The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout

I think mine is a nominal 1Kw, maybe 1.2, maybe 800 (I don't remember, fine print on the split impossible to read, too far). It is inverter type, so most of the time it is doing 300W.

And yes, sure, I use a fan by the door to direct cool air at my bedroom across the aisle. I should place another split in the bedroom, but I intend to move to another house. And the external wall is a pain to drill.

Well, most houses in Spain predate that design. AC is a new fashion, and winter heating is done typically distributing hot water over room radiators, or electric radiators, or even gas stoves. There are no air ducts, that's a retrofit except on new houses.

So a split placed near the ceiling is not a major eyesore. The external unit hanging on the outside of the building, on buildings 15 floors tall, each flat doing it differently, that's is an eyesore, but the owner doesn't see it :-p

That engineers thought of the idea as viable? :-)

I don't like the idea, if it involves my car. I wouldn't mind other people doing it :-D

I assume that it would come with a rebate from the electricity companies.

I would like some of that to be installed here, it sure would help.

Unrelated, but there was yesterday a three hour outage at the Canary Island of La Palma.

According to initial data, the outage was caused by a ‘generation turbine trip’ due to some kind of fault or anomaly at the Los Guinchos power station, which has brought the island to zero power.

At the time of the incident, the real-time energy demand graph of the company Red Eléctrica shows a drop to 1.2 megawatts, compared to the 29 megawatts expected, before falling to zero a few minutes later.

The island is, well, an island.

Possibilities you don't appreciate because you don't understand what's goig on?

That does involve understanding why it is isn't working, and changing it so that it can.

We aren't talking about the whole universe, but rather the bit we need to manipulate.

Not in my experience, or the experience of those of my acquaintances with a couple of dozen patents to their names.

You clearly don't know any. "Rigid theorist" is a contradiction in terms. The most beautiful theory can be slain by one inconvenient fact.

My wife and her colleagues did manage to construct quite a useful theory in psycholinguistics, and found it easy to write up because all the unsuccessful experiments they'd done to test the precursor theories had dealt with pretty much all of the alternative explanations.

Most of the patents I know about were seen as obvious ideas by their inventors, and patented because nobody else had seen them.

One of the three patents I've got only got patented because I'd had to spend so much explaining how obvious it was that it finally struck me that it might not be obvious to those skilled in the art.

Easier than building it, if less reliable. My 1kV at 10uA to to 1mA at

Probably not. The charger would have to be bidirectional, but that wouldn't make it significantly more expensive

Within negotiable limits.

(and no one would accept that)

Unless paid for it.

They got to be connected to be recharged, and the obvious place to do that is in the home garage or the work parking lot.

The amount of wear is negotiable, and it would be paid for. Expecting people to agree to do it for nothing would be a silly idea, but that's your silly idea.

Converting low voltage DC from solar cells into mains voltage AC to power your house is much the same idea as converting main voltage AC to direct current to charge your car battery, and the car converts that DC into variable voltage DC to drive motors that move your car.

The intentions may be different, but the hardware is pretty much identical

So what.

I can understand why you may have difficultly getting your head around the concept - you do seem to be dim and ill-informed as well as simply wrong.

The claim appears to be total nonsense.

Nuclear fission doesn't produce any long-lived transuranic radioactive isotopes. The neutron flux in a nuclear reactor can be captured and promote some of the uranium and plutonium around into even heavier isotopes, but it is very minor component in nuclear waste.

Since the transuranic radioactive isotopes are a very minor problem anyway, who cares?

Eventually. You have to take the spent fuel out of the reactor, take out the fission product and the U-233 that has been generated by neutron capture, and put the purigied residue back into the reactor

Twaddle.

Nobody liked admitting that U-235/U238 nuclear reactor were plutonium breeders, and that processing spent fuel involved recovering the Pu-239 that had been bred, but there's no way they can avoid breeding plutonium

U-233 makes perfectly satisfactory bombs. Bigger bombs were actually hydrogen bombs, and the even bigger bombs that followed them used an outer layer of U-238 to capture lots of the neutron produced by hydrogen fusion, turning it into Pu-239 which fissioned immediately.

https://hb11.energy/

The guys at HB11 would beg to differ. They are currently financed by venture capitalist - which implies a 5% chance that their approach can be made to work, though I suspect that the odds are rather worse because the pay-off would be remarkably generous. You snipped the link without marking the snip.

Asserting that some technology will take a long time to mature is a standard conservative tactic, but it is pure guess work.

A more realistic attitude is to recognise that nuclear reactors are expensive power generators, and anybody who builds them is doing it to get the fissile material to make atomic bombs. The U-233 from thorium reactors makes the same kind of bombs that you can make with U-235 and Pu-239, though thorium reactors don't make as much U-233 as uranium reactors make plutonium.

It seems Bill read it in a book somewhere. And even if an engineer thinks it is viable - even if there are companies making money from selling the idea - that does not mean it is a /good/ idea. But it might explain why Bill thought it was a good idea.

And that is a big part of the point. The world is not going to be saved by ideas that don't appeal to a wide audience. And earning a few dollars from letting your car run out of battery before you need it is not going to persuade many people.

How wonderful. They must be fabulously wealthy.

Why would the "fossil carbon extraction industry" even care about this book? You seem to be imagining some shadowing conspiracy group that is directing a war on electricity and the earth's climate. That's nonsense

- there's just a bunch of companies trying to make a profit from their businesses and investments, and down-playing the risks in order to make a short-term profit. It's just normal capitalism, and like any other branch of industry, it is a problem when they are too powerful. But it doesn't help to be paranoid and imagine a conspiracy that does not exist.

Companies that make their living from fossil fuels do not care about some little book written by a journalist. Why should they? The people who read a book like that have no influence of significance. The people that invest in their companies, or buy their products, wouldn't bother with such a book.

You underestimate it.

Sure - but it would still be unpredictable. One of the big hurdles for electric cars is fear of running out of juice, because it can be difficult to find working chargers in many places, it can take a long and somewhat unpredictable time to charge (especially if you need to wait in a queue), because the car's estimates of remaining charge can be so inaccurate, and because sometimes you unexpectedly need to drive more than usual. A lot of electric car drivers start worrying at 50% charge

- they will not be happy about starting the day lower than that.

Sure, paying for it helps. But rather than buying a car with a huge battery and renting out half of the capacity, it makes a lot more economic sense to buy a smaller and cheaper car.

Lots of people don't have a home garage and a big enough power connection. And those that do, will want to use it for charging - not discharging.

I never suggested anyone would do this for free.

It is a silly idea, no matter who is paying for it. It is a silly idea for electricity companies to pay for the expense of lithium batteries compared to cheaper battery types, for the extra expense for the packaging that is needed for car batteries but not for fixed installations, for the much higher costs associated with replacing worn batteries, and paying the car owner enough to compensate for their not insignificant inconvenience in the whole thing.

It makes much more economic sense to use fixed installations with cheaper batteries. Who pays for the capital costs, and the running of the system will depend on who benefits most - the owner has on-hand bulk energy for charging their car faster without high peak current costs, and the electricity company has lower costs by better balancing of overall production and local distribution. It means the money is being paid for something /useful/ - rather than for compensation for an artificially created problem.

There is an overlap, but many, many differences - in the electronics, the control, the batteries, the housing, the connections, the regulations, the economics.

So saying "electric car owning households are tending to have both" is nonsense.

Why would anyone recommend an expensive, inconvenient and environmentally damaging technology over a cheaper, easier and cleaner alternative? Your arguments make no sense, unless you own Tesla stock.

Oh, thanks for that! I'd never heard of Wikipedia before. I have also heard rumours that there is a newfangled way to search for information - "goggle", or something like that. Perhaps you could explain that to us too?

Ah, well, if you say so it must be true. You can no doubt refer to some comic book as a reference.

Try reading the Wikipedia article you linked - perhaps also the page

It is the long-lived ones that are the problem. Short-lived isotopes are only an issue if you let them escape before they have decayed.

If only there were a way to do that...

If it was a secret, it was a badly kept secret.

I know the basics of nuclear weapons, and I know how to read Wikipedia.

To the bomb makers, there is no such thing as a "satisfactory" bomb - they always want bigger.

Don't believe the hype. Wait another 50 years until it is working.

Of course they would. After all, they are financed by venture capitalists - begging is the name of the game. They will keep releasing news about things /almost/ working in order to keep the cash flowing in. /Eventually/ they might get it working - or someone else will - but it will be decades longer than any media release suggests. The same goes for the dozen other private fusion research companies around the world.

I snipped the link because I don't post links to random sites.

Fusion energy has been 50 years in the future for the last 80 years. I have not seen anything to suggest that has changed much - and I make a point of keeping up with scientific and technical news.

I believe that eventually, we will have workable fusion power (though it will probably be deuterium / tritium fusion first), and that will be a big step up from fission nuclear power. For the next 50 years at least, however, thorium fission is the way to go for bulk power production, with solar and other renewables helping out as it takes a long time to get nuclear plants up and running.

But you have done something unique here - I can't remember anyone else being so confused as to suggest that I am a conservative!

Back in 2008. The idea has been around for a while.

And David Brown thinks that it is a bad idea without advancing any reason beyond personal prejudice.

Predicting what the electricity companies will offer and what the market response will be does seem to require more background knowledge than you seem to have.

Most people do seem to assume some sort of quid pro quo.

It is not nonsense. It has been going on for some twenty years now. George Monbiot in his 2006 book "Heat" devoted a chapter to it.

People who want to keep on selling gasoline to car drivers don't want their customers to switch to electric cars, and they spread lying propaganda to discourage them.

The "conspiracy" really does exist, and it is well documented. There's nothing paranoid about being realistic about the way consumers are misinformed. Ignoring the manipulation saves you from having to think about it, but that's a false economy.

Because well-informed customers do read that kind of book, and make choices that cost the fossil fuel companies sales,

The do get bothered when the sales volumes start to shrink. Oil companies used to advertise their products to get the sales volumes up. That's what you do when you care about what your customers think.

Or you over-estimnate it.

This will become less of a problem when there are even more of thme around.

But people still buy big and expensive cars because they want to make an impression.

And that what it would be used for, most of the time. Occasional bidirectional use will be handy in exceptional circumnstances.

You don't seem to be aware of economies of scale. Make an item in ten times the volume and you can usually afford to sell it for half the price. Electric car batteries are produced in volume, and the extra expense of packaging them for the car industry gets washed away by the economies of scale.

Which aren't yet produced in volume, and may never be.

There nothing artificial about the variable generation rates offered by renewable energy sources. Nobody would tolerate it if they weren't the cheapest power source available, by a big enough margin to pay for a lot of back-up storage (even if the Spanish mainland network was too cheap or too dim to invest in any).

And it all gets dominated by the economies of scale

Electric cars are becoming more popular and about 40% of new roof-top solar installation in Australia include a roughly car-sized battery. It's not nonsense.

I certainly don't own any Tesla stock, and the chinese BYD electric cars are now the second best selling electric car brand in Australia.

BYD's blade batteries seem to be better engineered than their Tesla equivalents. They now seem to be produced in similar sorts of volumes so they offer the same economies of scale.

The "environmentally damaging" line seems to come from the usual propaganda sources. Nobody seems to be much fussed about Australia's lithium mines, which is odd because our greenies get excited about most mining operations. Australia has quite a lot of lithium mines with many hard-rock, pegmatite-hosted lithium resources, largely in Western Australia.

Nuclear reactors do produce them, but not by nuclear fission as I explained in the section below, which you clearly hadn't read when you produced your response.

What makes you think that transuranic radioactive isotopes are particularly long-lived? Heavier nuclei do tend to be less stable - technicium is the lightest element that doesn't have a stable isotope.

There is. It involves doing chemistry on very nasty radioactive spent fuel rods so it's difficult and expensive, but perfectly practicable, if mostly economicaly impractical

It was never any kind of secret, but nobody liked talking about it.

But you don't seem to bother. I got taught most of this stuff long before Google got going, but getting at the contents of the Melbourne University libraries isn't all that easy from Sydney and finding the information with google is pretty straightforward.

Not always. You can fit small atomic bombs into big artillery shells, and fire them far enough away to survive the blast.

https://hb11.energy/

HB11 hopes that they can get their scheme working rather earlier than that. I heard about it at tolerably sober Royal Society of NSW presentation. Nobody is promising that it is going to work, but the early studies they have done look promising. There's still a long way to go, but it might pan out.

Not my impression. They do small chunks of work when they get the money to do them, and report the results.

There's nothing random about the site. It has been there for years, and I've posted that link in the past - it's been around since 2017 and I referred to it here in 2019.

But you haven't heard of hydrogen-boron fusion? And you haven't noticed that the current generation of hydrogen fusion machines have got pretty close to the Lawson criterion (and I did work with John D. Lawson's youngest son, who wasn't remotely in the same league).

You've copied a conservative tactic. That doesn't make you a conservative, but it does suggest that you don't think too hard about what you post.

My father was well-off but he didn't own any of his patents. My friend in Scotland is in the same boat. My Australian friend made about 12 million Australian dollars out one of his patents, but seems to have managed to fritter most of it away on less successful inventions.

You can have range anxiety without even leaving home.

Are we talking thermal or electrical power?

I think Carlos was referring to the electrical power input.

With a COP of 3 this would require about 4.6kW electrical input

Yes. As measured with a little cheap device, now defunct, that does take into account the power factor, something I would found amazing when I studied electronics on another decade.

I make do with lowering the temp inside to maybe 2 degrees less than the uncooled house, so the power needed is small and relatively cheap.

I think that you ignore main aspect of inertia. You have a power deficit and you need to adjust grid to compensate for lack of power. Inertia means stored energy which can be deliverd at cost of lowering frequency. IIUC in grid with rotating generators and with similar deficit like in Spain it is supposed to give you grace period of about minute or maybe 2 minutes. In this time control may try to activate new sources or start controlled dropping of loads. Current reporting indicate that inertia in Spain was enough for 20 seconds and that was too little for orderly reaction.

Sure, inverters can try to keep fixed frequency, but then instead of too low frequency problem you get too low voltage problem. IIUC low voltage could lead to shutdown of the grid in a fraction of second.

You can try to improve control algorithms so that they cope better with short term power deficit. Given scale of deficit and observed result there may be space for improvement there. But logically, you need some fast reaction energy storage. Or some instantly swichable generating capacity. But running PV sources (or other) at say 80% of their true power (so that you can instantly increase their output) looks rather unattractive compared to energy storage. You can use rotating masses, for example run traditinal generator powering it from the grid to keep it moving (so it does not need a turbine) or grid scale battery. Fast reaction energy store give you time to activate slower sources like hydro or fast start gas powered generators. Or to drop loads in controlled way.

The point is that if you have power deficit, then grid can not work well. And without energy storage you may lack time to switch on extra generating power (assuming that it is available). Instantly dropping loads may be possible, but if it is the only short term balancing mechanizm, then effect on loads may be nasty.