Posted on 08/10/2019 7:21:48 AM PDT by BenLurkin
FULL TITLE: Fury at power cut that brought Britain to its knees: Government launches probe into mystery simultaneous failure of wind farm and gas-fired power station as officials insist there is 'no evidence' of a cyber attack
Julian Leslie, Head of National Control at the National Grid Electricity System Operator said: 'We had an unplanned near simultaneous event on our network. This event was the loss of two generators which connect to the national grid network in order to export their power.
'As a result of this, this rare event, the system needs to protect itself. What was happening was as the frequency was falling, the system could see this and unfortunately the way the system protects itself is to lose some demand. You would have seen this in a temporary and short power cut.'
The power cut stopped traffic lights from working, plunged Newcastle Airport into darkness, affected Ipswich Hospital and caused huge disruption on the railways during the busy Friday night commute.
'The root cause of yesterday's issue was not with our system but was a rare and unusual event, the almost simultaneous loss of two large generators, one gas and one offshore wind, at 16.54pm. We are still working with the generators to understand what caused the generation to be lost.
'Following the event, the other generators on the network responded to the loss by increasing their output as expected. However due to the scale of the generation losses this was not sufficient, and to protect the network and ensure restoration to normal operation could be completed as quickly as possible, a backup protection system was triggered which disconnects selected demand across GB.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Both use the same Made in China Fuses ?
Will be interesting to read the technical report on this, when all the facts of what happened are brought together. Right now, the detailed ‘data’ exists in a number of places at different ‘metering’ points, sampling line voltage and currents and relative phase shift at like 32 times per 50 Hz ‘cycle’.
Power plants do go off-line, usually on a planned basis for maintenance. Wind plants also go off-line, usually on an unplanned basis because the wind don’t blow.
It seems obvious that the Brits chose to rely on the wind blowing when they need to shut down their conventional plants. The wind didn’t cooperate.
Welcome to ‘clean power’.
IRAN!
No, Scotland !
Thailand?
Sounds like the network needs a better system than computer networks,all else fails go to manual operations?.
Government launches probe equals government spends even more of your money.
Exactly.
Without the gas plant to stabilize the system,the wind mills go off line.
Well, they said they were dropping frequency, so they were overloaded. They probably did have other gas plants on line, just not enough capacity to meet the load.
They might as well get used to it over there, and do what the Third World does, which is to expect blackouts, but then be ready to recover quickly to full operations once power comes back. It’s a good capability to have, even for advanced countries that don’t plan to transition to Third World status.
As it happens, there were strong winds right across the country yesterday, so the ‘wind didn’t blow’ scenario doesn’t work. The National Grid’s explanation of the sequence of events, as reported in the article, is much more plausible than rhetorical side-swipes at wind.
Perhaps the winds were TOO STRONG, so they took themselves off line, as wind plants are programmed to do just that.
Either way, get used to it!
We were supposed to have 12-15 mph wind at this time.
The systems are showing 1-2 mph!
You touch on a very important point. The US should insist on all critical component manufacture and sourcing in the United States. It is insane to rely on China for anything vital.
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