Posted on 05/07/2025 9:03:12 AM PDT by Pontiac
Last Monday, the Iberian grid suffered a disturbance in the south-west at 12:33. In 3.5 seconds this worsened and the interconnection to France disconnected. All renewable generation then went off-line, followed by disconnection of all rotating generation plant. The Iberian blackout was complete within a few seconds.
At the time the grid was producing 28.4 GW of power, of which 79 per cent was solar and wind. This was a problematic situation as solar and wind plants have another, not widely known, downside – one quite apart from their intermittency and expense.
This is the fact that they do not supply any inertia to the grid. Thermal powerplants – coal, gas, nuclear, for example – drive large spinning generators which are directly, synchronously connected to the grid. If there are changes which cause a difference between demand and supply, the generators will start to spin faster or slower: but their inertia resists this process, meaning that the frequency of the alternating current in the grid changes only slowly. There is time for the grid managers to act, matching supply to demand and keeping the grid frequency within limits.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
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Green energy is bidenesque.
Interesting
The inertia issue is well known among power engineers, and the situation described here was entirely predictable given the heavy penetration of “renewable’ energy into the grid.
It’s hard to imagine since the Left hates coal, that back in the 80s their biggest issue was stopping Thatcher from shutting down the coal mines.
Well, did the blackout also add to their net zero goals?
From my college days I remember learning that DC was not good at long distance transmission.
Yet, Britain and Ireland are transmitting DC across the Channel.
>> From my college days I remember learning that DC was not
>> good at long distance transmission.
>> Yet, Britain and Ireland are transmitting DC across the
>> Channel.
For overhead transmission lines, yes there are issues with DC such as corona discharge.
But for underwater transmission there is another huge issue which makes AC less practical - the large capacitance of the underdwater cable.
From my perspective, this is easy to understand. The generators that have huge rotating armatures with accompanying power plants that have huge rotating flywheels resist sudden draws on power with their inertia. It gives the speed governors (or whatever they are called in huge power plants) time to kick in and maintain power.
This simply does not exist in solar. Solar cannot accommodate a huge instantaneous demand. Wind probably can’t either
I don’t get this.
Doesn’t solar have DC to AC converters that maintain a constant desired frequency? And why would one solar installation going down cause the rest of them to not keep producing electricity at the set frequency?
Nuclear Power Plants can not react in that kind of time frame. Nukes are great base load plants but are poor at quick response to load changes.
Really any turbine plant can not not increase its load by 1500 MW in 1.2 seconds. The torque on the turbine shaft would snap the shaft like a twig and the thermal expansion of the copper windings would likely lockup the rotor.
Back in the good old days of 'Regulated Electric Utilities' the electric utilities kept 'Spinning Reserve' plants running at very low loads for such events. They could quickly ramp up for such system upsets. They also provided the 'grid inertia' the article speaks of.
In the utility I worked for when I started these plants were older, dirty small coal fired plants. In my later years the coal plants were retired and the utility built gas turbine plants that had quicker response times and could be remotely brought on-line.
This all goes to the point that for the grid operator to be able to respond to a grid upset in such a short time frame the grid would have to several plants on hot standby ready to be spun up. No single plant could increase power output by 1500 MW in 1.5 seconds.
bkmk
By law or tariff, all private solar must cease output should a grid glitch occur. Law says 5 minute lockout.
>> Doesn’t solar have DC to AC converters that maintain a
>> constant desired frequency? And why would one solar
>> installation going down cause the rest of them to not keep
>> producing electricity at the set frequency?
Probably because there is no peak handling demand built into the system. I’m not familiar with solar plants, but something like a large battery bank that could soak up peak demands.
This of course could be impractical or uneconomic.
That’s a load problem not a frequency problem.
Yes the solar farms do have DC/AC converters.
But they will automatically follow the grid frequency.
When a large solar farm trips off line the load it was carrying will drag down the rotating generators that govern the frequency of the grid. (slow down the generators)
If the rotating generators do not have the capacity to increase power to compensate for the slowing, frequency drops.
Spain foolishly has decommissioned coal plants that could have been spinning reserve that could have been spun up to recover the grid
Its coming. It is going to happen, as sure as God made little green apples, it is going to happen.
Maybe later to us than to them, but it is going to happen.
Insanity. They know the problem, yet they press forward.
You would think that it would.
After all the blackout shut down their coal plants for 12 hours.
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