of rotating metal are slide bolt simple and reliable.

Even if the link to France didn't exist the Iberian grid was going to collapse one day. And the French would prefer not to be knocked offline by Iberian problems.

There is a wonderful European term for this: Electropolitical. Probably summarizes a meter-long German compound word.

The US has many of exactly this same kind of study. Including totally non-technical people making major engineering decisions.

Which recently have not been going well politically.

The US has its examples as well.

The need for spinning reserve in both directions may change their calculus.

Joe

And are easily damaged. I wonder if an electronic version will ever be a replacement for tons of steel and copper and oil. They could be modular, like big RF transmitters are now. Lower voltage would help, namely more regional power generation. In other words, pump gas and not electricity. Gas pipelines store lots of energy; electric lines don't.

Seems like stability is getting worse.

Cool. One dragged anchor, or a bomb planted by a robot sub, could make Europe go dark.

Residential rooftop solar all over Morroco, to be collected and exported to europe? Interesting concept.

Solar electriocity or water heating makes no sense in San Francisco either, but people get big subsidies so many do it. It complicates roof repairs.

Yes it is, basic electrical engineering theory.

In effect it is a constant speed generator connected to variable load; increase the load and more electrical energy immediately flows into the load, taking mechanical energy from the inertia of the moving parts. They then begin to slow down and the much more heavily damped mechanical regulator feeds in more energy to them from the primary source.

This is a bizarre argument. Solar power generation is widely distributed, and you only hook it into networks if you get some advantage from doing that.

Solar farms offer exactly the same option, and they can be split down into even smaller units - roof-top solar is an obvious example.

Same here but my garage or perhaps I should say workshop is a double garage front with room for 4 cars in theory. Realistically only room for one and there is an inspection pit too although I have to syphon the water out of it before use. Water table is rather high round here.

Back half is workspace with a bench, big vice, press drill and a lathe.

So it is completely passive. A big battery isn't a primary source but it can provide enough DC current to let your grid scale inverter generate exactly the AC output that you need.

Why futz around with the rotating metal? It may entertain tourists, but that's really all that it is good for.

In California and many other states it is required that residential solar inverters adhere to Rule 21 (aka UL 1741).

They have some simple rules that are intended to stabilize the grid where there are significant amounts of solar power.

Below 60Hz and 245V the inverters are not restricted but as the frequency or voltage rises above the thresholds the inverters will curtail their output.

As there is no energy storage in the inverters it is not possible to go further and take power from the grid.

As yes there are no similar rules for systems with batteries but it could easily be implemented even in residential photovoltaic systems.

Processing complexity is not likely to be an issue as even micro-inverters have their own processor in general with internet link.

Typically some form of Powerline communication is used to communicate from the inverter/s to a gateway that has the internet connection.

Yeah, but you aren’t growing hemp on your desk.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I noticed in my µW oven. I was very surprised.

Nukes didn't actually work. They fell sooner out of the network that was falling, they did not help to avoid the falling. And they were the last to be connected back on the recovery procedure.

And no, they are not clean. They produce very dangerous waste that has to be managed, and nobody has yet found a way to do that.

They are not even profitable.

Wouldn't it be just easier to switch to DC?

Or to at least switch to islands, interconnected by DC.

Probably not practical by now.

And they have the advantage of having long term planning.

No, that he didn't say. Not possible to say.

That the interconnection to Europe is too small, is a factor. We could not rely on Europe for stabilization. Another factor, in reverse, was not isolating into small sections inside of Spain, some of them might have survived.

Sure, I'm waiting for a good one, letting others decide on which is a good one.

I believe that one to be biased against renewable power.

I should say, although too late, that it should be "Gran Apagón" :-)