Essay by Eric Worrall
“… the infrastructure is not prepared for new energy feeds …”
Power outage hits Balkan states as heat overloads system, minister says
By Reuters
June 22, 20245:43 AM GMT+10 Updated 11 hours agoPODGORICA, June 21 (Reuters) – A major power outage hit Montenegro, Bosnia, Albania and most of Croatia’s coast on Friday, disrupting businesses, shutting down traffic lights and leaving people sweltering without air conditioning in the middle of a heatwave.
Montenegro’s energy minister said the shutdown was caused by a sudden increase in power consumption brought on by high temperatures, and by the heat itself overloading systems. Power distribution is linked across the Balkans for transfers and trading.
…
Experts were still trying to identify where the malfunction originated, he added.
…
Shifts in the region’s energy supplies have put strains on its transmission systems, industry officials say.
Western Balkan nations have seen a boom in solar energy investment, meant to ease a power crisis that had threatened a shift away from coal.
But the infrastructure is not prepared for new energy feeds, the president of North Macedonia’s Energy Regulatory Commission and other industry figures told Reuters in April last year.
…
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/power-blackout-hits-montenegro-bosnia-albania-croatias-adriatic-coast-2024-06-21/
Clicking the “industry officials say” link led to this article;
Western Balkans see boom in solar energy but grids unprepared
By Daria Sito-sucic and Ognien Teofilovski
April 21, 20237:03 AM GMT+10Updated a year agoSKOPJE, April 20 (Reuters) – Western Balkan nations are seeing a boom in solar energy investment, which could help ease a power crisis that had threatened a shift away from coal, but industry officials say transmission systems are not prepared for new energy feeds.
North Macedonia’s Economy Minister Kreshnik Bekteshi said investors have started to invest “quite furiously” in solar plants and that his country, which is a power importer, has become a regional hub for renewable energy sources.
…
Certified producers of solar panels in addition warn that poor control of companies that install solar panels without licence amidst rising demand causes technical glitches and may inflict a huge damage to energy system.
…
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/western-balkans-see-boom-solar-energy-grids-unprepared-2023-04-20/
What a mess.
Luckily for EU energy consumers, some European governments have reportedly found a face saving way to bust their own sanctions and import Russian gas – the gas is allegedly being laundered through third party nations. European importers and governments pretend they don’t know the gas they are importing was originally produced in Russia. The real losers in this alleged arrangement are European energy consumers, who are paying the cost of maintaining the gas supply fiction through their energy bills.
Refusing to do fracking to satisfy basically nihilist greens is the problem. The Green Blob can be assured to oppose any solution that can work, like nuclear or fracking for gas.
Pass the popcorn please!
At this point I can only echo the central point made by another poster a few threads ago: data centers generating profits and enhanced control mechanisms for billionaires will always get electricity. Everyone else, starting with the poorest, well…
I think it would be a good idea to require data centers to purchase power on the spot market. This would encourage them to cut consumption during peak demand periods.
Good thought.
Ha, ha, ha! Do you actually think that Tech billionaires are going to allow their political and bureaucrat lackeys to short or increase the costs of their energy supplies? Ideology stops at the bottom line.
Is “talk to the hand” still a thing?
Data centers are critical infrastructure. Shutting down a data center does more than stop somebody’s Netflix streaming.
If you hope to use your credit card, you had better hope that the data center that your card issuer uses is up and running.
If you keep some of your data on the cloud, and want to access any of it, you better hope that the data center that houses your cloud, is up and running.
The use of data centers is pretty much ubiquitous throughout the economy.
The company that I work for has a responsibility to be available 24/7, throughout the year. We have two data centers. Our primary center and a fail over center in case anything happens to the primary. For extra security, the two centers aren’t in the same region of the country.
I just don’t get the hostility so many have towards data centers.
The hostility is based on the ever increasing demands of AI, which has dubious value in my opinion – and crypto mining none whatsoever.. The original comment was, however, not so much based on the idea that data centers shouldn’t get energy, but rather that the rest of us should also.
Yes.
But it is not just data centers. Steel, aluminum, glass, silicon, & cement producers require huge amounts of energy, which much of the time can not be interupted without disastrous consequences for the plant.
Vaclav Smil’s 4 pillars of civilization: ammonia, steel, cement & plastic
[“How the World Really Works” (2022)]
Or maybe just adds in your streaming and browsing will disappear 🙂
Theoretically my ISP is providing me with 500Mbs data speed. However, that is just tested from my house to the local Data server. When ever I log on to Wattsupwiththat it takes over 10 seconds to get the first page to show up and another 10 to 20 to completely load the article I want to read. Same snail pace on each of the other main page links. Older pages take much longer. Have no Idea where WUWT is but I am very near the center of Continental US. I can remember when pages loaded with a snaping, almost clicking, sound.
Data Centers without continuous power would not be much good as data centers.
I hate to be the party pooper here, but cloud operators like Amazon already have a pricing tier that does exactly what you propose. Lets say that you have some serious resource hungry operations to do that are not critical to do immediately or at a particular time. Then you would register for a type of operation to trigger when the compute price is within a certain range.
They already do computational auctions similar to how RTOs do their 15 minute auctions for electricity generators for the spot market.
I know of some folks who buy their electricity in the hundreds of megawatts range to run their crypto mining operations. They switch over to the type of crypto based on whichever is paying the best at the time.
The point being, this mechanism is already in place. The bad part is there is a large slice of the pie that is inelastic to time-shifting or resource price hunting. Do you really want to run your weather forecasts or process an eCommerce shopping cart only when the wind is spinning in the nearest Availability Zone within a cloud?
Speaking of AZs, its usually good architecture to spread the processing between regions in the event bad things happen in one particular region, the other can pick up. Of course there are costs in data consistency between regions and the cost of sending bits over fiber to chase the sun (in terms of solar energy souring the data warehouse) Running a lot of replication servers just to be available during minimum demands in a particular region means that more and more servers are required to sit around waiting for the wind and sun to be Just Right in order to pick up a load. Its the equivalent of having a nat gas plant spinning without generating anywhere near nameplate just to be available to back up a drop of wind or a passing cloud.
You are asking for a lot of waste.
Only quibble is that “weather forecasts” in the UK are rarely worth a fiddler’s fart, anyway.
Data centres will ensure there is adequate battery capacity nearby. They might even invest in it themselves. What they have to pay for power ultimately gets onto your bills one way or another.
If there is a wide grid outage then data demand will fall: the main requirement is a graceful shutdown until power is restored. There have already been a good number of instances of data centres going offline, either for power or cyber attack reasons, leaving bank customers and others in the lurch. That is not new.
Oddly enough, this may save the day. Data centres cannot be supplied reliably by the national grids, which is why they are seriously looking at building their own small nuclear power plants: They have the capital to do this without subsidies and it will save them huge electricity bills. And they can make money by throttling back their CPUS and exporting electricity in times of shortage.
Other major industrial consumers of power and/or heat and even hydrogen for a replacement of coal, for smelting etc, may also follow on.
We consumers do not have the power to swing government policy. But huge industrial companies do.
Interesting times.
The only good outcome in sight is that the idiots that voted for this dysfunction might die first from lack of air conditioning…..sort of modern Darwinism. Wait for it.
Western Balkan nations are seeing a boom in solar energy investment, which could help ease a power crisis
So in the Heat Wave, looking to get those houses A/C’ed before the sun goes down and solar doesn’t work anymore.
Just the beginning, more to come. I wonder how long it will take before people notice so called “renewable energy” is anything but and their lifestyle is sinking to promote an ideology that is against human development and growth? The sad part is the Marxist media will blame this on “Climate Change” instead of poor planning.
This is more capitalists hoping to make $trillions in profit from the energy “transition.” They own the media and control the politicians with their campaign contributions.
Crony capitalism isn’t capitalism.
Correct, it’s insider trading.
It’s a form of government control of the economy, which is pure socialism.
Its called ‘state capture in Africa. Public money ends up in private hands.
It is in fact a serious problem in society: Those with money influence the governments to pass laws, favouring or mandating and/or subsidising their specific products, irrespective of their actual utility. Or it may extend further to the awarding of state contracts directly to such interests.
The more liberal the government ostensibly is the more it will justify bypassing the free markets to ensure ‘fairness’ or social benefit as excuses to gouge enormous taxes from the individual to spend on political projects that mysteriously benefit certain groups.
It is a fact of life, like sexually transmitted diseases. Just harder to eradicate.
Having money does not make one a capitalist, no matter how many times the socialists repeat that mantra.
They will also proclaim that any failure of government “planning” is proof that capitalism doesn’t work and only more socialism can save us.
Just stop it. The proper term is FREE ENTEPRISE. Capitalism only goes with CRONY before it.
Free enterprise creates wealth.
Crony capitalism is the politicians and their CRONIES picking winners and losers. ANd ratepayers and/or taxpayers are ALWAYS the losers with crony capitalism.
Just look at the report on rural broadband internet. The Brandon Administration has apparently spent 40 BILLION US dollars and provided NO broadband to anyone. That sum COULD have provided 130 MILLION Starlink systems BUT Musk bought Twitter so his Starlink system.
I use at our remote mountain cabin, was declared NOT to be broadband “enough”. I get 150+ down and 20+ up consistently with 20 to 30 latency. What rural school kid needs more than that. Only gamers can ever have a problem with Starlink and the speed and latency just continue to improve with every Falcon Starlink delivery of another 22 or 23 satellites. 10 or more launches a month, 200 plus satellites a month, month after month.
About everything the Brandon administration has done IS crony capitalism.
Hopefully the TRUMP! administration will go after every bureaucrat involved in that 40 billion boondoggle.
Capitalism is the ability of anyone with some amount of wealth beyond basic needs to participate in business by purchasing stock in publicly traded companies. It might be abused by political processes in some cases but those go outside the actual processes of capitalism.
It is often worthwhile noting that Capitalism is marxist language.
And by the way, many people including Burke warned of ‘crony’ accumulation of wealth. It is a quite natural process whereby power accumulates power.
For states or supra orgs (like the UN/EU) this has resulted in an accelerating mission creep in which more power is taken with ever more centralized control mechanisms. The people on the top seem to dream of Chinalike systems. This is an overall authoritarianism and a threat to individual freedom. By making private property a ‘flexible’ concept its a small step for states to seize assets. It seems to me that step by step individual rights are being abandoned and replaced by command and comply rules. Unless you have real wealth and power. You are in that case quite a bit more ‘equal’ than others, to put it mildly..
They will blame it on both climate change AND poor planning. That the government hasnt done enough green energy implementation and that the grid operators havent put in enough infrastructure.
In other words: nothing to do with green policies. Your blackouts will get the appropriate blame. The saying goes as usual:’ mistakes were made but not by us’.
What a mess. Get the government out of the energy business.
Yeah, I trust business to look out for peoples’ needs and wants a hell of a lot more than I trust politicians and bureaucrats. Business makes their income directly from you, while politicians and bureaucrats make their income from their crony capitalist donors and captured industries.
Business has it’s problems also but the thing is they are accountable to their customers, their stockholders and yes even the government. The government is accountable to no one, that’s a big big problem.
And while they’re at it, they should get the energy out of government.
Perhaps in some parts of our planet, government has some energy – Argentina under Milei, perhaps.
Here in the UK, there has been a succession of decisions deferred [called’kicking the can down the road’ in Civil Service technicalese], and modest signs of polies trying to position themselves for their benefit, but no sign of energy at making the ‘Rolls Royce’ of a Civil Service that we – we are assured – have and pay for one whit more efficient.
Sadly.
Auto
“investors have started to invest “quite furiously” in solar plants”
Due to tremendous profits thanks to huge EU subsidies?
Here’s what Bloomberg, one on the largest financial firms it advising.
$200 Trillion Is Needed to Stop Global Warming. That’s a Bargain.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-05/-200-trillion-is-needed-to-stop-global-warming-that-s-a-bargain
With 2 billion households in the world and 90 percent of them unable to afford anything additional it works out to about $US1 million per household in the developed world in extra taxes and higher electric bills.
Investors Call for Policy Unleashing $275 Trillion for Net Zero
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-21/investors-call-for-policy-unleashing-275-trillion-for-net-zero
That’s about $US1.4 million per household.
The majority of households are in India and China. They have already adopted a coal based electricity strategy.
And Bloomberg is wrong on the figure because there is no transition. It is simply a shift in where the coal is being consumed. For example, Australia is making inroads into its transition through exporting coal, iron ore, copper concentrate, bauxite and a myriad of other minded resources to China to be converted to solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, transmission lines, transformers, power electronics, synchronous condensers, to name a few of the transition goodies, that Australia imports to keep its transition going.
What the numpties in investment houses like Bloomberg are yet to realise is that there is more coal consumed in making the transition goodies than they can offset during their limited life in operation. The miners caught on to this almost a decade ago and became strong supporters of the transition. The transition is shifting wealth to real miners as well as the subsidy miners.
“Luckily for EU energy consumers, some European governments have reportedly found a face saving way to bust their own sanctions and import Russian gas”
Terrible idea. I guess you don’t mind the fact that Russia has murdered tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and wasted much of that nation’s infrastructure.
The EU and the US are funding both sides of Putin’s war on Ukraine with their failing green policies.
Yes, ‘our greatest ally’, currently running Ukraine, was killing thousands of Russians living in Ukraine, so that horrible Putin stepped in and said ‘enough’. Plus he ran the rich oligarchs out back to their land of milk and honey. Putin is no saint, but he has a lot of like company on the other side of the battlefield.
I’m just glad the USA isn’t sending $10’s of billions to any country killing tens of thousands of women and children. I think that would be a bad thing.
grifting and mass murder…. oy vey!
And in the midst of it all innocent pawns will die of heat stroke and such while the rulers and grifters rub their hands together.
Did Putin tell you to believe that?
Hitler claimed that the Germans in the Sudetenland, an ethic German territory attached by the victors of WW I to the entirely artificial country of Czechoslovakia, were being oppressed by the Czechs. We all “know” he was lying. After the war, all German ethnics (3 million) were kicked out. They had lived there for hundreds of years.
So, just because Putin says it does not mean it is not true.
BTW, as soon as the Soviet boot was removed from Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia peacefully broke up, underscoring the totally artificial nature of that state.
There’s nothing natural about any state- it’s all about power- which comes and goes.
Hi Joel, I was born in Czechoslovakia and in time of splitting I had 16 years. I was against it, I liked my country as it was, but Czechoslovakia was split without referendum, most of people were against it and it was conducted purely politically.
About artificiality of Czechoslovakia, just check here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moravia
Great Moravia was state in 9th century and covered area of Czechia, Slovakia, parts of Hungary, Germany, Austria and Poland.
It was preceded by Samo’s Empire from year 630.
Great Moravia fell after invasion of hungarian hordes from Ural to Europe.
Thank you for the information.
Going back centuries to justify or explain a contemporary situation is a very European thing. History really doesn’t start in America until about 1600. Even then, nothing important really happened until 1776.
As an aside, I just came across this…
Was thinking.. how is this that much different from the US. 😉
It is a bogus argument by the CIA because Russia has been authoritarian for CENTURIES thus unsurprising it is that way today.
It is true of all regimes, It is the extent to which the state oppresses the individual that is the difference.
Although in the case of the US its growth isn’t based entirely on commodity. It does a lot of value-add, as does china
Hi Leo.
Are you working on integrating Gridwatch with the new Elexon API for BMRS data? The old BMReports system was switched off at the end of May, as I suspect you know.
America’s is slightly more subtle. 🙂
The Russian’s murder their opponents.
The mere thought that Putin who has himself already killed in excess of half a million ethnic Russians in this war, stepping in to say ‘enough’ when a few Russian agents beat up a few ethnic Russians in the Donbas is laughable.
No one in their right minds can have any doubt that the only Russian Putin cares about is Vladimir Putin.
As far as cleaning corruption out of Ukraine goes, well the Ukrainians don’t need Russia’s help in that.
“As far as cleaning corruption out of Ukraine goes”
Just send Hunter Biden and his cronies back to the US. !
Putin wants one thing- to be memorialized like Peter the Great. He gave a talk about Pete a few years ago. But, “you can’t always get what you want”. 🙂
“Ukraine, was killing thousands of Russians living in Ukraine”
Bullshit- first of all, they were/are Ukrainians, not Russians. This is the Russian myth and talking points- needed by Putler so he could begin the rebuilding of the Soviet Empire. The West has spent countless trillions since WWII to keep the Russian Empire in check. It’s now run by revanchists who want their empire back. If they get it back, the West will be in real trouble. Russia can live without an empire, just like France, Italy, Germany and others can live without their empires. In the late ’90s Putler said the worst thing to happen in the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
“Yes, ‘our greatest ally’, currently running Ukraine, was killing thousands of Russians living in Ukraine, so that horrible Putin stepped in and said ‘enough’. Plus he ran the rich oligarchs out back to their land of milk and honey. Putin is no saint, but he has a lot of like company on the other side of the battlefield.”
The truth is Putin is not a saint, he’s a dictator with delusions of grandeur. He attacked Ukraine to expand his empire and steal lots of money from Ukrainians.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4064431-wagner-chief-says-russias-war-in-ukraine-intended-to-benefit-elites-accuses-moscow-of-lying/
Solution; use coal, natural gas and nukes. Be thankful you have them and stop worrying about climate change.
Most it not all the warming was caused by reducing smog that blocked sunlight and sulfur emissions that seed clouds which were stopping the suns rays from warming the Earth.
Pollution Paradox: How Cleaning Up Smog Drives Ocean Warming
New research indicates that the decline in smog particles from China’s air cleanups caused the recent extreme heat waves in the Pacific.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/aerosols-warming-climate-change
‘Cutting pollution from the shipping industry accidentally increased global warming, study suggests’
“A reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions may have caused “80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020.”
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/cutting-pollution-from-the-shipping-industry-accidentally-increased-global-warming-study-suggests
The articles don’t mention it but most countries have been reducing smog and sulfur emissions for decades.
Is pollution control the reason why temperatures increased from 1850 to 1970?
While it is possible that cleaner air has played a role in some of the warming since 1970, declaring that most if not all of the warming since then is caused by it, can’t be supported by the science.
And you can’t blame the 1910 to 1940 warming on reduced pollution, when the concept of air pollution wasn’t invented yet. It’s another red herring, and anyway it’s based on modelling.
From the USA SO2 data shown…
From 1980.. 174ppb to 1998… 89ppb (essentially halving the SO2 concentration)
UAH USA48 shows no change in temperature.
SO2 dropped from 79ppb in 2005 to 24ppb in 2015..
so to less than 1/3.
According to USCRN, there was no change in US temperature over that period.
And since 2020, the globe was cooling up until the 2023 El Nino.
Only a station by station examination could untangle what actually is happening. I have never seen any presentation that isn’t just a mixing and averaging over all the stations. Depending on how that is analyzed the trend line goes either up, down, or almost level.
UAH doesn’t use stations.
It also shows no warming over the US from 2005-2015.
USCRN stations are well spaced and mostly stable.
Story tip
US Olympic and other teams will bring their own AC units to Paris, undercutting environmental plan
https://apnews.com/article/olympics-air-conditioning-paris-0f753df91956f3fe61ad4febaff0ebb9
Dutch weigh TenneT Germany sale options after Berlin bails on grid purchase
The Dutch government said on Thursday it would try to find another buyer or seek an IPO for the German arm of its state-owned electric grid company, after a sale to the German government foundered on Berlin’s budget strains.
Story Tip
Story tip
France’s Orano loses operating licence at major uranium mine in Niger
Niger has removed the mining permit of French nuclear fuel producer Orano at one of the world’s biggest uranium mines, the company said Thursday, highlighting tensions between France and the African country’s ruling junta.
Australia has plenty of uranium.
Just trying something… Darn… Different graphics format didn’t work.
Mods… delete this post if you like.
The Russians and Chinese are angling to be the new customers and owners.
This is interesting phrasing. You only make statements like that when ending coal is the only point, not just the main point.
Its a more diplomatic way to say “You ought to be damned thankful that we spent crazy money to build solar farms so that you rubes and hicks can charge your mobile phones.”
“A major power outage has hit the Western Balkans as the region swelters in an early heat wave that has sent temperatures soaring to up to 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit“
I have a hunch this is not the first time the temperature got this high. Is it so hard to imagine what people did before electricity and ice were invented. I was about 15 when we got our first window AC.
Eric opened with “… the infrastructure is not prepared for new energy feeds …”
This is a point not to be missed.
Lies have costly consequences.
There’s not a lot of attempt to hide imports of Russian gas into the EU. The pipeline flows are revealed by the ENTSO-G data. Here’s the overall flow ex Russia via various routes
https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiYjQxZmM3YzUtZmM4Zi00ZGQzLTliY2QtNjhhMWJkOTFjNTFjIiwidCI6IjgxMDU4NGZkLTY5ZjktNDEzNy1hNmExLWMwZTMzMjgwYjE1YyIsImMiOjh9&pageName=ReportSection4a7a2f13419ca575a9c7%22&pageName=ReportSectionf117829800c285ca9346
You can explore the different routes. Overall flows are stable at a quarter of what they were before the Russians started restricting supply.
Here’s an LNG delivery docking at Zeebrugge just a couple of days ago.
Not mincing words for Oz-
AEMO needs a ‘complete restructuring’ and must be brought back into the ‘real world’ (msn.com)
story tip