Spain's Government Blames Huge Blackout On Grid Regulator and Private Firms (bbc.com) 20
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Spanish government has said that the national grid operator and private power generation companies were to blame for an energy blackout that caused widespread chaos in Spain and Portugal earlier this year. Shortly after midday on April 28, both countries were disconnected from the European electricity grid for several hours. Businesses, schools, universities, government buildings and transport hubs were all left without power and traffic light outages caused gridlocks. While schoolchildren, students and workers were sent home for the day, many other people were stuck in lifts or stranded on trains in isolated rural areas.
In the immediate aftermath, the left-wing coalition government did not provide an explanation, instead calling for patience as it investigated. Nearly two months after the unprecedented outage, the minister for ecological transition, Sara Aagesen, has presented a report on its causes. She said the partly state-owned grid operator, Red Electrica, had miscalculated the power capacity needs for that day, explaining that the "system did not have enough dynamic voltage capacity." The regulator should have switched on another thermal plant, she said, but "they made their calculations and decided that it was not necessary."
Aagesen also blamed private generators for failing to regulate the grid's voltage shortly before the blackout happened. "Generation firms which were supposed to control voltage and which, in addition, were paid to do just that did not absorb all the voltage they were supposed to when tension was high," she said, without naming any of the companies responsible. The day after the outage, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez suggested that private electricity companies might have played a role, saying that his government would demand "all the relevant accountability" from them. However, the new report on the blackout also raises questions about the role of Beatriz Corredor, president of Red Electrica and a former Socialist minister, who had previously insisted that the grid regulator had not been at fault. Aagesen said there was no evidence of a cyberattack behind the blackout. The government also maintained that Spain's renewable energy output was not to blame.
In the immediate aftermath, the left-wing coalition government did not provide an explanation, instead calling for patience as it investigated. Nearly two months after the unprecedented outage, the minister for ecological transition, Sara Aagesen, has presented a report on its causes. She said the partly state-owned grid operator, Red Electrica, had miscalculated the power capacity needs for that day, explaining that the "system did not have enough dynamic voltage capacity." The regulator should have switched on another thermal plant, she said, but "they made their calculations and decided that it was not necessary."
Aagesen also blamed private generators for failing to regulate the grid's voltage shortly before the blackout happened. "Generation firms which were supposed to control voltage and which, in addition, were paid to do just that did not absorb all the voltage they were supposed to when tension was high," she said, without naming any of the companies responsible. The day after the outage, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez suggested that private electricity companies might have played a role, saying that his government would demand "all the relevant accountability" from them. However, the new report on the blackout also raises questions about the role of Beatriz Corredor, president of Red Electrica and a former Socialist minister, who had previously insisted that the grid regulator had not been at fault. Aagesen said there was no evidence of a cyberattack behind the blackout. The government also maintained that Spain's renewable energy output was not to blame.
schoolchildren were sent home... and 8 people died (Score:2)
Six people died of carbon monoxide poisoning after switching electricity to a faulty generator power, one in a house fire, and one after breathing aid ran out of battery. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Faulty generator?
In Taboadela, Ourense, a couple and their son died of carbon monoxide inhalation due to a generator being used indoors. One of the couple required a mechanical ventilator, which prompted the use of the generator
There were also 7, you counted the breathing aide fatality twice, they were one of the inside generator victims.
The house fire was candle use.
3 were from the generator being used inside
The other 3:
Three of the deceased in Galicia are a 59-year-old man , with various pathologies, who was found dead in Ferrol by his niece when she went to look for him at his house; another 80-year-old man in Betanzos , also in the province of A Coruña, who was left in good condition by his carer at night and was found dead in the morning; and another 86-year-old man who lived with his wife in Dumbría (A Coruña) who died this morning, according to the Minister of the Presidency, Diego Calvo, based on the incidents during the blackout collected by the 112 emergency service.
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you counted the breathing aide fatality twice.
The 8th death I counted was in Portugal.
Re: So it wasn't the Russians as Kaja & Ursula (Score:3)
Um, that's so last Spring. The brand new bad guy is Iran. Please keep up.
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What do you mean new? We've always been at war with Eurasia.
Not really applicable here: we HAVE been at odds with Iran pretty much straight through sine the 1979 Islamic revolution there. It just flares up sometimes more than others.
Very curious to see where this goes, maybe this constant irritant to the area finally goes away in this episode. Iran has a lot of potential to be a moderate and rich country if they did some regime change...
Voltage Regulation (Score:2)
Aagesen also blamed private generators for failing to regulate the grid's voltage shortly before the blackout happened."Generation firms which were supposed to control voltage and which, in addition, were paid to do just that did not absorb all the voltage they were supposed to when tension was high,"
A clear symptom of these private generators pushing maximum power onto the grid, stability be damned. That's not a fault of the grid regulators. But it is a signal to cut the offending generators off the grid for failing to meet contractual requirements. Name them and cut them off.
and traffic light outages caused gridlocks
Where I live, many of the traffic lights have been converted to LEDs. As a result, their power consumption is low enough that they have their own local battery backups. Good for around 10 hours. During major outages, traffic still
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Low/medium voltage inverters are not regulated to be grid forming, they might have a volt/var curve but otherwise they just push voltage upto nominal plus 10%.
Regulators should have created standardised and centralised control schemes for small inverters, instead of just letting them push to nominal plus 10%.
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Regulators should have created standardised and centralised control schemes for small inverters
Perhaps a good idea for small generators as well. Because the cumulative effect can destabilize the system. But from TFS:
Generation firms which were supposed to control voltage and which, in addition, were paid to do just that
That sounds like a violation of regulations and contract terms. Now multiply that by hundreds of little roof-top installations and then figure out how you will monitor, let alone enforce such terms.
People paid money for their panels. When the sun is out, they are highly motivated to push as much power as they can for a better ROI.
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That sounds like a violation of regulations and contract terms. Now multiply that by hundreds of little roof-top installations and then figure out how you will monitor, let alone enforce such terms.
One solution is to no longer allow small rooftop solar installations to feed into the grid. Specify that they can only feed into the grid if the are part of a "virtual power plant" like the kind Tesla is trying to set up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I assume there must be some kind of fees for participating in a virtual power plant, maybe not a bill that shows up in the mail every month or is deducted from a checking account but rather comes out of the money they'd get back from the utility for the p
It's the frequency Kenneth (Score:2)
The voltage in isolation wasn't the problem, the way voltage interacts with frequency and phase in AC grid regulation made it a problem. Shit started oscillating till the safety tripped.
Synchronous condensers or grid forming statcoms can provide inertia for dumb inverters. If high voltage distribution was all HVDC, it would have worked fine too though. AC is a clusterfuck, Edison was right in the end.
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Bidirectional buck-boost converters, just like they use silly large bidirectional inverters to connect HVDC to an HV AC grid.
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Inertia in the AC grid has a dual purpose. It provides a small bit of storage to give power plants and spinning reserves time to modulate their power, but it also dampens oscillations in the grid caused by the very complex phase/frequency/voltage regulation mechanism. The lack of sufficient inertia to handle the latter was the problem here, it was not a storage issue.
In a DC grid there is far less potential for grid wide oscillations, desynchronization is completely impossible. When voltage rises to 10% ove
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