With the contribution of solar and wind being oblivious of demand, the burden of keeping the grid stable must be taken up by thermal or hydro power plants. When Spain's grid crashed, PV amounted to well over 50% of the total supply. It makes me wonder why it didn't crash sooner.
Jeroen Belleman
I'm estimating that half the hazard is the actual physics, power and energy storage, and half is bad policy and inadequate control theory.
A region should be able to isolate itself without bringing in the same boat with three or four other contries.
We have the crazy situation in California where sometimes we have to buy coal-fired power from Nevada, and some times we have to *pay them* to take our excess power.
Where does a gas turbine get the energy from?
There is a regulation that says that every building will have to install some solar panels. I don't know when is the limit.
Sorry, I don't understand this sentence. :-?
Wait, wait, let me think....
Inertia, and then burning gas?
Well, same thing.
Batteries, and panels and wind flaps.
Too early. It will be months before we know what actually happened, and this before anybody can think what can be done about it.
Exactly.
That's what I said on another part of the thread, but with less detail because I know less :-)
They don't have to run at that point all the time, and can be designed to move away from it when necessary. The grid system can broadcast an instruction to do that, and the mobile phone system can instruct specific PV installations in specific localities to do that.
The system is designed to cope with that. The problem happens when the local fluctuations happen to combine in a way that the regular system can't cope with.
When 30% of roof-tops solar panels - as they are in Australia - and an increasing proportion these systems are backed up by Tesla Powerwalls and the like - it can be quite a bit of energy.
Back in 2008
And the people who paid for the climate change denial propaganda you are parroting will keep on making a lot of money out of wrecking the climate.
The contributions of wind and solar don't have to be oblivious of demand
- wind turbines can be feathered and photovoltaic cells can be run at higher voltages and lower currents than would give maximum power transfer.
In fact when you have a variable generating capacity, you need short term storage to smooth it out. Pumped hydroelectric storage has been around for decades now, and grid scale batteries are becoming popular. though the South Australian Hornsdale Reserve was the first one installed back in 2017.
It make me wonder why they didn't have any grid scale scale storage. Bureaucrats are averse to innovation, but they shouldn't be quite that ignorant. Carlos says that some of the Spanish island communities already have grid scale batteries - so it looks like bureaucratic inertia.
If only you made a habit of it.
It was a rhetorical question.
I have this suspicion that power engineers know very well what happened. Nobody wants to be the person to tell, because anyone who does will be the scapegoat. Spain's politicians were very clear: They are looking for someone to punish.
Jeroen Belleman
But you do have to have serious stored energy available at the drop of a hat if the inverter is to effectively resist frequency being pulled down by the load. It can be done but the engineering will be interesting.
I suspect from the time of day when this happened it was over supply of solar PV leading to too high a frequency and/or over voltage events that led to the cascade failure. Unclear why it didn't pass through a stable state where supply matched demand though if that really was the case.
I suspect poor network stability analysis played a large part and the network was still relying on the intrinsic stability of the old turbine generators that were no longer present. Have to wait for the report.
ISTR the electricity supplier in Spain has been warning about this for a while but the politicians were not listening. I wonder if the Spanish government *will* actually publish the results of the investigation.
The sun + CO2 > plants > animals > gas > mechanical energy.
They have it because they need them more. They run isolated, they can not rely on others to smooth their loads. As a result, some islands have successfully run for days on solar/wind only.
I asked chatgpt:
You said: Have the Canary Islands or the Balearic Islands Yes, both the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands are actively implementing grid-scale battery storage projects to enhance energy security and support the integration of renewable energy sources.
⚡ Canary Islands
The Canary Islands are advancing several significant energy storage initiatives: evwind.es+6REE+6REE+6
🌴 Balearic Islands
The Balearic Islands are also progressing with substantial battery storage projects: REE
These initiatives reflect a strong commitment in both archipelagos to modernize energy infrastructure, reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and facilitate the transition to renewable energy sources.
ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info. See Cookie Preferences.
Not really. It should have a few percent of margin to increase power delivered when the frequency drops. The point is that the mains grid is composed of many generators. This only works if they take collective action. The European grid collectively has a target dP/dF in the 20GW/Hz ballpark. Any single installation will provide only a tiny, tiny contribution.
Solar PV is sufficiently important in Spain that it should contribute its part. (It's in the 19GW ballpark, more than half of demand during daytime.) I don't know if it does.
Supply = demand is not a sufficient condition for dynamic stability, anyway.
Yes. The problem has been anticipated for years.
Jeroen Belleman
Unlikely.
+1
When from an engineering point of view it looks like it is the politicians who should be flagellated for this major SNAFU.
He may have died in America but he wasn't born there.
It has been around for a least a decade, if not longer. The politics of the region are complicated.
John Larkin's climate change denial propaganda sources do like to claim that. The fossil fuel extraction companies want to sell as much of their output as they can, while they still can.
The problem may have been expected for years, but "anticipating a problem" involves doing stuff to make it less of a problem when it does show up. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the network had been beefed up in any way to prevent the problem, or confine the consequences to the area where the problem first kicked in.
South Australia bought the world's first grid scale battery in 2017 because they'd been having grid stability problems. They anticipated further problems by doing something that made them less likely to show up again.
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