Posted on 05/01/2025 4:33:11 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The collapse was predictable and could have been prevented—for a price.
Big sections of the European electric grid had a blackout recently. First reports blamed a frequency dip due to a lack of “spinning reserve.” When frequency gets too low, automatic electrical breakers open, isolating sections of loads and the transmission grid. The power plants can only safely operate within a narrow frequency range (pumps spin too slowly, etc), and they too will isolate and trip to protect themselves from damage.
The classic grid can be imagined as a broad network of spinning gyroscopes, all electrically synchronized to the same frequency. Electric loads try to drag the frequency down and suck energy out of the spinning gyroscopes while power sources add energy to the gyroscopes to maintain the frequency. The power sources are controlled by governors that increase or decrease power input via throttles as necessary. The whole system is finely tuned with governors scattered across the system assigned specific sensitivities called “droop.”
But solar panels have no rotational inertia and windmills far less than the giant hunks of rapidly spinning steel and copper in regular power plants. Nor do they have governors in the usual sense, although they can dump power if the frequency gets too high.
So, if you have too much power coming from power sources that can make no contribution to the rotational inertia, the grid’s responsiveness is reduced, and things can get iffy quickly if the clouds cover the sun or the wind goes calm.
Nuclear power plants are typically some of the most powerful units on a grid and contribute a great deal of rotational inertia due to the huge sizes of their turbines and generators. But they are also some of the most sensitive to frequency disturbances, so they’ll trip off the grid
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Many predicted that this would happen. As usual the left did not listen and chose to believe their own fantasy.
For Solar Reliant Systems:
Every Afternoon is a Death Race Against Darkness.
You’re a peon
I've always wondered about this but had no idea about the particulars. Thanks for the post!
How they expect to manufacture anything....like tanks..guns...machinery....just askn for a friend.
I worked a quarter as a student at a large coal fired steam plant. One of the biggest powerplants in the country. It is still operational today. 3.16 GW, so 3160 MW. That’s a *lot* of juice!
It had substantial startup boilers (separate from the main steam generator boilers) and natural gas power combustion turbine generators on site so that in a grid down situation you had enough steam and electrical power to do a cold startup. It is not something you ever want to have to do.
Yep, in a plant that big, there's lots of mass involved that means one cannot go too fast. Ramping temperatures puts a lot of thermal shock to pipes, valves, and moving elements. Dynamic load variation and heating/cooling creates situations when things break, and when things break, one must reverse course, and sometimes too quickly. I'd bet it can make quite the cascading effect.
We became dependent on frequency and therefore rotational momentum of spinning turbines.
Later we tried hooking up DC power solar panels and highly variable AC wind power to an AC grid.
I'll ignore FDR's contribution to public utility commissions (PUC's).
What could go wrong?
It has to be a nightmare to manage a grid with a high dependency on renewable energy (solar/wind). The higher the dependence on renewable energy the lower the stability of the grid.
The most economical and stable grid would have nuclear plants that meet the minimum power demand of the grid added to coal plants that have the capacity to produce 45% of the needed power to maximum peak demand with natural gas turbines capacity added to meet the need of 5% to expected maximum demand and 5% surplus power for unexpected events.
The natural turbines are important to a stable grid as they can respond instantly to power demand changes and can be used as loads to keep the voltage and current phased properly in the power legs.
Yeah it was predictable. Because it was designed that way.
“As usual the left did not listen and chose to believe their own fantasy.”
And here in Colorado it’s full speed ahead for ‘green’ energy.
I'll have to re-read my history, but I believe Tesla invented AC generation and output. Wasn't it Edison who worked hard to
defame the 'Tesla' electrical current and promote his vaunted, albeit impractical, Direct Current to the masses?
So, in the AC/DC fight, Edison’s AC won and Westinghouse’s (Tesla) DC lost.
Well AC/DC certainly sold a lot more records than Tesla.
Edison was promoting DC and envisioned little neighborhood power plants because of the problems transmitting DC over a distance. Tesla promoted AC which can go long distances without significant line loss. Edison ended up buying an elderly elephant from a circus and electrocuted it before a crowd of people to bolster his claim of how dangerous AC is. The depreciation was brutal.
Repercussion (bloody spellcheck)
You have that exactly backwards. Edison was heavily invested in DC. Westinghouse saw the advantages of AC power, and Tesla had the missing piece of the puzzle that Westinghouse needed… the AC motor.
Edison (who was very nasty person) fought back using every dirty trick in the book including talking NY State into using the electric chair. Edison wanted to call it Westinghousing someone instead of electrocuting someone. As I said, Edison was a nasty person.
But in the end, Westinghouse won and fortuinately AC became the global standard.
Inevitable with treehuggers designing anything. Spinning reserve is as basic to grid design as ......... any food article in anything you would eat. Geesh.
Not designing for that is as blinkered as not having a power plant running in a receiving city that is at the end of a loooong transmission line. Will not work. NIMBY is a guideline, not a rule.
Texas has had blackouts and near blackouts for years with the crisis spawned by cold weather demand and doldrums winds that often accompany these cold snaps which stop or freeze their wind turbines. If their back up generators cannot pick up the load then the inevitable blackouts occur. The Climate Change Cult has pushed to close fossil fuel and nuclear plants in the US and will soon give us the same blackouts experienced in Spain.
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