- Company has downplayed the role of wind energy in the power cut
- In April a study warned renewable power sources could risk network’s ‘stability’
- Half UK’s power generated from wind at one point on the day the power failed
By Helen Cahill For The Mail On Sunday
Published: 18:01 EDT, 17 August 2019 | Updated: 07:10 EDT, 18 August 2019
National Grid had evidence that the shift to renewable energy was putting Britain’s electricity supply at risk months before the biggest blackout in a decade, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The company, which is responsible for keeping the lights on, has downplayed the role of wind energy in the power cut that caused widespread chaos earlier this month.
John Pettigrew, chief executive of the FTSE 100 firm, described the outage as a ‘once-in-30-years’ event and said there was ‘nothing to indicate there is anything to do with the fact that we are moving to more wind or more solar’.
Yet in April, National Grid published research warning that using more renewable power sources posed a threat to the network’s ‘stability’.
In a report based on a £6.8 million research project, National Grid admitted that renewables increased the ‘unpredictability and volatility’ of the power supply which ‘could lead to faults on the electricity network’.
The revelations come as energy regulator Ofgem and the Government continue to investigate the causes of the blackout.
A report due out this week is expected to show the outage was caused by a series of failures, including a lightning strike which led to the almost simultaneous shutdown of two power stations.
A gas-fired power station at Little Barford, Bedfordshire, and the Hornsea offshore wind farm in the North Sea both went offline just before 5pm on August 9.
That caused the electricity network’s frequency – the rate at which power is transmitted to users – to drop below 50 Hz. Equipment can be damaged if it is higher or lower than this level.
To maintain frequency, local distribution networks were forced to cut supply in some areas.
When did the 30 years begin?
They new all about this back in 2011
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/04/the-empire-strikes-out/
Wasn’t this the guy that said, several years ago, britain would have to get used to not having electricity at the flick of a switch.
That was his predecessor. In January 2017
Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
So all the U.K. has to do is double their already hugely expensive investment into Green Energy infrastructure to build giant battery farms so that the already overly expensive electricity has instantaneous backup. They have to run all of these green power farms as close to capacity as possible to pay for the expensive infrastructure, and charge outrageous rates for it.
Or… Build real power plants based on nuclear, gas, or coal and run these at lower than true capacity so there is built-in backup – you know the way we have been running reliable power grids for half a century?
RE:”Renewable energy is a blackout risk….”
Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
“Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you (and others) freek.”
IOW, tell the truth and catch the first bus out of town.
Common sense (very much lacking in AGW and renewable energy) means that power generated from stable sources has to be more reliable than power generated from sources where the output is variable. Back up batteries can provide power (at great expense) for about two minutes allowing other sources to kick in. Assuming that renewables are permanently ‘on’ unless the skies are cloudy or the wind isn’t blowing from the right direction or right speed, then I would guess that fossil fuelled power stations could not be brought online in the 2.5 minutes maximum that the lithium batteries can provide auxiliary power. They must therefore be running and producing CO2 in the background. The power cut a week last Friday affected most of England from the South West to the North East (where I live, I was without power for an hour). In a 21st century advanced economy, we cannot afford to have power cuts of any description or duration. People were stranded on trains for hours, because technicians needed to reset their computers. In Newcastle upon Tyne and London all the traffic lights ceased to function as did our Metro and the London Underground.
We are dealing with an incorrect and nonsensical solution to a non-existent problem.
“Don’t worry! That was just a…”
[books one way plane ticket out of the country]
“between now and 10 o’clock this Friday event!”
“Just change one rule — so the world can see what Wind and Solar really cost”
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/08/just-change-one-rule-so-the-world-can-see-what-wind-and-solar-really-cost/#comment-2177887
This is exactly what I was just thinking.
You need to be able to supply consistent power levels. The only solution is ‘spinning reserves’ of reliable power to offset likely outages of unreliable power.
Spinning reserves need time to get up to speed, so you also need battery backup for this time period. In fact, since you don’t want to spin up every time there is a lull in wind, or a cloud passes the sun, make that several times the spin-up tine so you don’t spin up and down all the time. Say 5x the spin up time.
So, to factor all this in, you need the wind/solar farm, an equivalent fossil fuel generator in reserve, and a battery large enough for 5x its spin up time.
Now realise that all you save, above just building the fossil fuel plant, is the fossil fuel not used while the renewable is actually working, less the fossil fuel required to keep the spinning reserves spinning (not inconsiderable).
Costs for these savings are the additional capital of the renewables, and the battery, and the maintenance of both.
Now get an accountant to do the figures. They’ll recommend just building the fossil fuel plant.
If CO2 were a factor, you’d just build nuclear and be done with it, and any Climate Alarmist who disagrees is just a watermelon.
That’s it in a nutshell. Renewables are an economic joke once examined, and an economic tragedy if executed.
The whole point of inertia is that you don’t need to invest in any expensive batteries, because the generators and turbines rotating at 3,000 r.p.m. (for 50Hz power) are natural flywheels that provide a store of energy that can be drawn on while fuel (including extra water into a hydro turbine) is added to generators operating at part load to increase their output, allowing the frequency to be restored. The demand on those flywheel stores determines how much they slow down (and thus lower the frequency), and obviously the more flywheels you have in operation the slower the frequency drop.
I can understand one or a few individual turbines going offline – but an entire large offshore wind farm? That doesn’t sound to me like a problem with the Grid. More like a problem down on the farm.
This appears to be an interesting article on Renewables in California.
The worlds densest form of practical energy storage is uranium. Build 6 or seven nuclear plants and problem solved.
People have no idea how much the electric system runs on a knife edge.
There is no power storage, so the plants that are doing load-following must adjust their power output from moment to moment. And keep the AC frequency within a very tight band. That would usually be natural gas turbines, sometimes hydro, since nuclear and coal are “base-load” plants that are full on.
The greenies are idiots; they know nothing.
Yep, just need giant batteries; maybe 20 the size of the Pentagon would cover most of London…
So that’s all we need? Get on the blower to Elon quick-
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/green-energy-revolution-near-impossible
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49402296 Lightning appears to have been involved.
That sounds like BBC spin to divert attention from a multi-generator wind farm going offline without warning. Lightning happens frequently. Grid brownouts not so much.
But you can never trust the BBC for an accurate report. The precise role of lightning was to knock out some 500MW of embedded generation.
We now have the initial report by National Grid – from the executive summary:
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2019/08/incident_report_lfdd_-_summary_-_final.pdf
More detail:
I was right about the sequence, although I missed the embedded generation on which there is inadequate information.
Never mind – the Chief Executive of National Grid has just had a £1m pay increase – so we can all breathe a sigh of relief – because obviously he has now got everything under control…..
The report is here:
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2019/08/incident_report_lfdd_-_summary_-_final.pdf
Page 17 states: “To ensure that, in the event of a loss, the rate of change of frequency does not result in the disconnection of users the ESO can decide to increase the total system inertia (which would slow down changes in frequency) or reduce the size of potential generation and demand losses that could credibly occur. A smaller sized loss will result in a correspondingly smaller RoCoF in low inertia conditions.
There we have it, wind reduces inertia, and you can reduce the wind input to the grid, to increase frequency robustness.
Pettigrew graduated from Cardiff University, where he earned a bachelor of science in economics and a master’s degree in international economics and banking
They don’t teach power system reliability in economics or banking. Every engineer that has worked on complex systems has dealt with fools like Pettigrew. They are always sure with their grand announcements but not often right.
UK was lucky to NOT to sit in the dark AND having exploding fire alarms throughout the country:
https://www.lfv-sbg.at/blog/trafoexplosion-in-abtenau/
Everybody feel free to correct me where I’m wrong.
The cover-up is complete. When reading through the MSM today they all say in unison: “Blackout was caused by a lightning strike that triggered a series of events”. If this were really true than we can wait for the next blackout very soon, as the National Grid is struck by lightning on average 3 times a day.
When you go into the details, it is obvious that failing of the windfarm Hornsea, in combination with a lack of spinning reserve in the grid, is the main cause for the blackout.
But the spin in the media makes the people think it was “the lightning”. Will we ever hear the truth?