Spain's Government Blames Huge Blackout On Grid Regulator and Private Firms (bbc.com) 43
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:3)
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, Funny)
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...
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Unless they elect someone the US doesn't like, in which case the CIA and MI6 will foment a coup and install a more pliant dictator. ...
In March 1951, Mosaddegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, cancelling its oil concession, which was otherwise set to expire in 1993, and expropriating its assets. Mosaddegh saw the AIOC as an arm of the British government controlling much of the oil in Iran, pushing him to seize what the British had built in Iran.[35]
Nationalization doesn't usually go over well, though it was the fashion at the time. Prob should've thought twice about it... would had been better for his career. [ from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ]
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describing more than justifying.
But note that the nationalization was more than just preventing new investments or something. it was expropriating the company's property and reneging on existing leases.
And it was a rougher era. We'd just come off Germany and Japan literally doing wars of conquest 10 years earlier and colonialism was only starting to draw to a close.
But no i don't think countries' governments should be overthrown so lightly for such directly economic reasons. But for long term griefers lik
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describing more than justifying.
Alright.
But note that the nationalization was more than just preventing new investments or something. it was expropriating the company's property and reneging on existing leases.
Well of course it was. It was nationalizing. However- it was one of the nicer nationalization deals written. A full 25% of oil profits were set aside to go directly to the British companies that owned the assets until they were made whole.
And it was a rougher era. We'd just come off Germany and Japan literally doing wars of conquest 10 years earlier and colonialism was only starting to draw to a close.
Eh, it was Britain being Britain.
The US didn't even care about the oil, and initially rolled their eyes at the Brits. The Brits then, literally, manipulated US intelligence until we thought there was going to be a Communist takeover (rougher era, indeed) at which
Voltage Regulation (Score:3)
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 flows fine.
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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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There was not a shortage of power, there was a shortage of grid forming. You don't need active power for that.
They need to install grid forming statcoms or if available convert some mothballed power plants to synchronous condensers.
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Coal plants are being replaced by gas plants, those would be an option for conversion.
Spinning reserve can provide inertia, but it has to be at operating temperature so it is not very efficient for just that. That said, hybrid conversion services are also on the market, so that's an option too. Then it can be both, efficiently.
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Now multiply that by hundreds of little roof-top installations and then figure out how you will monitor, let alone enforce such terms.
smart reverse power meters (we have the technology just not the ethics)
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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 flows fine.
Where I live the cars form an orderly queue waiting for the others to go first, or perhaps for a bus to turn up. Even if there's only one car it forms a queue of one.
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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.
Errr no that's not how grids work. You don't get to just blindly push to the grid, that's the whole point of the grid regulator. If the companies are pushing to the grid blindly then it is still the regulator's fault for not regulating it properly. In many countries if you exceed your export allotment you get a nice fancy fine. If you don't provide the stability services you promised you get a nice fancy fine. Not doing the above is the regulator's fault.
In this case the grid regulator miscalculated the sta
It's the frequency Kenneth (Score:3)
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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I don't think that's what Pinky's Brain is saying, and it's not what I understand to be the issue either.
If you have a grid where long distance transmission is via HVDC, you can control the AC parts with the large inverters at either end of the link. Rather than relying on spinning generation or mass to regulate the AC, you can use the inverters to add load and to shed supply.
Dumb inverters aren't the problem, lack of regulation on the generation side, and lack of controllable load is. Flywheels are a good
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If you have a grid where long distance transmission is via HVDC, you can control the AC parts with the large inverters at either end of the link. Rather than relying on spinning generation or mass to regulate the AC, you can use the inverters to add load and to shed supply.
Flywheels (and synchronous condensers, basically spinning generators that don't actually generate, and are often old fossil plants) are both forms of artificial inertia used to control the AC waveform. You can use smart inverters (which are not capable of black start but are getting better), or you can use traditional spinning inertia, but the nature of AC grids is you need one or the other. If you allow dumb inverters you MUST have enough inertia elsewhere in the system to support them. There are no gri
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with small rooftop solar, we wouldn't need big grids
this is all just classist exploitation by big power
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Re: It's the frequency Kenneth (Score:2)
This is mostly wrong.
The voltage in isolation wasn't the problem, the way voltage interacts with frequency and phase in AC grid regulation made it a problem.
Voltage and frequency/phase are mostly separate phenomena in AC grids. The problem in Spain was that several large generators that were providing voltage regulation tripped offline, and then the remaining large generators failed to provide the amount of voltage regulation they were contracted for. This was at a time when the system was tending toward high voltage, but that (and the generator outages) were within the planned-for operating ranges. The system would have pulled through OK i
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Pushing AC in Spain grid wide above nominal plus 10% when the sun shines is almost impossible. Solar was providing nearly 20 GW and will modulate down to zero in ms AND reconnect if the overvoltage doesn't last too long or oscillates way way too high.
Unlike solar, the power plants don't nearly instantly lower output at nominal plus 10%. So how exactly would a pure voltage issue cause their shutdown?
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Edison was wrong back then. He would have been right today, but only because very iompressive power semiconduictors and computers are available now.
also... (Score:1)
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two blondes were stuck un an escalator for several hours until they were rescued
I can't imagine they had anything to say that would have interested anyone else in that elevator ... except maybe another blonde :)))))
What is this stupid writing (Score:3)
Why would it matter that the government is "left wing" and why is this written like not immediately providing an explanation but waiting for the analysis results were a bad thing? It is not. It is the sane and competent thing.