Spanish Grid Operator Faults Big Power Plants in Blackout Blame Game (ft.com) 39
Spain's grid operator has accused some large power plants of not doing their job to help regulate the country's electricity system in the moments before last month's catastrophic blackout across the Iberian peninsula. From a report: Beatriz Corredor, chair of grid operator Red Electrica's parent company, said power plants fell short in controlling the voltage of the electricity system.
However, the heads of Spain's biggest plant owners linked the blackout to a lack of grid investment and insufficient efforts to boost electricity demand. The public blame game over the outage is intensifying as more than three weeks after 60 million people were left without power, Spanish government investigators insisted they needed more time to establish the root cause.
However, the heads of Spain's biggest plant owners linked the blackout to a lack of grid investment and insufficient efforts to boost electricity demand. The public blame game over the outage is intensifying as more than three weeks after 60 million people were left without power, Spanish government investigators insisted they needed more time to establish the root cause.
Did oversupply cause the blackout? (Score:1)
Did they have so much power in the lines that it shorted itself out, sort of like undemanded electricity build up leads to forest fires in California?
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Now, that's the extreme cases. Unfortun
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While they were producing lot of solar energy, excess lowers the price and Spain and Portugal hydro storage buy all that cheap electricity and pump water up... a few hours later, they sell that same electricity for 10 to 100 times more on the end of day, when everyone is arriving home, cooking, charging their cards, etc. That was why Portugal was importing 30% of their electricity from Spain, they were charging their hydro storage. Spain and Portugal have good power interconnects. Spain with France are some
Spain? (Score:1)
Is that still even a thing?
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It's also rather convenient that Spain pretty much never gets hit by hurricanes the way Puerto Rico does.
Synchronous Condensers (Score:4, Interesting)
From what I can tell, the jury is still out on possible causes for the outage. However, for people pointing out the issues involved in decreasing inertial stability, it is possible to convert older gas and coal fired plant generators into synchronous condensers to maintain inertial stability.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/zomb... [ieee.org]
"Repurposing old power-plant generators is part of a larger comeback story for a technology that seemed doomed with the advent of solid-state controllers in the 1970s. Thyristor-based static VAR compensators (SVCs) quickly conquered the market for dynamic voltage support because they produced VARs more cheaply and efficiently than synchronous condensers.
Their predecessors started making a comeback a decade ago, however, thanks to faster control systems and a growing recognition that spinning machines offered some crucial advantages over electronics. Those pros stem from a spinning rotorâ(TM)s mechanical and electromagnetic inertia, which make the machines more tolerant of grid disturbances.
Severe voltage drops, for example, hobble SVCs, whose reactive power output drops at double the rate of line voltage. In contrast, a synchronous condenserâ(TM)s spinning rotor keeps on pumping out reactive power. It will also generate real power if needed, moderating the drop in AC frequency that would result, say, from shutting down a power plant."
"Speed was a critical factor in the California Independent System Operatorâ(TM)s decision to order a condenser conversion, though in a gas-fired plant instead of a coal plant, following the shuttering in 2012 of the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Without the 2,200-MW plant, located between Los Angeles and San Diego, voltage control weakened all across Southern California. âoeThe potential for rolling blackouts in the L.A. basin was seen as a very high risk,â says Chris Davidson, an electrical solutions business-Âdevelopment director for Siemens, which did the conversion."
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When you encounter a "just replace everything with solar" smoothbrain it's best to ask them how they will handle reactive power.
You get a reaction, that's for sure.
We can do some cool engineering for workarounds but it's amazing how alluring the One Ring is to some.
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Smart inverters.
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Smart inverters.
Most inverters are currently grid following. In the future grid forming inverters may negate the need for traditional inertia in existing power grids.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/so... [energy.gov]
However the future is not now, and people who talk about how cheap renewables are rarely factor such things into their equations.
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The rent seekers oppose grid forming inverters as it makes their subsidised toys more expensive. The tech is there, obviously, every off grid inverter is grid forming.
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Inverters are rated in KVA. Every reactive VA used to stabilize a system is one that cannot be used to move real power (sell electricity). Renewable operators are not willing to do that unless contracts to tie into the grid require it as a condition. And then they will still scream.
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Their inverters will shut off during overvoltage though.
If Spain had had more (synthetic) inertia on the grid, the grid wouldn't have gone out of sync. Voltage would simply have risen and grid following inverters would have automatically shut down, until the grid operator could take power away to bring voltage down.
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Their inverters will shut off during overvoltage though.
Then those inverters aren't rated to feed reactive power into the grid. And if that was a contractual requirement for connection, then it would not have been permitted.
Sorry. If you want to play with the big boys, you have to invest in equipment that's suited for the purpose.
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When you encounter a "just replace everything with solar" smoothbrain it's best to ask them how they will handle reactive power.
Flywheels, ofc, nobk.
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did you know that even the Spain nuclear power and gas plants failed? And that some solar kept working?
yes, things should have gone better and improvements will be made for sure, but the main lesson we can take is that we moved from a huge central power station (with few connections to other regions) to a international highly interconnected grid, so a problem in one place in the past affected mostly only one region, but now it will affect multiple countries. Grids need to adapt and build newer protections a
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When you encounter a "just replace everything with solar" smoothbrain it's best to ask them how they will handle reactive power.
Tell us you don't know a thing about power engineering without telling us. You handle reactive power the same way ... we do already. The latitude for PF correction at a large power plant is very small, and completely inefficient - not actually covering the whole reason you don't want reactive power on the grid since correcting for it at generation doesn't resolve the issue of reactive losses.
You correct for it at distribution points or at the customer. There is literally *NOTHING* different about solar in t
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it is possible to convert older gas and coal fired plant generators into synchronous condensers to maintain inertial stability.
If only there was somebody who would step up and pay for the conversion and subsequent maintenance.
Somebody?
[Sound of crickets]
Now where did all those solar and wind people go suddenly?
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If there's something we (as in society) need but no money in providing it that's just a type of market failure, that's where the state steps in to either create the market or just do it directly.
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The market has been working fine for over a century, both with public and private participants. Having a new entrant that just says "I don't wanna!" isn't my definition of a market failure.
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I didn't think what was being proposed was necessarily an energy generation system but a stability one? In that case if it's something needed for grid stability the government would just regulate anyway, those are the options if there is some perverse incentive the power companies don't want to do these upgrades. If i misunderstood it and it's just a new fossil generator or new power tech then yeah it can ride on it's merits a bit more.
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You can't manage a grid for power delivery without addressing system stability issues at the same time. The two issues are inseparable.
Unfortunately, the whole renewables fad has snuck up on the system operators. In part due to the politics attached. What used to be cute little toys that people thought could be overlooked have grown to the point that they can now knock national grids on their ass.
In that case if it's something needed for grid stability the government would just regulate anyway
And that regulation might come in the form of "Make provisions for system stability. Or we cut you off the grid
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"Make provisions for system stability. Or we cut you off the grid."
Not opposed to that at all.
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SVCs aren't the only thing available any more. There's grid forming STATCOMs, with no storage, supercapacitors or battery storage. The US has been using battery ones since 2017 to allow cold idle gas peakers to qualify as spinning reserve.
Not sure if trying to retrofit is really cheaper than just recovering the copper and installing silicon.
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The topic of inertial stability is a distraction. Stability is important but inertia is not the only way to do it, it just so happens to be the way it was done historically thanks to power being produced by rotating machines. Inertia is nothing more than a form of energy to be converted to electricity on the grid. We have other forms of energy, e.g. chemical.
I remind people the first large scale grid connected battery was put there not to store energy when the wind stops, but to provide mostly FCAS - Freque
Horseshit (Score:1, Flamebait)
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That's an interesting statement. Has anyone provided evidence of Spain being a recent target for Russian state actors?
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do you know that the all the nuclear and gas power plants failed, but yet a couple of solar kept working (yes, most disconnected too, but not all).
This problem really will be studied for several years
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You're the authority now?
Hmmm.
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Large plants provided inertia to the grid which Spain's glut of renewables failed to do.
Indeed. Why do we need months long investigation on a highly complex topic by qualified engineers. Everyone knows ignorant Slashdot armchair engineers are the rightest there is. You should post this on TRUTH to really get your message out to the world, think of all the money we could save when we just let Slashdot commenters come to the conclusion. What even are these "engineers" and "investigators". Who decided they were the "experts". In fact you could just make up a bingo card of all the things you think
Need some Tesla Megapacks (Score:2)
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Spain and Portugal grids are highly distributed, while that could have helped, just one would be useless... how many, where to place them and what tech (batteries, flywheels, gravity storage, etc) is something that will for sure be done. But exactly what to do is postponed until we understand better what happen and where and how it could have been avoided. The Australian case was simpler, they were not as much distributed, most population and demand lives near the coast in bigger cities. Spain and Portugal