Transport chaos across England and Wales after major power cuts

From alBBC

“National Grid has said it will “learn the lessons” after nearly one million people across England and Wales lost power on Friday.

He said he did not believe that a cyber-attack or unpredictable wind power generation were to blame.

Nice inclusion of the diversionary “cyber-attack”. No doubt the Russians will be fingered in the fullness of time.

I wasn’t stuck on a train in London so can be more sanguine about it, though it was annoying that neighbors alarms went off when power came back on.
Perhaps it was a good thing in that it reminds everyone about the importance of a stable electricity supply and that politicians and greens mess with it at their peril.

Couldn’t happen to nicer people on that funny island!
A great week it were!

First BA IT system goes t..ts up,so those who wanted to go ON HOLIDAY were stranded.
Next thing that happens, people who want to gGO HOME FROM WORK on Friday eve can’t because the grid goes t..ts up.

It all smacks of a country of maximum (in)-competence, like another greeny spotted peeing in the pees to give “added flavour” to the mix.
Where’s John Cleese to give the final laugh to this all?

Lucky they’re leaving the EU, no doubt the Macron greeny toad will push the premium price of all them VOLTS crossing the channel from Frog nuclear ‘lectric thru the roof, once he gets it in his silly mind to punish the Brits for leaving.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/29/collapse-of-wind-power-threatens-germanys-green-energy-transition/#comment-2756579

Dennis Sandberg wrote:
“Additional renewable’s for the German grid can only further destabilize it. Each additional 1000 MW of renewable capacity enables retiring 5 MW of “Fossil Fuels”, a net 5% fuel saving.”

All correct, thank you Dennis. These facts were written in the highly credible report “Wind Report 2005”, published that year by E.ON Netz of Germany, then the largest wind power generator in the world. That report is cited below and the pertinent words are quoted verbatim.

We knew all this in 2005 – I published similar thoughts in 2002, and yet here we are, with ten of trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of lives squandered, based on false climate hysteria and intermittent, diffuse green energy nonsense.

So my question is:
ARE OUR GOVERNMENT LEADERS AND THEIR ADVISORS REALLY THAT STUPID, as even today they parrot global warming and green energy falsehoods, or do they have a darker, more sinister agenda?

My conclusion is that they are knowingly trying to destroy our Western economies, to turn our countries into serfdoms with themselves at the helm, the new kings of a totalitarian world.

If you think this is an outlandish hypothesis, look around. More than half the people in the world already live under such oppression. Venezuela and Zimbabwe are fully destroyed, as is much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Continental Europe is failing due to green energy fiascos and unchecked immigration, and Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA are all under attack. The popular media keeps repeating the same green energy falsehoods, and suppresses and distorts dissent from the few skeptics who dare to speak out.

Canada, led by a child-prince with no apparent education or intellect and surrounded by ultra-green, uber-left energy advisors, is not Canada anymore. We are Canazuela, part way to the economic ruin that has devastated Venezuela, once the most prosperous country in Latin America due to its heavy-oil resources.

Regards, Allan
____________________

Reference: E.ON Netz Wind Report 2005
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/eonwindreport2005.pdf
(apparently no longer available from E.ON Netz website).

This is a really old post I wrote – probably circa 2005 to 2008:

Quote:

The Duke has it right – the fatal flaw of wind power is that it requires almost 100% backup capacity from conventional power stations.

This is even true of very large, country-wide distributed grids.

Willis, to verify, check Figure 7 of the E.On Netz Wind Report 2005 that I emailed you today, which refers to Germany’s power grid.

E.On Netz was in 2005, and may still be, the largest wind power generator in the world.

(Quote from Wind Report 2005)

Fig 7. Falling substitution capacity

The more wind power capacity is in the grid, the lower the percentage of traditional generation it can replace.

As wind power capacity rises, the lower availability of the wind farms determines the reliability of the system as a whole to an ever increasing extent. Consequently the greater reliability of traditional power stations becomes increasingly eclipsed.

As a result, the relative contribution of wind power to the guaranteed capacity of our supply system up to the year 2020 will fall continuously to around 4% (FIGURE 7).

In concrete terms, this means that in 2020, with a forecast wind power capacity of over 48,000MW (Source: dena grid study), 2,000MW of traditional power production can be replaced by these wind farms.

(End of quote)

Also, wind power can dangerously destabilize the entire power grid. See Figure 5 & 6 in the same report.

(Quote)

FIGURE 5 shows the annual curve of wind power feed-in in the E.ON control area for 2004, from which it is possible to derive the wind power feed-in during the past year:

1. The highest wind power feed-in in the E.ON grid was just above 6,000MW for a brief period, or put another way the feed-in was around 85% of the installed wind power capacity at the time.

2. The average feed-in over the year was 1,295MW, around one fifth of the average installed wind power capacity over the year.

3. Over half of the year, the wind power feed-in was less than 14% of the average installed wind power capacity over the year.

The feed-in capacity can change frequently within a few hours. This is shown in FIGURE 6, which reproduces the course of wind power feedin during the Christmas week from 20 to 26 December 2004.

Whilst wind power feed-in at 9.15am on Christmas Eve reached its maximum for the year at 6,024MW, it fell to below 2,000MW within only 10 hours, a difference of over 4,000MW. This corresponds to the capacity of 8 x 500MW coal fired power station blocks. On Boxing Day, wind power feed-in in the E.ON grid fell to below 40MW.

Handling such significant differences in feed-in levels poses a major challenge to grid operators.
(End of quote)

This reliable information has been available for years, and has been ignored. I know this is true, because I published it online and in newspaper articles, starting in 2002.

A trillion dollars [now tens of trillions of dollars] has been squandered worldwide on climate hysteria, much of it on nonsensical wind power. Jesus wept.

*****************

Imagine if this power failure happened during a cold winter – it will, unless drastic steps are taken ASAP.

This green energy debacle was all predictable AND PREDICTED – by me and others.

Regards, Allan
_________________________

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/10/ee-democrat-climate-change-committee-members-own-shares-in-fossil-fuel-companies/#comment-2621626

Excerpt from the article:
“I don’t agree with the Democrat public position on climate change, I think genuine action to shut down fossil fuel would be terrible for the US economy, which is currently booming thanks to the flood of cheap energy unleashed by President Trump and the previous Republican Congress and current Republican dominated Senate.”

It is even clearer than that, for the USA and for the world:

Fossil fuels comprise fully 85% of global primary energy, unchanged in decades, and unlikely to change in future decades. Ban fossil fuels and ~everyone in the developed world is dead in a month. The remaining 15% of global primary energy is almost all hydro and nuclear.

Despite many trillions in squandered subsidies, global green energy has increased from above 1% to below 2% is recent decades.

My concern, as an energy expert, is that intermittent energy from wind and/or solar power cannot supply the grid with reliable, uninterrupted power. These so-called green energy technologies are not green and produce little useful (dispatchable) energy, because they require almost 100% conventional backup from fossil fuels, nuclear or hydro for periods when the wind does not blow and the Sun does not shine.

Green energy does not even reduce CO2 emissions, because of the need for almost 100% conventional spinning reserve. There is no current grid-scale “super-battery” technology that can economically solve the intermittency problem, except for Pumped Storage that requires special siting that exists in only a few places in the world. My home province of Alberta covers 662,000 sq. km in area, larger than many countries, and we have exactly ZERO sites suitable for pumped storage – we have no sites suitable for hydro dams with a large reservoir at the bottom of the dam.

SO HERE IS MY “EXPERT SOLUTION” TO SOLVE THE PROBLEMS OF INTERMITTENCY IN WIND AND SOLAR POWER:

1. Build your wind or solar power system and connect it to the grid.
2. Build your back-up system consisting of 100% equivalent capacity in gas turbine generators.
3. Using high explosives, blow your wind or solar power system all to hell.
4. Run your back-up gas turbine generators 24/7.
5. To save even more money, skip steps 1 and 3. 🙂

A final note of humour – the extremists are now claiming that this numbing cold spell is caused by global warming – yes, really! But none of the global warming alarmists predicted this cold. They said “kids would not know what snow looked like anymore” and other such nonsense.

In 2002 I predicted a return to global cooling, such as was experienced from ~1940 to 1977, to recommence by 2020 to 2030. Solar activity in SC24 has crashed – it is the lowest solar cycle since the Dalton Minimum circa 1800, when much of Napoléon’s Grande Armée of 680,000 men froze to death in the Russian campaign.

Try to stay warm during this current cold blast from the North. Cold kills, and cold weather kills 20 times more people globally than hot and warm weather. Excess Winter Deaths in the USA average about 100,000 per year – equivalent to two 9-11’s per week for 17 weeks every year. Remember that when someone tells you “we’re all going to die from global warming”. Earth is cooler-than-optimum for humanity and the environment.

Regards to all, Allan

I’ve done a lot of research on this, looking at the data from National Grid at BM Reports, Gridwatch, and a very helpful frequency chart at 1 second resolution from Upside Energy, a small company providing experimental token grid stabilisation services using distributed systems (a potential precursor to such things as V2G). You can see that their effort was very prompt but puny at under 6MW for about 3 minutes in this chart they tweeted

:large

Here’s what I found:

I think the conclusive answer to the question is yes – the blackout’s primary cause was the sudden loss of output from Hornsea wind farm, though the precise cause of that remains unknown at this stage: likely candidates are a failure at the offshore transmission platform where the voltage is boosted to 220kV, somewhere along the cable to shore, or at the grid connection point (at Killingholme on the Humber) onshore. The really damning evidence comes in this tweet that shows grid frequency based on 1 second data:

:large

The extremely rapid initial drop in frequency at 15:52:32Z to below the statutory minimum of 49.5Hz is compatible with the drop in wind generation of about 850MW recorded in grid 5 minute data (although there appear to be timing discrepancies between the frequency and power data – but I would regard the frequency data as conclusive, especially with wind). That is followed by a small bounce as the grid starts to try to recover, before a further smaller collapse in frequency to the nadir at around 48.8Hz, which is entirely consistent with the smaller drop in CCGT output recorded in grid data that suggest that Little Barford was probably operating at about 50% of its 727MW capacity. There is a major grid transmission line that runs from Keadby near Killingholme past Little Barford at St. Neots and on to the transmission ring around the North of London. It is almost certain that this power line was delivering power from the wind farm towards London. When that failed, there would have been a sudden extra demand on Little Barford, which would have caused its frequency to drop and that (if not the already rapid drop in grid frequency) would have tripped it out of operation.

Do not be deceived by the reported outage times on the plants. The formal record shows that Little Barford announced it had zero capacity at 15:55:37Z w.e.f. 15:57:40Z (compare with the chart above). Hornsea is shown as having zero capacity w.e.f. 16:00:00Z – which is a highly unlikely timing, except that it coincides with the start of the next settlement period. That report was not submitted until 16:19:48Z, over 20 minutes after the main event. By 16:00Z the grid frequency chart shows that balance had been restored by the combination of load shedding and running up Dinorwig pumped storage to nearly 1GW, OCGT rapid response, and diesel STOR. It seems that management decided not to report the real time of the loss of power for reasons that might vary between inadequate monitoring systems, or a failure to understand the need to report the true time rather than the next half hour settlement period time, or simply to lie to cover up having reviewed the evidence.

That these disturbances caused such a rapid and severe frequency drop that triggered load shedding is entirely due to the lack of grid inertia caused by the high proportion of generation from wind and solar, which had been running at over 40% most of the day. A 2016 presentation from National Grid has a chart that shows the relationship between the rate of change of frequency that can be expected for different amounts of load loss at different levels of grid inertia: it suggests that they were sailing far too close to the wind. You can think of grid inertia as the flywheel energy stored in the rotating heavy generator turbines. It is measured in GVA.s, which you can think of as gigawatt-seconds. Divide by the level of grid demand, and it tells you how long the energy would last if it instantaneously could become the only source of power on the grid. That gives a measure of the response speed required from backup generation (spinning reserve, fast start, grid batteries etc.) if grid frequency is to stay within limits that avoid blackouts. You have to suspect that at Grid HQ in Wokingham, they will be thinking about having a larger level of spinning reserve, and about curtailing wind to ensure that there is more inertia.

I note that today the formal record of the timing of the shutdowns has magically disappeared. More questions to be answered.