Just as a heads up, Spain and Portugal’s electrical power net has collapsed shutting down almost everything. I am on the island of Mallorca which (duh) has an independent grid. Captain, can you post whether and when you are up?
It is not a good sign, whether in Texas or New York or Europe when grid management is not up to critical tasks.
Although the cause of the massive power outage in Spain and Portugal is not yet clear, there are “no indications” of a cyberattack, said Antonio Costa, president of the European Council.
Translation: We have no clue what caused it but we DO KNOW it was NOT a cyber attack.
Reportedly in Spain power now comes gradually back online. Fwiw, the independent regions seemed to have suffered a lot less.
A “rare atmospheric phenomenon” is being blamed. I’m not an electrical engineer, so I don’t understand what an “induced atmospheric vibration” is, or how temperature variations can cause a blackout. There might be an imprecise translation from the Spanish (or Portuguese).
The Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns.
REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
NYT article on the outage. Gift link:
It appears they still don’t have a good explanation as to why the power grid collapsed in Spain and Portugal on Monday.
A few news articles…
“We must not rush to (conclusions) and (commit) errors through haste,” Sanchez said on Tuesday. “We will find out what happened in those five seconds.”
REE said it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in Spain’s southwest that caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France.
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I never understood the “induced atmospheric vibrations” or “extreme temperature variations” explanations they were using yesterday. They seem to be backing down from that wording now.
From the AP:
Eduardo Prieto, director of services for system operations at Spain’s electricity operator, noted two steep, back-to-back “disconnection events” before Monday’s blackout. He told journalists that more investigation was needed.
Spain’s meteorological agency, AEMET, said it hadn’t detected any “unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena,” and no sudden temperature fluctuations were recorded at its weather stations.
Also:
Investment bank RBC said the economic cost of the blackout could range between 2.25 billion and 4.5 billion euros, blaming the Spanish government for being too complacent about infrastructure in a system dependent on solar power with little battery storage.
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Apparently, three people might have died from carbon monoxide poisoning from a running generator.
_ Pete
Yeah, extreme temperature variations doesn’t fit very well with a pleasant spring day.
DB2
It sounds like someone was motivated to think up some BS explanation, but then I‘m not an expert.
Today, a Russian hacker group has claimed authorship.
May be we‘ll get something more credible in a few weeks.
Meanwhile, the memes are spreading…
The Repsol oil company’s refinery in Cartagena, one of Europe’s largest diesel producers, had to shut down a few weeks ago due to power problems. The blackout occurred at 12:32 p.m., but the system began to fail at 11:30 a.m. With the sun shining, operators began to notice fluctuations in the grid with photovoltaic production at full blast. This excess sunlight caused the gas-fired combined cycle plants to reduce their production to make way for photovoltaic power.
In that sense, nuclear power didn’t enter the market to avoid losing money, and there was no need to rely on hydroelectric plants to avoid water loss. Without firmness technologies, the voltage became more fluctuating and vulnerable than ever. And then the incident happened. The 5-second voltage drop is an eternity in the electrical system and tripped the “system differentials,” shutting down everything at once: the photovoltaic, the cycles, the four remaining nuclear plants.
The industry insists we were lucky because the transformers didn’t burn out, which would have caused a blackout lasting more than 24 hours. ” Red Eléctrica miscalculated the risks and allowed the closure of three nuclear power plants that would have provided stability (voltage) to the system,” the industry claims.
DB2
A month after the Great Iberian Power Outage, we are still waiting for answers regarding the cause.
I have seen some articles that refer to a lack of “inertia” in the power grid. Big spinning turbine-generators, as that exist in large nuclear, coal and natural gas power plants, have a significant amount of spinning inertia. That inertia helps to keep the frequency stable. But if those generators go away, then a small frequency perturbation can more easily turn into a large frequency mismatch, and equipment can start tripping offline.
Another article from MIT…
From the link above…
Whether or not solar and wind contributed to the blackout as a root cause, we do know that wind and solar don’t contribute to grid stability in the same way that some other power sources do, says Seaver Wang, climate lead of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research organization. Regardless of whether renewables are to blame, more capability to stabilize the grid would only help, he adds.
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I am not saying a lack of “inertia” is definitely the cause of last month’s power outage. It just seems to be a subject that certain news items have discussed about the incident in Spain and Portugal.
_ Pete
I arrived for a visit in old haunts (lived here for five years in the early 2000s) in Mallorca shortly after the big Iberian blackout (island Mallorca not affected). A local retired EE I know and respect was quite solidly convinced on the inertia theory. He thinks the planners simply cut it too close as big turbines were being phased out, and, Oh Whooops.
The effect of renewable energy incorporation on power grid stability and resilience
Smith et al.
https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.abj6734
Abstract:
Contemporary proliferation of renewable power generation is causing an overhaul in the topology, composition, and dynamics of electrical grids. These low-output, intermittent generators are widely distributed throughout the grid, including at the household level. It is critical for the function of modern power infrastructure to understand how this increasingly distributed layout affects network stability and resilience. This paper uses dynamical models, household power consumption, and photovoltaic generation data to show how these characteristics vary with the level of distribution. It is shown that resilience exhibits daily oscillations as the grid’s effective structure and the power demand fluctuate. This can lead to a substantial decrease in grid resilience, explained by periods of highly clustered generator output. Moreover, the addition of batteries, while enabling consumer self-sufficiency, fails to ameliorate these problems. The methodology identifies a grid’s susceptibility to disruption resulting from its network structure and modes of operation.
Ahmed et al.
The first key challenge is the intermittency and variability of renewable generation due to their weather dependency, which has prompted questions regarding the reliability and flexibility of a power network…
The second challenge is that many of these new resources are connected to the grid via power electronic inverters rather than by spinning electromechanical machinery. When compared to synchronous generators, inverter-based resources have very distinct characteristics, including a lack of physically coupled inertial response and, traditionally, a limited ability to produce a high short circuit current during fault events. Therefore, from a dynamic stability point of view, shifting from a dispatchable centralised power system with inherent self-synchronisation to inertia-less inverter-based resources (IBR) means gradually losing system inertia and control mechanisms.
All these issues have resulted in a lack of frequency and voltage management, network congestion, and a deterioration of system adequacy and restoration capabilities.
DB2
Have no fear, here. Shiny-land will be saved by coal.
/sarcasm
…for those that missed it in the other thread.
Steve
US electrical grid operators are warning of capacity crunches. It would seem worthwhile to at least maintain what baseload generating capacity we presently have.
While retirements are accelerating, most new additions in the interconnection queues are intermittent renewables—and that highlights a mismatch in reliability attributes…
MISO’s Curran echoed this concern, pointing to a projected drop in the amount of electricity available during the most critical periods. “MISO’s Future Planning Scenarios estimate that while the total amount of installed electric generation will increase significantly over the next 20 years due to the rapid growth of wind and solar,” she said, “the actual amount of electricity available to the system during critical hours could decline by about 32 GW due to the operational characteristics of these new resources.”
DB2
The current order from the regime only extends through this summer, but, I would expect it to be extended indefinitely.
MISO’s Curran
Oh, this is interesting:
Prior to joining MISO, Curran was manager of power generation and supply strategy for MISO and PJM at Reliant Resources.
Wasn’t Reliant involved in a round trip trade scam, with CMS, owner of the plant in question, trading power back and forth between themselves, to artificially inflate their revenue, to jack up their stock price?
ah, the net is a wonderful thing.
In early May 2002, following the public announcement that another energy trading company had engaged in round trip trades, Reliant Resources made internal inquiries and subsequently announced that it had similarly engaged in significant same-day commodity trading transactions involving simultaneous, pre-arranged purchases and sales with the same counter party for the same volume at the same price (“round trip trades”). Reliant Resources promptly reported to the Commission the facts surrounding the round trip trades, and also publicly disclosed those facts in a press release dated May 12, 2002. For the most part, the round trip trades resulted in neither profit nor loss to either transacting party. Instead, the trades were designed for the sole purpose of increasing trading volumes to improve Respondents’ standing in the gas and power trading rankings in industry publications.
Steve
I certainly don’t know enough about the Spain issue to comment; neither does anybody else yet, apparently. But I do have a couple thoughts about the idea that solar and wind are somehow making things worse instead of better.
Spare me a paragraph or two: 100 years ago the roads between cities were 2 lane affairs, winding through the middle of towns and lined with stores and other curb cuts to allow traffic in and out. Now we have limited access roads which speeds traffic along and is a vast improvement, no?
100 years ago there was one phone system, it relied on having copper wires come to your house, and you paid big bucks for a second phone, or to call relatives out of state, or for other accoutrements like a fax machine. Now we have cell phones, reachable most anywhere at any time and you can call the world for a nickel.
OK, one more. 100 years ago the water/sewer system consisted to two pipes: one in, one out. Now the water is filtered, purified, sometimes chemically treated and monitored, and the sewer leads to a treatment plant where it is remediated to near purity before the effluent is dumped out into a swamp somewhere as it used to be.
If you look at today’s grid, you will find almost the exact same infrastructure that existed in the time of my grandmother. Tall wires carry high voltage, it’s stepped down at the pole, and comes into the house, using the same technology that Nikola Tesla would recognize in an instant. That technology has worked pretty well, although it’s clear that in toay’s world most everything - save a tiny few heavy use appliances like stoves and furnaces - could operate at much lower voltages than in the past. (You probably have more wall warts than fingers and toes.)
Similarly, the generating facilities are largely of the same technology (often actually the same equipment) as 50 or 100 years ago, propped up with some maintenance, sometimes deferred for too long.
Perhaps, just perhaps given today’s world, it’s time to look at the entire electric grid holistically, and decide if we can have a more decentralized system, and if we need to have the same kinds of wires, transformers, generating plants and all as were “the revolutionary technology” of a century ago.
How we might make any such transition I don’t know, but somehow we did it with roads, with telephones, with water, with sewer. And with television, radio, music, news, and more.
Maybe the problem isn’t that “solar and wind” don’t have the same characteristics as we have had for a century, maybe it’s that those characteristics are now an outdated technology, and we keep trying to bungee cord them to it.
It wasn’t enough to have wider roads through the center of town, it wasn’t enough to have better wires for telephones, it wasn’t enough to make fatter pipes to deliver the water. Maybe it’s not enough to keep new energy technologies slaved to ancient infrastructure needs, and an entirely new paradigm of decentralized production is needed.
Just a thought.
They do indeed have different characteristics, as noted upthread. Which is the reason they can’t be shoehorned onto the existing grid pell-mell. Political pressure doesn’t help.
That 100% renewables thing is going to take a lot of finessing and may not even be achievable.
DB2
I (for one) have never thought “100%” renewable was achievable. We will always have need for other sources of energy including petrochemicals.
I do believe that the more renewable we can use the more we keep our gold in the bank, so to speak. Less oil today means more availability for uses, perhaps some undiscovered, in the future. And we lessen the effects of the pollutant after-effects perhaps to a level where the planet is more able to cope with them.
There is an astonishing amount of energy at our fingertips: from the sun above and the earth below. Meanwhile we burn a limited resource creating pollution in the process! I understand why it developed this way historically (we used to burn wood, because it was easy, then coal, because it was hotter and pretty easy, now oil because it’s versatile, and kind of easy). But solar, used to the degree that I would like requires a rejiggering of the entire grid from centralized to distributed, and that’s a big chasm to cross.
We used to rely on giant mainframes and slave terminals to do our word processing, then the cost of CPUs came down to the point where it could be distributed to every desktop for individual use. It changed the industry, and I would argue for the better. In a similar way, distributed energy production could improve reliability and cost, but we’re trying to duct tape it onto a structure which already exists for a paradigm from another era. At some point, I suspect and hope, that will change.
There are still houses with coal chutes but they are little used. Similarly I would hope that someday there will be homes with wires to the grid, and they will be used - just a lot less because the energy demand will be mostly self-fulfilled.
Seriously? It was political pressure which created the first paved roads (see: the Good Roads movement). It was political pressure which got the “Municipal” water and electric systems organized. It was political pressure which got the EPA formed, and pollutants regulated.
It was political pressure that got water cleaned up, got cities to stop dumping sewers in drinking water, got the Dust Bowl cleaned up.
How does “political pressure” not help?
Exactly what I have in my primary residence in Mexico’s countryside: solar cells (and I am about to increase their output eightfold by quadrupling the rooftop area covered and doubling the output with new panels), big battery, automatic cut in generator (to be phased out and sold after I confirm output of panels and battery), and a remnant connection to the big Mexican power grid.
With our intense reliance on internet (thank you Elon! for starlink), computers, audio/video recording studio with portable gear with battery packs to charge, and home appliances (radiant floor heat, A/C, big big freezer, steam chamber in place of long hot showers or spa), we are an intensive energy user household that is now barely net carbon negative but rapidly improving.
I run the numbers on solar+battery every few months and it hasn’t ever come close to being economical. Heck, most configurations that I would like aren’t even economical if I assume that my kids keep this house for their lifetime. So, it would end up being a “hobby” of sorts, and I don’t do those kinds of extremely expensive hobbies.
Just for fun, I ran another estimate just now and it comes to $76,000 total plus all sorts of permitting/inspection fees. And if they require roof replacement/changes, that could add another $20-50k depending on roof choices. And that’s with only 25kWh of battery. We typically use about 50kWh a day, more in the summer, less in the winter. So the battery can only sustain us for roughly half a day. I’d rather have at least 2 days of battery, but that would require 4 times as much battery expense.
