What does the April 2025 Spanish power failure tell us about how we compare solar and wind to stable fossil fuel and nuclear power generation?
By Andy May
Global energy demand and consumption rose 2.2% in 2024 to a record high according to the 2025 IEA Global Energy Review released in March 2025. Growth in fossil fuel consumption accounted for 54% of the growing demand and growth in renewables and nuclear power accounted for the remainder. Most of the consumption growth was in emerging nations. The total energy supply for 2022-2024 is given in Table 1.
In 2024 fossil fuels supplied 80% of the energy used and over half the increase in energy consumption since 2023. The supply of both renewable energy and nuclear power went up in 2024, just not enough to cover the increase in energy consumption.
In figure 1 we show the Ourworldindata presentation of “primary energy” consumption or supply for the world computed using their “substitution” method. As they explain (Ritchie & Rosado, 2021), primary energy is what a source can produce and while nearly all the energy produced by solar or wind is delivered and used due to government mandates (also see here), some of the energy produced by fossil fuels is wasted as heat expelled through a smokestack or tail pipe. Taking this waste heat into account, coal electric plants have an average efficiency of 32%. So, in figure 1, the nuclear, solar, and wind values have been divided by an assumed efficiency factor that changes with time to account for increases in efficiency with newer technology. In 2023, the factor was about 0.4. This factor more than doubles the energy actually produced by solar, nuclear, and wind.
Nuclear energy is reported as delivered electricity, so its waste heat is not counted in the delivered data. While correcting wind and solar energy because they produce no waste heat is logical, it is also logical to reduce wind and solar energy production to take into account the following issues:
- Wind and solar need backup for windless and cloudy days (dunkelflaute).
- Wind and solar have no inertia, destabilizing the grid.
- Wind and solar are more heavily subsidized than fossil fuels.
- The grid must be modified to account for wind and solar.
Hanna Ritchie provides another article on primary, secondary, final and useful energy here. The article is interesting, but does not address the elephant in room, the need or the cost of backing up solar and wind energy for downtime or the grid modifications required to account for the solar and wind electricity.
Discussion of the four issues
Many of the issues ignored by Hanna Ritchie and Pablo Rosado at Ourworldindata were dramatically demonstrated in Spain on Monday April 28. All four issues listed above affect the cost of solar and wind power generation in Spain and/or contributed to the Spanish grid failure. Item #3, subsides to wind and solar, are outrageously expensive as explained by IER. This raises consumer costs by a factor of 4 or more and encourages more solar and wind power to be produced, further destabilizing the grid.
All electric grids distribute electricity of a certain frequency, usually 60 Hz in the U.S. and 50 Hz in Europe. With regard to items #2 and #4, all inputs to the grid must feed their power at a matching frequency or very, very close to it (±0.5 Hz) or the grid can fail. Failures of equipment or natural disasters occur at times and solar and wind installations have little or no inertia to smooth out the failures and allow time to react to it. Russ Schussler examines this issue in more detail here. Coal and natural gas plants have heavy moving parts that supply inertia, so they fail more slowly and provide reaction time.
Batteries can store energy and provide some stability for a short time to wind and solar powered grids, but they are very expensive and can only stabilize a grid for a few seconds or minutes. For more stability the presence of gas, coal, or nuclear power is required. More importantly, the gas, coal, and nuclear facilities must act as a spinning reserve, that is they must always be idling, even when not providing power, thus they are using fuel even when not supplying electricity. The cost of batteries and spinning reserve to prevent grid failure is not included in Ritchie and Rosado’s substitution method.
So, fossil fuel generation is required for long-term grid stability. It is also required for backup (Item #1) on windless and cloudy days or windless nights. There are often long windless periods (dunkelflauten in German, aka anticyclonic gloom) with associated heavy clouds and fog. These events occur in Europe every year and pose a serious risk to grid stability (Li, Basu, Watson, & Russchenberg, 2021). Due to the length of dunkelflauten events battery backup is not adequate.
What happened in Spain?
At 12:33PM on Monday April 28 the Spanish power grid catastrophically failed, losing 15 gigawatts of power in about five seconds. This was around 60% of national demand. It took until 5:00AM on Tuesday for 92% of the power to be restored. The power failure paralyzed train systems and may have caused as many as seven deaths. The economic toll of the blackout is estimated to be 1.6 billion euros.
Hours before the collapse there were fluctuations in the voltage delivered to households, some of the fluctuations were up to 15 volts in less than two seconds. This was a sign that the grid was in trouble. Since power grids must keep usage balanced with power generation, they are very sensitive to disruptions, whether human-caused, equipment failures, or natural events. The more solar and wind on the system, the smaller the system inertia, and the more sensitive the grid is too disruptive events. As Russ Schussler reminds us, a similar problem in 2021 did not end catastrophically because the grid inertia was higher then.
It is a bit premature to blame the power failure on solar and wind power generation, but it is not too early to say that Spain’s over reliance on solar and wind contributed to the failure. Ali Mehrizi-Sani, Virginia Tech professor and director of the Power and Energy Center, writes:
“Renewables introduce a new paradigm in electric power generation—they generate power without needing large rotating masses. This means that with more renewables, the inertia of the power grid is reduced. Less inertia can make the grid more agile but also more fragile during sudden disturbances.” (Ali Mehrizi-Sani)
At 12:30PM, a few minutes before the failure about 69% of Spain’s electricity was being produced using solar and wind, the nuclear plants were operating at about half their usual capacity, and the spot electricity price was negative since Spain was exporting its excess to Morocco, Portugal, and France. In addition, excess electricity was being used to pump water into high elevation reservoirs to store energy (León, 2025).
As noted above voltage fluctuations were occurring within the grid, in addition France’s grid took note of problems in the electricity feed from Spain and cutoff imports. The nuclear powerplants within the Spanish grid detected unusual surges in the grid which caused them to shut down. At the same time solar input to the grid dropped from 18,000 MW to 8,000 MW in just a few seconds, usually a drop in solar would be compensated for by an increase in hydropower, but the drop was too much for hydropower to make up.
We noted earlier that the frequency of the power in the grid must be maintained very close to 50 Hz, unfortunately solar cannot be used to compensate for frequency variations since it is fixed at exactly 50 Hz. So, when there are significant frequency variations, solar will sometimes take itself off the grid.
Thus, nuclear was shut down due to serious fluctuations in the grid, solar failed, and the hydroelectric capacity was insufficient to take up the slack. No provision for natural gas backup was available and total collapse was the result.
According to J. Guillermo Sánchez León:
“Solar energy during the sunniest hours distorts all offers (at price or negative), making more stable sources economically unviable unless they have a guaranteed price, and discouraging their production. The question is therefore not one of renewables versus nuclear, but rather how much solar power can be in the grid at any given moment while also maintaining stability.”
What Dr. León makes clear is that subsidizing solar (and wind) causes two significant problems. It costs taxpayer money and discourages more stable sources, like natural gas and nuclear power. In other words, we are not only wasting taxpayer money we are also using that money to destabilize the grid.
I will be very interested in seeing the final report on the Spanish grid failure. I hope they don’t focus only on the proximate cause, as in what switch (or other component) failure initiated the problem and look at the bigger picture. I often complain when the cause of a catastrophic forest fire is identified as a single person throwing a match. That may have started the fire, but the reason it was catastrophic may be the lack of fire roads, forest management, and proper fire breaks.
I will also be very interested to see if Hanna Ritchie and Pablo Rosado revise their substitution method to account for the weaknesses in solar and wind generation.
Works Cited
León, J. G. (2025). The Conversation Spain. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/spain-portugal-blackouts-what-actually-happened-and-what-can-iberia-and-europe-learn-from-it-255666
Li, B., Basu, S., Watson, S. J., & Russchenberg, H. W. (2021). A Brief Climatology of Dunkelflaute Events over and Surrounding the North and Baltic Sea Areas. Energies, 14(20). doi:10.3390/en14206508
Ritchie, H., & Rosado, P. (2021). What’s the difference between direct and substituted primary energy? Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method
It showed that one does not need still air and freezing rain to crash a grid with too many “renewables”, like Texas.
I would much rather have a system that’s 32% efficient but available 100% of the time than a system that’s totally efficient but only available only 32% of the time requiring both massive over build and expensive storage to make that efficiently produced energy available when required!
I agree.
I wonder how they will feed the 1.6 billion euros into the cost per kWhr.
I hate this argument. I have worked at plants burning all energy sources for over 45 years. How about we compare the efficiency of solar? It only converts 18% of the sunlight to electric. At what cost per kWH? How about wind? What % of the energy in the wind is captured? Even smaller? At what cost?
Yes, coal only collects 32%, some plants are higher. But coal can produce electricity for about $.004/kWH. What is Germany paying for their’s? $0.04/kWH? 10 times more expensive when it is available!!!!
Correction: $0.04 / kWH for coal, $0.4 / kWH for Germany. Too much emotion first time.
Yup. Safe, clean, reliable nuclear is pushed aside for safe, clean and unreliable solar and wind. We’re all living inside a failed experiment. Time to move on.
FTFY 🙂
Safe? Clean?
Unsafe
7 died in the Spain blackout. 1.6 billion euros of economic loss and damage.
WTG are 100+ feet tall. Installation, maintenance, and repair are far from safe, especially at sea.
Unclean
Look and mining in Indonesia and Congo and tell me again it is clean.
I am awaiting a new disaster movie along the lines of Sharknado and its kin.
Solarnado. Tornados rip through solar farms then shred everything in its path with shards of broken glass and the occasional spear of a broken support frame. Maybe I could get royalties on the concept?
It’s already happened, in Puerto Rico:
Puerto Rican Solar Farms Heavily Damaged By Hurricane Maria
Look at the fact that in reality we cannot recycle them and they are just stored and when broken seeping their crap into the ground and drinking water, it is not only the resources mined but also the waste after.
But The experiment was predicted to fail beforehand as I’ve been reading here for years.
Now that it has failed while in full operation in Spain, will someone step up and say “oops” or will they double down and try some more?
True believers are the only ones who do that. Be careful of those who cannot learn hard lessons when their beliefs fail. Remember, there are plenty of politicians who think communism and socialism will work this time, because we are smarter now.
The eternal refrain of the Progressive Environmentalists, when faced with failures of their grand plans like the Spanish blackout is “We will do it right, the next time. All we need is more money, and more narratives supporting the plan, and more control of the deplorables who do not agree with our visions of the future. We will do it right, the next time.”
What is clean about solar? We van recycle solar panels on paper, but in reality, we just stack them en let al the crap that comes out of them seep into to the ground and drinking water.
Isn’t this the curse of the “mixed bag” of generation sources as they call it?
Why we need a mix of energy sources
Here’s why the low-carbon energy that will be produced at Hinkley Point C is vital to helping tackle climate change as part of our future energy mix. – EDF Energy
Well, they would say that…
“EDF secures further funding for Hinkley Point C in new settlement”
But things are on the turn, green jobs have turned out to be redundancies and the brothers are not impressed
“The boss of one Labour’s largest supporting unions has urged Sir Keir Starmer to ignore the “false prophets of climate fundamentalism” and rethink the current net-zero timetable.
Writing in the Times, GMB General Secretary Gary Smith warned the government’s pledge to transition to clean power by 2030 could lead to blackouts akin to those in Spain and Portugal last week.
Smith also said banning future North Sea exploration licenses would “accelerate the decline of domestic oil and gas production and increase our dependency on gas imports.”
Unions have become increasingly critical of environmental policy that is not followed up by significant investment to guarantee jobs.”
https://www.cityam.com/ed-milibands-net-zero-plans-risk-causing-blackouts-says-union-boss/
There may be trouble ahead…
EDF and the other nuclear protagonists have to thread a narrow course through the maze of public opinion and political graft.
Currently the message is ‘Renewables are great but we need nuclear too’. How long before they can say ‘nuclear is great and it doesn’t need renewables at all’ is moot.
We noted earlier that the frequency of the power in the grid must be maintained very close to 50 Hz, unfortunately solar cannot be used to compensate for frequency variations since it is fixed at exactly 50 Hz.
______________________________________
Why is that? Electric pianos can be tuned to any note on the scale or in the cracks.*
*musicians can pipe up and tell me I’m full of crap.
As to the pianos, it is possible, but generally not easy or commonly done.
As to the grid, the frequency variation itself would not be a problem if all generating units drifted in sync. The problem is that once drift occurs all of the units are fighting each other electrically as they are set to run on the standard. The prime movers will be throttling up and down to try to get the rotation and frequency back to standard. The more units, connected, the worse the problem. These actions are too rapid and overwhelm the controls.
Out of phase is worse than a short circuit and is a fault condition which trips circuit breakers to prevent catastrophic damage.
That is so muddled it is not even wrong.
All the sources on the grid are synchronized. Some can supply extra power when the frequency drops. some cannot. The ones that cannot are therefor unable to stabilise the grid frequency
That is so muddled is not even wrong.
Yup.
Electric pianos can be tuned to any note on the scale or in the cracks.*
*musicians can pipe up
Why would you want to deviate from the well tempered keyboard (Clavier)? That makes no sense. Did you have a pitch wheel in mind?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_wheel
My son is gifted with perfect pitch. Some deviates from the standard and he just can work with it.
The statement is false. See my earlier post
I have turned pianos. As long as it takes to tune just one key would result in the Spain blackout.
Anything can be tuned, of course. That is not the point.
And the issue on the grid is not merely the frequency, it is also the phase and sometimes amplitude.
The issue with wind and solar on the grid is that there isn’t much effort put into having those sources vary their output to follow demand. With legacy generation, the governors were set to vary output with frequency, increasing output when frequency dropped and decreasing output when frequency rose. The enabled load sharing between generators and allowed for spinning reserve.
Also note that the frequency/power strategy also works with the transmission lines, where a slight drop in local frequency would cause more power to flow into the local area from other areas.
You can’t play the piano while it is being tuned.
Too many times the convenience of “good enough” results in putting band aides on the symptoms and ignoring the root cause.
Too many time failure investigations identify the triggers and name them as the root cause. Triggers and root causes are very rarely the same and I can not name one time it was true.
I don’t understand this part of the quote from Ali Mehrizi-Sani:
In terms of voltage and frequency you don’t want an agile grid; you want a stable one. You want agility when adjusting supply to meet instantaneous demand so as to maintain constant frequency and voltage. Greater inertia gives you more time to make those adjustments. In the case of major disturbances you need a lot of inertia and ways to either shed load or add supply very quickly.
In the case of the Spanish blackout, the disturbance exceeded both grid inertia and available hydro capacity.
The key question is what caused the voltage fluctuations up to several hours before the failure; that is what apparently caused the shutdown of the French interconnect and the disconnection of the nuclear plants.
I agree, and I don’t know the answer. Hopefully, the report will tell us when it is out. The voltage fluctuations were severe.
Were I to hazard a guess, it would be overcompensating inverters. Out of phase causes voltage fluctuations. I could be wrong and probably am.
Hopefully the report will be transparent, comprehensive, and politically neutral.
I have given up trying to explain it because few actually want to try and understand. You could always try reading from a source that might know about it
https://arena.gov.au/blog/how-can-we-tame-transmission-network-oscillations/
The key point
>>> These new oscillations arise from control interactions between inverter-based resources and the system. <<<
You can’t treat it like a traditional problem as a traditional grid doesn’t behave like this. That is why there is lots of research on it and indirectly how I got involved.
The likely answer is going to probably be something along the lines of create a timing signal either along the powerlines or connected via internet. Each inverter then has a signal to sync against importantly not on the load itself. The problem comes you need to work out fail safes what if the sync pulse is miles out from what the inverter is seeing, then what does it do. Then you have the problem what is the best way to deliver the timing pulse GPS, internet or modem signal on the cable. So the long answer is there is still lots to be worked thru on how this would work in practice.
The thing we know is these oscillations will cause a grid to destabilize it is the electrical equivalent of mechanical vibration that damage mechanical things.
Maybe not an internet sync signal. Latency can vary by many milliseconds over a distance. A radio signal might be better.
It’s not really the internet as such it’s the power utilities LAN and we are talking about special node devices that have an advanced version of an NTP that work out jitter.
It’s hard to take this down to a level so most would understand, what is inherently a complicated hardware implementation. Then beyond that you need to create a standard for inverter supplies to build to, like was done for grid operator to stop feed in from an approved inverter.
I’m so delighted to see that ‘traditional biomass’. (Lefty polite for this Indian granny making chuppatties out of cowdung for the fire) is now only double the energy produced by world wind. Used to be triple.
Don’t forget Drax burning CO2 producing wood pellets from clearcut forests in the Southeastern U.S. – some how counted as ‘clean’ energy.
Drax uses wood waste such as slash (i.e., the limbs from the fallen trees) and logging debris to produce the pellets.
So-called “distributed” power sources (i.e. anything with a DC-AC inverter) are required by standards to disconnect themselves within a fraction of a cycle when they lose the AC line frequency. This is called anti-islanding.
True and it adds to grid instability.
True and if reports are correct, it is why the French disconnected and why 2 SV generators went cold.
“I hope they don’t focus only on the proximate cause, as in what switch (or other component) failure initiated the problem and look at the bigger picture.”
I suspect there was no component failure.
More likely, the “proximate cause” was a protective safety device, functioning as designed to protect the system from the potentially damaging fluctuations, which are the root cause.
These systems are well monitored, the chain of events recorded. It will be interesting to see the final report.
I agree, thanks.
Very similar to my earlier post on triggers and root causes.
I suspect it was due to the marginal stability of the grid that resulted from implementation, not a trigger/fault.
Story tip:
Yet another industrial wind turbine issue:
EXCLUSIVE: Britain Forced to Spend £1.5 Billion to Mitigate Wind Turbine Corruptions to Vital Air Defence Radar
Yet another unexpected, unintended consequence.
August 18, 2017
Three years in the making, the wind development at Spondon, Derby, has been given the green light to begin full operation. The project has involved the collaboration of East Midlands Airport, Severn Trent and Aveillant to successfully mitigate the impact of the wind development upon the Primary surveillance radar (PSR) at East Midlands Airport.
https://www.pagerpower.com/news/spondon-wind-turbines-become-operational-following-successful-mitigation/
The project was given planning permission in 2011 so 3 years is a bit of an understatement as East Midlands Airport objected from the beginning of the project before 2011.
These radar systems are no longer needed. The Russians have been beating up very badly by the Ukrainians.
I haven’t gotten to the Spain stuff yet because I have a real beef with the idea of grossing-up the output of renewables (Ritche & Rosado 2018), presumably to put them on an apples-to-apples basis with electricity generated from thermal sources.
I suspect most people here are fully aware that there are larger thermodynamic losses incurred in generating electricity from natural gas than, say, using the same fuel for purposes of home heating or cooking dinner. And while the 2nd LoT may be news to many of our technically challenged friends in the alarmo-sphere, I don’t see any valid reason to use that ignorance to buttress their quasi-religious belief in the ability of their beloved solar toys to power our world.
Besides, last time I looked, it was well known that solar panels only convert a small fraction of the Sun’s radiation to ‘useful’ electricity, with most of the rest being converted into a significant amount of ‘waste heat’. And while I don’t think that wind turbines produce meaningful amounts of heat, I’m fairly certain there’s still a substantial amount of kinetic energy on the lee side of every turbine.
And air flow disturbance that extends a long distance.
That aside, they do produce meaningful amounts of heat as shown by the needing to oil cool the bearings, etc.
Not only that, but if they comply with electronic laws like Jacobi’s Law, for maximum power transfer, source and load impedances are equal, meaning that the generating equipment must dissipate the same power as is delivered to the load. In other words, both source and load provide equal amounts of waste heat.
The situation is different if you want maximum efficiency, but I guess the operator has to balance maximum power with maximum efficiency.
The future will be interesting.
They also have internal heaters, if they operate in conditions where freezing can occur. In some areas they use helicopters to apply de-icing agents to the turbine blades if they accumulate ice, like airplane wings do. Helicopters use a LOT of fossil fuel to perform this function, and it is likely not included in establishing their “efficiency”. I also think that windmills have what are called “turning jacks” on ship propellers, to slowly rotate the blades then there is no wind. I don’t know how often this would be done, but it would be a parasitic load on the grid.
Story tip. It’s all Trump’s fault; apparently.
Trump blows a hole in Ed Miliband’s wind farm plan.
Government insiders blaming Donald Trump’s attack on green energy.
https://apple.news/Ag9EI97leQGOeZ8G6qpxM7Q
Are you guys importing American Democrats again? Otherwise I have no idea why somebody is blaming Trump.
Because A: it is easy and popular and B: you have at least a 50/50 chance of being right.
Er no. That is wrong.
The issue is actually that as grid frequency falls there is no energy stored in windm solar and interconnectors that help keep the grid frequency up.
Renewables will track the falling frequency – they are tied, not to 50Hz, but to whatever the grid frequency is.
But unlike conventional generation, with no inertial energy available, the frequency can drop very fast and very far. And renewables can do nothing except disconnect themselves, followed by nuclear and the rest.
Frequency fluctuation is the symptom, but the disease is insufficient short term energy reserves on the grid. That could be made up by adding batteries at huge expense, but it isn’t.
And the hugely touted huge battery backup in Australia is only to carry the grid in the event of a failure of stability for about 6 minutes I think, long enough to bring a gas turbine up. The frequency modulators at the battery plant can only work for a short period of time before complete disaster.
What about flywheels?
/sarc
Story tip: Money no object
Sun-Dimming Quango has £800 Million of Taxpayer Money to Blow – and a CEO on £450k
few people on the street know what it is, what it does, or how much taxpayer cash is flowing into its well-financed coffers.
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/08/sun-dimming-quango-has-800-million-of-taxpayer-money-to-blow-and-a-ceo-on-450k/
“Renewable”. “Reliable”.
There may come a day when those two words are synonymous.
But today is not that day.
Until that day comes, “Reliable” is the smart choice.
Another “smart choice” is to let a free market rather than any government decide when that day has come.
“In other words, we are not only wasting taxpayer money we are also using that money to destabilize the grid.”
=========
yes!!. The problem is wind and solar do not follow supply and demand. And balancing supply and demand is critical to grid stability. Even more important than inertia.
You’re cruising at 60 mph, inertia helping over bumps and wind gusts, but long-term speed needs balance—gas vs. friction. Then “Solar” hitchhikes, slams your foot on the gas, ignoring limits. You resist, but Solar keeps stomping, dancing to the radio—until you crash. The wreck? A car with plate: SPAIN.
Ever stomp on the gas and fishtail your car?
Same with slamming on the breaks, although that is easier to deal with the consequences.
Took the kids out to have them do that. Showed them what caused the fishtail and taught them how to recover control of the vehicle when it happened.
Good idea!
I am not an electrical engineer, so bear with me. Why is it so important that the net frequency is always kept constant? I guess that it is a substitute for making sure that all parts of the net are in balance. Do we have devices which tell us whether energy in a wire flows north or south? Such a device could help to isolate the troubled part of the grid.
The call for “high inertia” has all to do with a constant frequency – a synchronous generation. A windmill has a huge inertia – but a variable speed. Can we use electronics to convert an asynchronous generator to a synchronous one?
You want energy added to a grid to add to the power, not subtract. You want no waste. That is why the input frequency needs to be as closely matched to the grid frequency as possible. Severe damage can occur if they do not match closely enough. I don’t think that solar and wind (asynchronous) can adjust, as far as I know their frequency (after going through an inverter) is fixed.
CG, probably nobody can take the time to answer your question….its a bit like saying I’m not a sailor…do we have devices to steer boats ?…can we use electronics ?….
Very nice Andy. Wind and solar can’t exist without fossil fuel and nuclear. Fossil fuel and nuclear do not need wind and solar. Wind and solar interfere with the operation of fossil fuel and nuclear. Remove wind and solar from the grid. Free up fossil fuel and nuclear to do the job they do best.
Agree!
As Bob wrote in the first comment “Remove wind and solar from the grid. Free up fossil fuel and nuclear to do the job they do best.”
Subsidising and mandating wind and solar on the grid was arguably the worst public policy blunder of all time and it would not have happened if wind droughts had been taken into account. Apparently there has been a conspiracy of silence among meteorologists to keep quiet about wind droughts.
Similarly policy makers and planners who decided to bet the farm on wind and solar power never bothered to check the reliability of the wind supply.
Recognition of wind droughts, wind lulls, or Dunkelflautes, could have averted the debacle. Mariners and millers would have known about them for centuries, at least at the local level. https://www.flickerpower.com/images/The_endless_wind_drought_crippling_renewables___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf
Independent Australian investigators documented the impact of wind droughts on the electricity supply over a decade ago but nobody in officialdom took any notice, at home or abroad.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-late-discovery-of-wind-droughts
Dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, how come the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply to become aware of wind droughts?
https://open.substack.com/pub/rafechampion/p/we-have-to-talk-about-wind-droughts
Wind droughts become an existential threat to thousands or tens of thousands of people when the wind drought trap closes on a windless night during extreme weather conditions, coinciding with outages of conventional power.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/escaping-the-wind-drought-trap
From the words of non-technical green activists and financial people – “but the wind is always blowing, and the sun shining, someone on the globe, all the time, and when we average it all out, it works just fine”. The loud voices of the people who said these things are what drove the politicians, who are even less informed, to support wind and solar.
Did the Spanish grid failure cause any damage to household appliances such as refrigerators?
I didn’t see any mention of that in the news. In my experience that is rare, although before I got a full house surge protector, I blew out a capacitor in my air conditioner about every third power failure.
“The question is therefore not one of renewables versus nuclear, but rather how much solar power can be in the grid at any given moment while also maintaining stability.”
Does anyone else remember a study done in Germany about 25 years ago that concluded the maximum wind energy that could be safely attached to the system was about 3% of the generating capacity? Above that, it becomes unstable. Well, it did.
A similar situation exists in Spain. The culprit is solar and the % is different, but the stability provided by the spinning mass is now missing. The grid has to “be there” and be stable for these distributed sources to put power into that grid. If the phase of the AC power at the pole is mismatched by 1/100th of a second it disconnects. If a large motor is turned off the local grid receives a voltage spike, a spike in current, a slight shift in frequency and a possible disconnection of everything monitoring the phase shift relative to their devices. As German engineers said at the time, it can only work if it is small.