By Robert Bradley Jr.
“Could the reliability of the Iberian Peninsula grid be ensured by introducing new technical solutions? Technically, yes—but economically, the feasibility is more challenging.” ( – J.K. Nøland, below)
Jonas Kristiansen Nøland, associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has a verdict on the Iberian Peninsula blackout. His take follows:
Recent evidence indicates that Europe’s worst blackout, occurring in the Iberian Peninsula, originated from an unstable power grid. This instability likely triggered the cascading chain of events that followed.
In the half-hour leading up to the blackout, two episodes of power and frequency oscillations were observed in the Continental European synchronous area. Grid operators took actions to mitigate these oscillations.
The likely root cause of these undamped “inter-area oscillations” was the inherently low inertia of the Spanish power grid at midday, with approximately 70% of generation provided by inverter-based solar and wind. Such renewable sources lack the spinning reserve needed to effectively resist frequency oscillations.
Due to these unstable grid conditions, exceptionally high rates of change of frequency (RoCoF) occurred, which became the final nail in the coffin. As a result, low-frequency load shedding (UFLS) were not able kick in to save the day.
The critical tipping point came with the first generation loss at 12:32:57, involving roughly 2.2 GW, likely from solar PV generation in southwest Spain—a region dominated by solar power.
This generation loss, occurring under already unstable conditions (likely owing to overvoltages, which is the hypothesis of Luis Badesa) accelerated a rapid frequency collapse within the inertia-deficient system. Officials from Red Eléctrica (REE) noted a “strong oscillation” precisely at this point, leading to protective disconnections cascading across the grid due to high RoCoF.
Could the reliability of the Iberian Peninsula grid be ensured by introducing new technical solutions? Technically, yes—but economically, the feasibility is more challenging.
Notably, REE had already installed synchronous condensers and leveraged existing synchronous generation (nuclear, hydro, solar thermal) to bolster inertia and voltage stability. Unfortunately, these measures proved insufficient.
Nonetheless, deploying additional synchronous condensers or procuring fast frequency reserves (FFR) to provide virtual inertia through balancing markets significantly increases system costs.
Currently, FFR is typically procured only during short intervals of low inertia. Operating a consistently low-inertia grid would demand permanent, costly frequency support mechanisms, potentially making such a solution economically challenging.
Sources:
[1] 𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐒𝐎-𝐄 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐥: https://lnkd.in/dajvNZ3f
[2] 𝐞𝐥𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚.𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞: https://lnkd.in/dmRHp5Zz
[3] 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫-𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐚 𝐨𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬: https://lnkd.in/dCEVR549
[4] 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐚 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐠𝐫𝐢𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲: https://lnkd.in/d8YXEumZ
[5] 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞-𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐠𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐬: https://lnkd.in/ghMYqhsq
——————-
Also see:
Inertia in One Lesson (Dave Edwards on LinkedIn) May 6, 2025
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A cloud over a solar array?
Very lightly, I’ve seen our solar array drop 40% in a few mins & then recover just as quick.
Perhaps J.K.Rowling could extend some extra Wands to Spain and Portugal and the people could learn “Lumos”
No. It was cloudless, with the sun not far from its zenith for the day. There was simply too much solar for the level of demand, leading to power and voltage surges. With very little local inertia it’s possible the local frequency in the South started speeding up, which leads to reduced output above 50.2Hz due to protection settings, then reconnecting when the frequency drops back again. If the transmission lines get overloaded they trip out, which seems to be what happened. That leaves a gross excess of power on one side, causing tripout of generation that cascades to blackout, and gross shortage the other side, which leads to rapidly falling frequency and plant tripping out. At 49.1Hz the pumped storage pumping gets tripped out, removing a large chunk of inertia. Between 49 and 48Hz automated demand disconnection operates supposedly to cut demand in half over 6 trigger points. At 47.5Hz pretty much all generation us tripped, but probably tripped already by the high local RoCoF.
Here’s the frequency and RoCoF chart
There is a lot of “expert” talk about “inertia”, and “renewables”.
For example, a large rotating mass, such as the rotor in an alternator, has inertia, certainly. It is not magic that keeps a component rotating at a more or less fixed speed, of course. There is a control feedback mechanism, which needs a stable time source in order to physically change rotational speed which will tend drop under load, and tend to increase as load decreases.
For a renewable source feeding the grid, the AC it produces should synchronise with the grid frequency, within 1 percent. It’s quite easy to do, using a PLL locked to the grid frequency. If the grid has failed, and there is no AC with which to lock, there is no problem, is there? The renewable source senses this, and disconnects within milliseconds.
It shouldn’t really matter. Even a pretty ratty quartz controlled movement keeps time to far better than 1 percent, typically about 6 parts per million. So, a renewable input, initially locked to the grid, has no problem maintaining a steady frequency reference for quite some time – completely isolated from a “dead” grid.
When the grid is reenergised, this has to be slowly and carefully, bringing the various source online one at a time, synchronising as they are connected. Initial loads are extreme, as electric motors start from full stop against maximum loads, heating elements often consume greater current when cold, and so on. Small renewables should not pose a problem, as they automatically synchronise – their inverters reacting within milliseconds.
Larger renewable units or installations may well use highly accurate time signals – GPS, etc. If other parts of the grid use similar absolute time measurements, then synchronisation should be no trouble at all.
I would be graceful if someone with fairly high level experience could chip in, and be prepared to amicably correct me if I’m wrong, and amicably respond to questions I might have.
My speculation is that sometimes grid failures just occur, and even after intense examination, expert opinions vary.
So you’re saying that it’s Gremlins wot dun it?
I think it was the great Stephen King who wrote a horror fiction book about nasty critters who rode around on the power lines and ate them up as they went.
So cool story, Bro.
Bloody gremlins! I’m convinced that some machinery is demonic – grabs loose clothing, spits crap into your eyes as soon as your protective glasses slip, tries to amputate your fingers.
On the odd occasion, I have inadvertently ignored various physical and electrical laws – and have been punished by being punctured, whipped, beaten, scalded, electrocuted, and poisoned – my just desserts, no doubt.
Things fail, things go wrong. Even very smart people sometimes can’t agree on the reasons. Some times, gremlins (or an act of God) is as good an explanation as anything. IMHO, of course.
All insurance companies exclude compensation for losses incurred by Acts of God.
They, of course, won’t argue about divine intervention.
Yeah every layman can cure power grid sub synchronous oscillations just ask them. Same as they can remove all mechanical vibration and knocking out of every motor and moving machine. You really wonder why you need engineers at all when the average layman such as yourself can fix everything or at least tell everyone how easy it is to fix.
The explanation is in the article. The “first generation loss” is due to circuit breakers automatically taking 2.2 GW of unstable solar power offline to protect equipment from major damage. The system is engineered to do this.
This is not a grid failure.
This is a policy failure.
Blame the policy makers.
“The critical tipping point came with the first generation loss at 12:32:57…
This generation loss, occurring under already unstable conditions… accelerated a rapid frequency collapse within the inertia-deficient system, leading to protective disconnections cascading across the grid“
“It’s a feature, not a bug.”
I don’t think 2.2GW was the first loss. I think he’s missed something in translation. It was a cumulative loss. Look at the frequency trace: it accelerated downwards.
Good charts. Where are they found? Corresponding voltage & current?
Spanish Wikipedia. Don’t know how they sourced them other than a leak from Red Eléctrica of the data. Other data still hard to come by with government clampdown I suspect, though ENTSO-E will get access in due course under EU law.
The 2.2 GW may well be the first loss, but it seems likely it was not the trigger. From your graphs it is possible that the frequency instability (? marks the spot) is what triggered the 2.2 GW drop out.
So far we are hearing about triggers and symptoms and little about the root cause.
Sara Aagesen, the minister has told the Spanish Parliament that a loss of power generation at a substation in Granada, followed seconds later by further losses in Badajoz and Seville, totalling 2.2GW, followed by cascading transmission trips. Slightly misleading, in that there is no generation at the substations. Here’s her statement, delivered at pace:
https://dai.ly/x9jhw0u
The causes remain unrevealed, but Red Electrica put out a statement that there was nothing untoward on the transmission grid ahead of the substation trips, and pointed to problems on lower voltage grids and generators that they do not manage. Rather a contradiction of their earlier claim that there had been large power oscillations on the grid ahead of the event – and doubtless politically influenced. Badajoz is a rather vague location, as it is a whole province as well as a town that has no real grid significance: again, a lack of clarity. I’ve tried to guess the substation locations on the purple 400kV network in this map:
Grid stability depends on frequency changing to accommodate loads varying across the grid and to provide a mechanism for changes in load to be shared by multiple generators. If load in one city suddenly rises, the frequency will start to drop as generation can takes seconds to minutes to respond. The will cause the phase of the grid in the city to lag behind connecting cities, which then increases the power flow into the first city to take up the load. The dropping in frequency will cause the governors to increase power from their respective prime movers and thus put a limit on frequency drop.
Renewable generation should be operated in such a way that generation can vary power in response to a change in frequency – which means being able to increase output when the frequency drops. They also should be configured that a sudden change in windspeed or change in cloud cover creates a sudden change in site output.
You say, “which means being able to increase output when the frequency drops.” And how can renewables increase power when the frequency drops? Batteries. All this free energy is getting expensive.
“Procuring fast frequency reserves (FFR) to provide virtual inertia through balancing markets significantly increases system costs.
Currently, FFR is typically procured only during short intervals of low inertia. Operating a consistently low-inertia grid would demand permanent, costly frequency support mechanisms, potentially making such a solution economically challenging.”
Batteries are one way, the other is to curtail some of the output in normal operation so the site has the equivalent of spinning reserve. Conversely, output should be reduced when the frequency rises.
Batteries have a voltage turn on delay. All of them. As batteries age, that increases.
Batteries have self-discharge leakage (internal chemistry). Charge/discharge cycles age batteries. Batteries require a full periodic discharge recharge cycle to keep them good. Laptop batteries are notorious for dying do to leaving the computer on the AC adaptor all the time.
Therefore, not only do you have to provide the adequate capacity to do the pseudo inertia thing, you have to have fully redundant battery systems so if something happens to the grid during a deep discharge cycle, there is something there or the grid crashes.
The long and the short of this is, whatever you think is the cost of a battery system, you have to double it and add additional equipment to handle the handshaking and also the periodic maintenance, be it weekly or monthly or daily depending on the battery chemistry.
Those are really old and obsolete facts.
Batteries require full periodic discharge/recharge cycle to keep them good. That was true maybe for NiCd or NiMh chemistries.
Laptop batteries are notorious for dying due to leaving the computer on the AC adaptor all the time. This was true for li-ion technology, which doesn’t like to sit on 100%.and it is limiting their 500-900 cycle life. Practically all solar batteries now are using LiFePO4 technology which has cycle life 2000 – 8000 and they don’t mind to sit on 100% or 0%.
I am not finding much information confirming that LiFePO4 is in widespread standard use for grid batteries. One source indicates that they have been in use since 2024. They appear to have miraculous properties.
They have been and are promoted as the next miracle technology.
However, there are technical issues:
Limited energy density, higher cost, slower charging speed, lower discharge rate, and limited temperature range are some of the drawbacks of using LiFePO4 batteries.
There are more concerns, too:
https://outbax.com.au/blogs/post/lithium-basics-troubleshooting-your-lifepo4-battery
Energy density is at around 75% of li-ion. Absolutely no problem for stationary solar installations.
Higher cost, is not true anymore, I bought my LiFePO4 for 55Euros per kWh. Looking for li-ion high capacity prismatic cells, they are now around 2 times more pricey than LiFePO4.
Li-ion cells are containing much more costly metals like Cobalt, Nickel than LiFePO4, so LiFePO4 are naturally cheaper.
Slower charging speed? Usual rate of LiFePO4 cells is 0.5C to 1C. That is enough for 5kWh cells charge 2.5 or 5kW.
It is possible to buy better cells which are able to discharge 3C, that is 15kW from 5kWh battery.
And there are specialized ones LiFePO4 which are able to do 10C those are like for starter battery where you can get 5kW from 500Wh battery.
Lower charging rate is really not issue here.
Temperature range is practically same as for li-ion, 0C to 60C.
Although using li-ion at 60C is funny while they have thermal runaway temperature somewhere around 120-140C.
LiFePO4 have thermal runaway temperature around 250C.
LiFePO4 were not in use at Moss Landing CA, the worlds largest battery backup facility before it all burned up for days.
They are not miraculous, but they are good, better than li-ion for solar setup. I wrote here few times already, I built up my own solar system and built up my own LiFePO4 battery. I’m using it for already more than 3 years so I know things or two about this technology.
I have 15kWh LiFePO4 main battery, it is able to provide safely around 7.5-10kW of power, same for charging. It is enough for my household. I have two more smaller LiFePO4 batteries 2.5 + 2.5kW, which are able to provide additional 5kW of power and charging.
I have 20kWh total, this can provide me power for 1.5 days.
I don’t need to care if battery is at 0%, this is happening a lot during winter, or if it is at 100%, happening during summer.
My oldest cells have over 1000 cycles on them, most of them done in time when I had only 2.5kWh battery which was stressed by charging/discharging of 70A which was 1.4C for those cells.
My inverter is connected towards grid only as charger, charging my battery from grid if I’m low on energy.
I’m very satisfied with this setup, it is working for 3 years already.
I’m also building batteries for my electric scooter and I built LifePO4 battery, because I was annoyed by li-ion battery dying every 2-3 years. li-ion has 500-900 cycles, but in conditions in electric scooter, freezing, frying on the sun, high power discharge more like 250 cycles. This is 2-3 years with almost working day usage.
LiFePO4 have 2000-8000 cycles, so I guess in scooter they will last like 1000 cycles, what would be 8-12 years.
Yes they have smaller energy density against li-ion, like 75% of li-ion, but I really don’t care if I have 16km or 22km total range.
And they are not burning like li-ion, they are much more safe.
I found also another behavior of LiFePO4 against li-ion which I like. They have really flat voltage curve. When you are taking energy from them, they practically hold their 3.2V voltage for about 80% of their capacity.
So in my scooter, when I’m at 50% of li-ion cells are at 36V (30V is minimum and 42V maximum) and scooter is very sluggish then under 50%. With LiFePO4 you have same minimum and maximum, but 80% of energy you have at 38.4V. So with LiFePO4 you are riding 80% of time like with almost fully charged li-ion. No sluggishness.
I am not saying LiFePO4 chemistry is bad. That was not the point.
You are not designing a grid scale backup system, so your design parameters are different.
I said 2x. If it is in an area that gets below 40F for long stretches of time, then you need more capacity. If it gets below freezing, you need even more to run the heaters to keep the batteries from freezing.
Testing of various chemistries over the past 50 years has shown a capacity reduction of ~50% at 40F or below.
I have not studied LiFePO4 to the degree I have all of the others, dating back to carbon zinc cells. I am concerned about the phosphorus content and elemental phosphorus ignites in air.
Each of the chemistries are unique.LiFePO4 has not been deployed in sufficient numbers for a sufficient period of time to discover the unintended consequence.
Old and obsolete. Right. /s
Most lithium secondary cells/batteries sold today are lithium ion (a high percentage are lithium cobalt oxide) and lithium ion polymer organic (aka LIPO)..
Grid scale batteries are Lithium Ion secondary chemistries in present time.
Discharge recharge also applies to Lithium Ion secondary chemistries.
Even your preferred LiFEPO4 requires discharge/charge occasionally or when voltage/current anomalies occur.
Grid stability depends on frequency, phase, and voltage.
Intermittent energy sources should be operating in such a way that the grid is not recklessly endangered.
“My speculation is that sometimes grid failures just occur, and even after intense examination, expert opinions vary.”
Dude…stop smoking bad grenola..seriously.
signed
your’s truthfully a professional electrician
Varg, it’s “Granola” and “yours”.
I have peered into your mind, and see that your experience of designing, operating, and maintaining a national power grid is zero. Correct me if I’m wrong – mindreading is not an exact science.
I acknowledge that you might well be proficient at using a screwdriver and a pair of electrician’s pliers, not to say capable of pulling cables through holes. Good for you!
It might be best if you don’t boast too loudly about knowing the cause of the outage before the experts have conducted their enquiry – the police and anti-terrorism guys might be interested in finding out what you know, and how you know it.
The advice is free, and worth every cent.
“My speculation is that sometimes grid failures just occur, and even after intense examination, expert opinions vary.”
Having been part of failure investigations, I can attest that, sometimes “it” happens, and even after intense examination, expert opinions vary.
Spain is not one of those.
A random branch taking down a power line. Sure.
A random short blowing a substation transformer. Sure.
Excavation severing a line. Sure.
However, single faults are different that system failures. I have dealt with both.
Triggers are not symptoms. Symptoms are not root cause.
You don’t understand synchronous generation. The rotating generator moves in lockstep with the connected grid. If you were to cut the steam supply to the turbine, it would continue to rotate,taking power from the grid to do it. The inverter output from the aolar generation must also be in exact lockstep (no 1% here).
From Australia’s AEMO –
When you said –
you assume that other generators on the grid were unaffected by any “contingency event”. No, the loads on the grid are continuously varying, and it is not always easy to keep either frequency or voltage within normal limits.
For example, Australia’s NEM has frequency limits of 49.5 to 50.5 Hz. About 1%. It may take 60 seconds or so to bring frequency back to nominal after dropping through the 49.85 normal frequency point.
Others can choose between your unsupported fantasy, or grid operator documentation.
That’s a huge simplification. When a grid is well balanced the frequency of all generators will be closely matched, but in a geographically dispersed grid there will almost certainly be phase differences caused by reactive/inductive loads and transmission lines. That means that if a local imbalance occurs it can result in a locally different frequency. Think if it like your car suspension on a rough track. All four wheels are turning in unison, but get part airborne going over a bump and that is no longer true. The rear axle only hits the bump with a delay. The suspension may break on landing again.
Frequency discrepancies lead to large oscillations in power flows, which is why a generator that suffers a problem disconnects more or less as soon as the frequency discrepancy is detected. Same for differences across transmission lines, and hence how parts of the grid can become islanded at different frequencies.
Whenever I see a pointless and irrelevant analogy, I leap to the conclusion that the writer is trying to avoid the fact that he does not understand his subject well enough to explain it in clear English.
“Whenever I see a pointless and irrelevant analogy, I leap to the conclusion that the writer is trying to avoid the fact that he does not understand his subject well enough to explain it in clear English.”
Kind of like CO2 is a thermostat… Or a blanket… Or a greenhouse?
I saw you thinking you had an explanation which was simply wrong, especially for a geographically dispersed grid like NEM.
I see you can’t actually say what you think you are disagreeing with me about.
Whenever I see someone whining about other people’s analogies, I know that I am dealing with a person who either didn’t understand the analogy, or is desperately trying to cover up the fact that his original claims have been disproven.
If the analogy given is so bad, it should be easy for you to point out how. Since you don’t even try to, it just goes to support the belief that you can’t.
I see you can’t actually say what you think you are disagreeing with me about.
You can believe anything you like, but it doesn’t mean it’s a fact.
It also doesn’t mean it’s not a fact.
Doesn’t mean it is either. Are you trying to be disparaging?
No more than you.
Yes, a sync generator can also act as a sync motor. Really identical machines.
The point you miss is simple, a rotating mass has huge energy storage. In Britain the mass is huge, tens of thousands of tons, with all the gas plants operating, with wind and solar there is zero. An extra load of say 1GW because of a cloud passing solar can be supplied for a second or two by the slightly slowing rotating mass, and then the gas turbines adjust to the increased load. The frequency of the renewable supplies has to exactly follow the grid waveform, there is no possibility that they can influence the overall frequency, because doing so requires huge input energy change. Renewables cannot change their output power, basically it is all that is available. I could be possible to make modifications to allow remotely variable load supply, but this would wreck the contracts for different arrangements so is very unlikely to happen. Variability is always by adjustment of the gas turbines!
No, I don’t. That is why the grid operator starts load shedding when frequency drops below the normal frequency range, and the intent is to remain within the contingency frequency range.
Even a large 150 tonne rotor spinning at 3000 rpm can slow by 1% under sudden load increase. If the power drawn from the rotor exceeds the capacity of the rotor’s driver, the rotor slows. No free lunch. “Huge energy storage” is relative.
It may take less than 5 seconds for the rotor to slow by more than 1% under unexpected load conditions. Sorry, an electricity grid is a complicated thing. Multiple redundancies, continuous monitoring, moment by moment load forecasting – all taken for granted.
LFDD is normally considered a last resort. The frequencies at which it kicks in vary: 59.3Hz in ERCOT, 49Hz across most of Europe (with pumped storage pumping at 49.1Hz) where they meet ENTSO-E sranfpdards, 48.8Hz in GB and I think as low as 47.5Hz in New Zealand. I’d have to look up for NEM, where the standard for primary response is within 6 seconds, with batteries being significantly quicker. FCAS (or its equivalent) is the first defence.
The problem is that the rotor has slowed, which is why frequency has dropped. If response time is say, 2 seconds, getting a large rotating mass back up to its nominal rpm takes some little time.
The operators do their best to predict loads, but when you think about, the grid is designed with failure in mind. Layers of redundancies, constant monitoring and so on. National power outages have occurred before the widespread introduction of solar, wind, or even hydro power.
I assume the grid engineers were aware of the impact of “renewables” when the grid connections were designed. I don’t believe they were all incompetent, and had no idea what might happen.
Things go wrong.
Here’s the NEM scheme
Yes. That’s after the initial response at 49.5 Hz failed to bring frequency back within set limits. Only remaining option is to reduce load. Disconnecting users.
Yes, same result you can get with solar factories synchronizing according GPS. If solar factories know they are behind or before phase, they can push back and stabilize grid.
Placing an entire grid by relying 24/7/365 on GPS is a disaster waiting to happen. You would have better odds buying a ticket on the HMS Titanic.
Sparta, the operators need a time source to maintain the grid frequency.
Here’s Google AI (first thing that popped up) –
The “highly accurate time source” needs to be available not only to national generators, but also to any exporters or importers. By the way, GPS receivers cost less than $5. Time accuracy is better than 30 billionths of a second 95% of the time, I understand.
The following from Wikipedia might be of interest –
This agrees with my understanding.
You say –
Do you have particular facts to support your assertion, or is this just personal opinion?
Yes, but I am not at liberty to disclose.
Let’s just say I was working in autonomous navigation.
Also I was involved in urban bus GPS.
My current job uses GPS but I am not allowed to discuss it.
There are times when GPS just isn’t there.
In addition, one acquires a constellation of GPS satellites and measuring the time difference between timestamped signals is how position is determined.
Yes it is. Receiving its time signal might not always be easy, but you’re creating problems that don’t really exist.
Completely irrelevant – the timestamped signal from one satellite tells you the time, doesn’t it?
That I agree with you. But if you imagine that without GPS you will just downgrade to current state, it is not such big issue.
There are also additional possibilities of synchronization, like radio.
dedicated longwave radio transmitter of time already exist.
So if you use GPS, fall back to radio, fall back to current state it is not so bad.
Consider failure modes and effects.
What happens if the radio signal is silenced?
The real problem is not limited to frequency, but also voltage and especially phase.
Radio signals incur propagation delay. If radio were sufficient the telephone companies would never have had to develop their timing system.
If delay wasn’t a problem, satellite communications wouldn’t have a problem. Phase drifting can also affect radio signals not to mention sun discharges. Fiber is a whole lot more reliable.
The point being relying on a source that has known outages for synchronization requires a robust failure modes and effect.
The point being losing that single timing source can result in a loss of synchronization depending on a host of factors.
Setting up a timing network is not simple. Multiple redundancy. Diverse geographic routing. Offline protocols. If you access the Internet, you are using digital carrier systems that have timing networks to minimize latency.
It’s not just a frequency issue, it’s also a phase issue. Synchronous condensers were initially meant to correct power factor (i.e. phase) issues, not to provide inertia to the grid. We used to use fixed banks of capacitors at locations with large motor loads (inductive) to keep phase differences in control but that’s not a very responsive method. Phase lags are not constant across the grid. Yet they are very important since they represent what I call FakePower. Total Power = RealPower + FakePower. FakePower doesn’t do any actual work so you want to minimize it.
As frequency changes so does phase. Real generators work to minimize phase lag, so do sync condensers. Wind and solar with inverters, not so much. They may match frequency but don’t do well with correcting phase lags. Yet phase lags can cause frequency excursions and ultimately tripping of protective devices.
If stabilizing the grid was as simple as connecting everything to a GPS conditioned time source it would have been done a long time ago. It just isn’t that simple. The electric grid may not be as non-linear and chaotic as the climate but its close and it works on a much shorter time frame than the climate. Anything like wind and solar that increases the non-linearity and the chaotic nature of the electric grid only increases the cost of providing control of the grid exponentially.
(p.s. batteries connected to inverters aren’t a panacea either)
Tim, you are perfectly correct. Everybody was banging on about frequency, neglecting phase – and voltage. You would be aware that synchronising say, zero point crossing, and locking frequency to external timing – say GPS – easily accessible, or atomic clock if available, then phase and frequency can be synchronised.
Easy to say, not so easy to do. Hence blackouts, brownouts, load shedding, voltage surges and sags, and so on.
Solar and wind have niche utility. For steady baseload provision – not my first choice, undependable, not cost effective. In my worthless opinion, of course.
Solar and wind have niche utility. For steady baseload provision – not my first choice, undependable, not cost effective. In my worthless opinion, of course.
Fully agree.
“… When the grid is reenergised…”
With what?
All those disconnected wind/solar that get their frequency from the grid. So what will be powering the grid and giving it its stable frequency, so wind and solar can happily come back on line?
Fossil fuel or hydropower rotating electricity generators brought up to speed and frequency synchronised to an accurate time source like the GPS. Because the grid frequency fluctuates dependent on load, the “renewable” needs to synchronise to a continuously varying source by following, rather than being slaved to an absolute time source.
I’m not a credentialed expert, but I don’t see why you have garnered so many downvotes. When you say
I know a number of references (behind paywalls generally) say that the grid itself should be frequency stable within 1% (0.5Hz), the need for individual sources to only be within 1% when connecting to the grid might be too far away to achieve synchronism.
I agree with you that grid failures occur even in a system of all thermal sources. The issue is that mimicking the inertia of thermal systems in a grid of renewables using stored energy along with a grid forming inverter is difficult because of the delay involved in detecting a frequency departure, and then using enough of these inverters with their appurtenances to achieve useful results is expensive.
‘I agree with you that grid failures occur even in a system of all thermal sources.’
Yes, witness the Northeast (US) blackout of 2003, which was initiated by a single plant tripping off line, followed by a cascade of poorly maintained transmission line failures, leading in turn to additional plant trips.
However, while bad maintenance, software bugs and human error were all significant factors at that time, there can be absolutely no doubt that the same conditions would have lead to an even worse blackout had the system also been substantially larded (laden?) with renewables, if only because of the added problems of higher complexity, intermittency, lack of grid inertia, added transmission infrastructure, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
Synchronization is more than just time, aka frequency. It is also voltage and phase.
I agree about frequency and phase, not so much about voltage – the voltage from a rotor is tied to the frequency. It’s not independent. It’s pretty easy to synchronise both frequency and phase, otherwise solar, wind etc. would not be able to connect to the grid.
Overvoltage will trip protection circuits taking sources and/or loads off line.
Cascading effects were primary to the Spain blackout.
Why would you want to synch over voltage? How would you do it?
Maybe you could quote what you are so valiantly trying to disparage me about.
Valiantly?
Bah.
Voltage is involved in synchronization in that overvoltage tripping loads/sources off line affects frequency and phase.
Makes no sense at all, does it?
Wind and solar use the grid to obtain a signal that is the input to control circuitry in the inverter that keeps it synchronized. Lose that grid signal and which one of thousands of inverters supplies THE signal for syncing.
Jim, if your thousands of inverters are not connected to the grid, what load are they feeding?
If the grid is “dead” (no voltage, de-energised) what are you trying to synch thousands of inverters to?
Maybe you don’t realise that your thousands of inverters don’t provide any power unless they are connected to a load. If there is no load, the thousands of inverters have circuitry which produces a nominal AC signal at a nominal frequency determined by an internal oscillator. You can’t synchronise to something which doesn’t exist!
You sound like you are trying to be disparaging, but it looks like the tactic has made you look both ignorant and foolish.
That’s the whole point I’ve been making. When the generators capable of supplying sufficient synchronous power trip offline, the non-synchronous generators will no longer have one good signal, just thousands of inverters doing their thing.
Why do you think there is no load? The generators are what is off line not the loads!
If your neighbor and you have solar panels, they will be providing power to whatever remaining grid is in your island.
Read this about islanding. https://electricalbaba.com/islanding-power-system/
Ignorant huh? I received my EE degree in 1972. To do that at that time, EE’s were EXPECTED to be able to step right into gas and coal powered generating plants. I’ve been around power plants and distribution since I could walk. I even repaired street light photocells (vacuum tube) in high school.
No s*it Sherlock. Thousands of inverters all trying to be the boss inverter!
Read Russ Schussler (Planning Engineer) at Climate Etc. – Casting blame for the blackout in Spain, Portugal, and parts of FrancePosted on May 5, 2025
Martin, many thanks, interesting read, and some interesting comments.
The one thing you don’t mention is what drives this synchronous generator’s rotating mass? The grid? What drives when the grid goes haywire.
Phase lock loops require an input that drives the output. That is not only necessary for frequency matching but for phase matching. Synchronizing the output in both frequency and phase when the grid itself has oscillating phenomena is pretty hard.
Lastly, give us an equation that contains the mass and speed of the rotating mass when there is no drive to the mechanism. When drive is removed I suspect supplying power to the grid at the correct frequency and phase won’t last long. Certainly not over minutes let alone an hour.
LRC is not insignificant.
You are not being serious, are you?
Spinning a 100 tonne rotor up to 3000 rpm and keeping it there is “pretty hard”, too.
No. Why should I?
You have no idea about electrical or mechanical engineering do you? You have no idea how to calculate the change in angular momentum as a torque is applied by suppling power to the grid do you? Do you think it could supply adequate voltage and frequency for an hour if it was not being driven?
Why should I tell you? Or are you not really asking a question – just attempting to be gratuitously offensive?
You really have no idea what you are talking about, do you? Maybe you really believe that you can read minds.
Jim, maybe you could concentrate on facts, rather than trying to consistently be disparaging, based on your unsupported opinions.
Only joking, maybe you can’t.
Wind and solar don’t work. Stop building them.
Can you express your opinion on this more succinctly please Bob 🙂
Don’t sugar coat it, Bob. Tell us how you really feel. 🙂
BAM! And there it is in as simple terms as possible.
This is not any sort of authoritative report. It is opinion from some one in Norway who seems to see only solar.
The link he gives to the 𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐒𝐎-𝐄 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐥 is authoritative and fairly recent. It notes the tripping, but doesn’t say it is all soar. In fact, the nuclear generation closed down at an early stage.
Nick, pre lotsa solar & wind on the grid, do you reckon such massive outages would have happened that seem to have left all the “experts” scratching their heads?
I mean, if a nuke plant shits itself somewhere, they make Hollywood movies for years afterwards about what went down minute by minute.
Alternatively, when solar shits itself, all the “experts” do a Mayor of Hiroshima impersonation –
(“what the fvck was that??”)
It’s inevitable that this incident will leave a black stain on renewables.
Therefore a new buzzword will be required to sanitize the image, and confuse the public, as when global warming became climate change.
Distributed Generation:
“One of the major issues with the integration of the DER such as solar power, wind power, etc. is the uncertain nature of such electricity resources. This uncertainty can cause a few problems in the distribution system: (i) it makes the supply-demand relationships extremely complex, and requires complicated optimization tools to balance the network, and (ii) it puts higher pressure on the transmission network,[6] and (iii) it may cause reverse power flow from the distribution system to transmission system.[7]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_generation
Wow. Wiki got one right.
For safety reasons, nuclear plants will be disconnected from the grid and put on standby power if the frequency gets too far out of spec.
Very reasonable, but also a factor in the blackout.
But for Nuclear it’s a “Factor” by design.
Perhaps Solar issues are also a Factor by Design (design flaw or designed fallibility)
Nuclear tripped out late in the sequence. First to go away from the solar south was pumped storage pumping, removing 3GW of inertia providing demand from 49.1Hz, and thus increasing the rate of frequency loss.
Having had a full scram shutdown the stations involved were not able to restart for several days as they waited for Xe139 poisoning to subside. However, the re-energisation of the grid in Spain was enabled by the massive inertia of the French nuclear dominated grid. Spanish engineers acknowledged the importance of that contribution.
Factor is not the optimum choice of phraseology.
The grid crash was due to multiple cascading events/factors.
The root cause was the basic grid stability.
There were triggers.
Patching the symptoms, as is often done under “good enough” principles, will not cure the problem.
I note one salient point from your link –
If true, this would give the lie to the “power grid sub synchronous oscillations” touted by people like Leon De Boer. Maybe the expert panel mentioned in “ENTSO-E expert panel initiates the investigation into the causes of Iberian blackout” needs to consult Leon De Boer.
The investigation will no doubt take a considerable period of time, and the conclusions will be interesting. I doubt that gremlins will be mentioned by name, but I would not be surprised if their presence was implied.
A computer bug is a member of the gremlin family, of course.
Hey I would love to claim it but hey I actually follow someone who might get the reports as in Spain’s minister for the energy transition.
https://www.portugalresident.com/analysis-of-iberian-blackout-throws-up-third-anomaly/
===> Before those five seconds – in fact 14 seconds earlier – there was an oscillation within the Spanish grid from which the system recovered. Then came the second oscillation, and ‘seconds later a third’, at which point the entire system collapsed, and the blackout affecting three/ four* countries began.
Hey but you go ahead and keep making shit up.
Leon, from your reference –
You see, “cannot be sure”, “cannot discount anything”. Nobody knows for sure.
Even your reference doesn’t support you, even though you might believe it does. If you wish to believe a newspaper reporting a politician, rather than the ENSO-E expert panel looking at causes, feel free.
If it walks like a duck and quakes like a duck then usually it’s a duck.
There were grid sub synchronous oscillations and they are reported facts by multiple sources contrary to your claim above.
You want to argue about what caused them … fine go ahead. Maybe it’s aliens, a sneaky terror attack, Atmospheric conditions or whatever crap people want to imagine. I am not buying into that crap when the most likely cause above all other is grid design flaw.
I can tell you I doubt you will never “know for sure” because you can’t experiment to try and reproduce it on the live grid. Might be just a little problematic given they killed 8 people when it happened.
Leon, if you talk like a fool, and act like a fool . . . Saying –
after implying you know what the causes were or are, makes you look like a fool.
By the way it’s “quacks like a duck”, not “quakes like a duck”. Sloppy, sloppy.
“Hey but you go ahead and keep making shit up”, as you said.
The blackout is a political football. The government has been pushing towards an all renewables grid, and has gone on the defensive, trying to think of lots of excuses to deflect attention from the truth. The domestic investigation is now dominated by political oversight, with reporting deadlines pushed further and further back. The ENTSO-E investigation is liable to take 9 months but will offer a lot of detail to judge from the previous event of grid separation between France and Spain in 2021 that led to significant blackout in Northern Spain.
You keep making disparaging comments on posters and asset things as fact all the time.
Yes he’s a bore. I no longer read his comments. Thinks he knows everything.
Well, like a clock that has stopped and is right 2x per day, sometimes he posts something relevant.
I think you mean “assert”, not “asset”.
When I assert something as fact, you are free to provide correction. I assume by “disparaging comments”, you mean I have provided facts to support my disagreement?
That was a “fat fingers” typo. You are correct, but I was not allowed to go back and correct.
Disparaging comments are addressed by you to individual posters.
You need to up your game. People can disagree without being disrespectful.
I find that remark quite disparaging.
I’ve been reading the reports in Spanish coming from industry insiders, including some from Red Eléctrica who clearly saw the grid control room picture. Sara Aagesen, the minister, has been leading the political attempts at obfuscation.
Spanish Wikipedia has been doing a good job of assembling background information, including the history of recent near disasters. The grid in Spain has been close to collapse for some while. I see today they have managed to source the first frequency and RoCoF trace I’ve seen.
4Hz/sec would kill just about any generator.
I don’t see Gremlins being blamed for long, the Mogwai have good lawyers that are only fed after midnight
The makers of the Robinson R-22 might have to worry about gremlins. Title of Air Safety Australia report on defective R- 22 governors –
How funny is that!
SO the cause of the power blackout is simply the thing which caused the blackout?
Just like the cause of a massive wildfire is not the poor land management, dried out vegetation load, or high winds fanning flames, but the picknicker who carelessly dropped a cigarette?
And the cause of a heart attack is the sudden exertion, not the lifetime of bad lifestyle choices?
If there are accidents waiting to happen, the cause of the accident is really not the thing which caused the accident…..
You have to look at the system as a whole.
Symptoms.
Triggers.
Root cause.
You seem to have a firm grasp on these.
Jim Fixx…
Nick is not any sort of authoritative source.
This professor knows magnitudes more about grid electricity than Nick will ever be capable of understanding.
Nuclear disconnected because of the grid instability caused by too much erratic, non-synchronous solar and lack of solid reliable inertia.
“nuclear generation closed down”
Wrong again. The link disconnected. French nuclear kept going.
It automatically disconnected from the highly disrupted and erratic out-of-sync Spanish grid.
Per earlier reports, 2 Spanish nuclear power plants disconnected at about the same time the Spanish-French interconnectors opened.
It’s inevitable that this incident will leave a black stain on renewables.
Therefore a new buzzword will be required to sanitize the image, and confuse the public, as when global warming became climate change.
Distributed Generation:
One of the major issues with the integration of the DER such as solar power, wind power, etc. is the uncertain nature of such electricity resources. This uncertainty can cause a few problems in the distribution system: (i) it makes the supply-demand relationships extremely complex, and requires complicated optimization tools to balance the network, and (ii) it puts higher pressure on the transmission network,[6] and (iii) it may cause reverse power flow from the distribution system to transmission system.[7]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_generation
They do not say that nuclear shut at an early stage. In fact, they refer to generation losses in the South, which was totally dominated by solar, since across the whole of Spain there was less than 1GW of CCGT in operation. There are no nuclear stations in Andalucia. The locations of operational stations are in this map. Only 3 were operating. Nuclear tripped out along with all the other generation as the grid frequency collapsed, in a full scram shutdown, achieved safely with the emergency diesel power operating properly to maintain safe conditions.
Furthermore the Operations Director at Red Eléctrica was quoted as saying you can say it was mostly solar [ that caused the trips in the South].
Thanks for reading, Nick. NOw you know for sure you were talking with no knowledge.
Correct. There was some surge, cause not determined, that caused 2 nuclear plants to disconnect and also interconnectors to France. That kind of turbulence is beyond what the grid can handle and things just went into self-protection/disconnect modes.
Whether the Norwegian engineer is authoritative or not is irrelevant.
At best the grid was marginally stable (in control theory jargon) and got hit with a step function. It responded as all marginally stable systems do with a step function. It went wacko.
Regardless of the primary cause of the event, from what I’ve read, a “black start” is a slow
piecemeal process. If so, how did they get a reported 92% of the Iberian grid back up in less
than 24hr?
Anyone care to comment? Plus any links that discuss the black start process that you could share?
This report covers it:
“The main steps of the restoration process were the following:
At 12:44 CET, a first 400 kV line between France and Spain was re-energised (Western part of the border).At 13:04 CET, the interconnection between Morocco and Spain was re-energised.From the start of the restoration until approximately 13:30 CET, several hydro power plants in Spain with black-start capability launched their black-start processes to initiate the restoration of the system.At 13:35 CET, the eastern part of the France-Spain interconnection was re-energised.At 16:11 and 17:26 CET, the two power plants with black start capability in Portugal succeeded their start up process after unsuccessful previous attempts, allowing to initiate the restoration process in Portugal with two islands.At 18:36 CET, the first 220 kV tie-line between Spain and Portugal was re-energised, allowing to speed up the restoration of the Portuguese system.At 21:35 CET – the southern 400 kV tie-line between Spain and Portugal was re-energised.At 00:22 CET on 29 April 2025, the restoration process of the transmission grid was completed in Portugal.At around 04:00 CET, the restoration process of the transmission grid was completed in Spain”
The main and only step towards restauration of the spanish grid was to wait until the sun went down AND pray that France and the remaining conventional powerplants could sync and handle the reduced load during the night.
It took in some areas until 6am to get the grid up. Recovery went from north to south.
Nick serously…YOU definetly deserve a blackout, but for more than “just” 18 hours. effn parrot you are..nothing more
“se te ve el plumero a distancia cabrón”
Yes Nick , you need lots of solid synchronous inertia available when you want to restart a grid.
Open the link from Frances nuclear.. sync the hydro to that,
…. then try to restart and synchronise other reliable power stations.
Notice that they didn’t have any wind and solar with “black-start” capability.
So what inquiring minds want to know is this:
How would this process of restoration happen in the UK? With no synchronous links over interconnect? And how long would it take?
Gas and nuclear still can provide a large proportion of UK’s electricity if needed.
The nuclear stations run pretty much constantly at around 5GW, so are always there.
I’m guessing they have “black-start” capability, it would just take a while.
Dinorwig is always cited as the primary blackstart location. If nuclear suffers an emergency shutdown it may not be available for several days: this happened in Spain.
Probably a lot longer. National Grid did try some experiments near Chapelcross about 3 years ago IIRC using less conventional blackstart arrangements, but it’s mostly theory.
Report on Distributed Restart experiments:
https://www.neso.energy/document/353901/download
It was, in large part, successful due to French nuclear generated electricity.
Except for Nick’s sterling reputation, I can not conceive how down votes apply to cut and past information from a report. It was an answer to a posted question.
In essence they depended on the high inertia strength of the French grid to establish a good area of reconnected supply, which made it much easier to power up hydro and CCGT to spread the reconnected area.
EU power grid needs trillion-dollar upgrade to avert Spain-style blackouts | Reuters
yeah…the Bussel witch also mentioned that billions would be needed…of course more of the renewable crap…
All the grid needs it needs is to turn off wind and solar, end the emmission certificate scam and fire up the remaning conventional powerplants.
short:
Going back to normal,
so eff the EU, eff the greentards
IMHO that estimate is a factor of 10 too low.
Bjorn Lomborg on X: “Solar and wind drive up electricity prices Here is one more reason they forgot to tell us about: Europe needs to spend “trillions of dollars to cope with rising green energy to avoid blackouts.” https://t.co/G344u6TMtV https://t.co/Q71hEB9FkB https://t.co/1kqBBJyODs” / X
Could the reliability of the Iberian Peninsula grid be
ensuredASSURED(stage 4 pedantry again. There is no cure 🙁 )
Your pedantry is
exceptedaccepted by me.“No Satan, I’m not going to”
Language is important. Especially in science and engineering, precision is needed. Contextual definitions just hamper communications. Basically it is a signal to noise issue.
Fortunately they used “ensured” rather than “insured.”
I feel your pain.
LOL. Moral of story a wind and solar need to hookup to the grid with a flywheel. I know of a large regional bank data center that when down due to battery back unable to respond fast enough. The cure was a flywheel. Of course all of that increases cost bigly. When will the world learn wind and solar are anything but cheap and reliable.
This ^
I’ve long wondered how something like a large solar array realizes it’s disconnected from the grid. If it’s powering the whole area/town the input from distant spinning sources isn’t providing much power. I suppose that source can dominate the working frequency even then.
It seems to me that if we could broadcast a 60 Hz (or 50 Hz) reference frequency, then the DC renewable sources could listen to that and stay in sync with it.
Of course “broadcast” would have to be chosen with care, as tacking onto something like WWV in the US is very easy for hackers to out shout. Perhaps syncing with GPS satellites or something in geosync orbit would be safer, perhaps running locally for a while with its own timebase could work well enough, at least until regional power could crawl back to life.
If that idea hasn’t been realized in the past it’s because it is either technically unreliable or financially unfeasable.
I remember from a visit to a coal fired powerplant in southern Germany the technician who led the tour joking with true pride:
“we run our generator’s frequency with such a tight precision that we actually could sync the atomic clock in Frankurt”.
That was back in 1994, I think the generator on which I stood on top spins at 3000rpm and the vibrations you feel are of really low intensity. Fascinating
Rubbish. The Grid frequency varies by about 1% according to load. When generation gets behind the power draw, the entire grid slows down. When they open the taps at the generation station, it speeds up again.
You missed the part where he said “joking.”
Ric,
What you and many others are missing is the speed with which a disconnect can occur. Not one comment has mentioned the word voltage. Electrical energy is voltage and nothing else and it transmits from the generator at just under the speed of light. I use to observe multiple generators being manually connected every day on the first start up on B727 aircraft. Once one generator is on line the next one cannot connect until the frequency is within the defined tolerance and also the voltage, then, all three phases, A,B and C phase have to be exactly at the top of their sine wave and all three exactly in sync before the bus tie breakers can be opened. The phases were observed to be in phase through flashing lights which decreased in frequency as they came into phase. If the KVARs were outside about 7 KVARs per generator it was possible to shear a generator drive – the KVARs being the measurement of reactive power needed in the system.
Large power grids are incredibly complex and that spinning inertia is vital. Very few people actually know what voltage really is. It is the astronomically large numbers of photons travelling along outside the wire in two wave forms, one electrical and the other magnetic at 90 degrees at just under the speed of light. A 60W light bulb emits about 10 x19 photons per second or around a billion trillion and all of them being absorbed and emitted by electrons as they jiggle around hardly moving as electron drift moves at only about 8.3 CMS per hour. A vast number of people seem to think that electrons are the energy, they are not and don’t go anywhere, they are the electric charge that are stimulated by the photons.
Varg and Leon de Boer were correct in their answering people who don’t know what they are talking about.
Including you. Voltage is the potential difference between two points. Electrical energy is not voltage. Electrical energy is measured in joules, not volts.
A capacitor charged to 400 v is emitting no photons as a result of its charge. You cannot tell by looking at it, weighing it or taking its temperature, what its capacity is, nor the voltage across its terminals.
You need to re-examine the contents of your fantasy.
You didn’t read the entire post, did you? The key is that the generators had to be phase sync’d as well as frequency sync’d. Power is the amount of work per unit time. It is *work* that is measured in joules. It’s important that all generators be sync’d in both frequency and phase to produce maximum power.
Voltage is the potential work that can be done per unit charge. The higher the voltage the higher the potential for work goes.
It is *power* that is important on the grid. It is ultimately what determines what an electric motor can accomplish. Power = Voltage x Current x PowerFactor. PowerFactor is the cosine of the phase difference between the voltage and the current. If a motor must do a certain amount of work, e.g. raising an elevator ne floor, then as the PF goes down it must draw more and more current thus increasing the load on the grid. As that load goes up and down it represents a varying load on the generator which, in turn, causes a frequency variation as the generator works to meet the load.
When a major generator trips off the network you will see major frequency changes *and* phase changes. These can cause cascading tripping of other generators as they fail in meeting the demands needed to correct the changes.
As I pointed out in a different message, frequency synching isn’t a sufficient condition. If it were that simple wind and solar wouldn’t cause the problems that they do.
You had a minor phraseology blip, that someone decided to make a big deal about.
50 years electrical engineering, systems engineering, and avionics and space systems. I am clear about voltage, current, joules, and frequency. My CV also include AC power generation and distribution systems, although that part is retired.
You have no idea what you are saying and totally wrong to say voltage is not electrical energy. Voltage IS electrical energy and whilst it is the potential difference between two points it is the stream of photons travelling along outside the wire as electromagnetic energy at just below the speed of light. It originates from the magnetic moment of the electron which occurs at 90 degrees to its rotation. You would be well advised to study some quantum physics before making outlandish statements that voltage is not electrical energy.
RK,
A capacitor may have a voltage across its terminals, but not be connected to a circuit. No electrons flowing, and no photons being emitted.
Am I deeply wounded by your disparaging remarks? Should I feel offended insulted or annoyed by your comment?
If you cannot tell me how much “electrical energy” is contained in 1 volt, then you are an ignorant numbskull – in my worthless opinion, and unless you cannot tell demonstrate otherwise.
PS. Here’s one definition of electrical energy –
The basic unit of electrical energy is the joule . . .
How many joules in a volt? Give your answer in square kilograms if you find it easier to calculate? (That’s gentle sarcasm for anybody suffering from a cognitive defect.]
R., you wrote:
Very few people actually know what voltage really is. It is the astronomically large numbers of photons travelling along outside the wire in two wave forms, one electrical and the other magnetic at 90 degrees at just under the speed of light.
What you are describing is current. And the photons are generated by electrons moving in the wire. You may be thinking of the Veritasium videos that I think are more confusing than informative and apply more to RF transmission lines and multi GHz computer circuits than power grids. A good analogy to electricity is my water well. The pressure in the water tank is like voltage, the force behind water molecules in a pipe or electrons in a wire. Current is the flow of water in the pipe or out of a faucet, like the flow of electrons in a wire. Power is voltage times current, think garden hose with a narrow nozzle or light bulb with a hot filament.
I was trying to keep the focus on just AC frequency. The lack of inertia in things like solar farms allows them to output any frequency with any “phasing” at any time. Much like your B727s, my uninterruptible power supplies take a few seconds once power is restored for their inverter output to come in phase with grid power before switching out, it’s fun to use an oscilloscope watch the two sync up before the switch.
The catch in all of this that I deliberately avoided is that if the solar array can’t provide the power demanded by the consumers, then it will have to put out a too-low voltage, i.e. a brownout. A relatively new catch is that the switching power supplies now used in everything from wall warts to massive data centers compensate by drawing more current and that forces the systems these to collapse. I’m not quire sure what that would mean in real life, but load shedding or shutdown would have to be a big part of protecting the system.
BTW, a very surprising fact is that the electrons in a wire are moving remarkably slowly. I remember one of my EE profs saying it would take half an hour for an electron to get from the wall switch to the light bulb. I never verified that – of course it implies DC power. In my water well analogy, note that water flow from a faucet starts instantly (modulo inertia and other physics with the water and plumbing) but the speed of water can be annoying slow as I’m reminded every time I wait for hot water to arrive at my second floor sink.
You are conflating photons with electromagnetic waves.
Ummmmm….
Are you invoking wave-particle duality or something, or do you really not understand what a photon or electromagnetic wave is?
That wave-particle duality has nothing to do with current in a wire generating an electro-magnetic field.
I have radar experience. I have telemetry (uplink and down link) experience. I have gone through EME qualification testing more times than I can count.
Interference between wires is not photonic. It is electric fields, magnetic fields, and the combination.
Ric, what I was describing was voltage, NOT current. You need to read up a bit on physics. If you would like, send me your email and I will send you a very good article on electromagnetic energy by a physicist on the whole subject. Electromagnetic fields are the phenomenon of photons and that is what is moving along the wire.
If you wish, my Email address is at https://wermenh.com/contact.html
Your insistence that “Electrical energy is voltage and nothing else” tells me you need to brush up on your dimensional analysis knowledge. Electrical power is volts x current – watts. Electrical energy is watts x time (well, integrated over time), e.g. the kWh I pay for every month.
Hey, I remember (and can find) https://www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/1978/02/00368423.ap071756.07a00210.pdf – well worth your time, though it doesn’t offer as much as I would have liked to see, e.g. that important constants often have really weird units, like G, Newton’s Gravitational constant.
I’m in the midst of converting to a rebuilt system so I’ll be very distracted for a while. I’ll be forced to convert some 20 year old programs to current language versions, so it will keep me busy for quite a while. I won’t have time to read it closely. However, physics was my favorite course in high school.
I feel your pain. I eventually gave up, and sniffed around to find similar programs written by others for modern systems. I needed one old piece of proprietary logging software, so I took the easy way out, and installed a virtual machine containing an old 16 bit Windows – just for that 16 bit program.
Guess what? I remembered that I could do my logging with my DSO! Silly me.
Have fun.
You didn’t obviously get the whole story about electrons moving. The are two theories, one that energy is moved by electrons energizing adjacent electrons. That would essentially move at the speed of light. The other theory is that a single electron moves the entire distance taking time traversing between atoms. That is your description.
Rick, do you mean that there is not the usual voltage present, or that there is a break in the conductors connecting the inverter output to the grid?
In any case, it’s fairly simple to design circuitry that monitors the AC on the grid, and takes appropriate action if the grid frequency or voltage moves outside certain parameters. Your reference frequency may be taken from the grid, or from the solar array’s GFM (grid forming inverter). Generally, instantaneous grid frequency control is not terribly precise, and varies up to one percent or so. Voltage can also surge or sag.
The very inertia from spinning rotors is a problem, as getting back to speed takes finite time.
Here’s a question – how does the “grid” safely accept “excess power” from say, a domestic solar system?
Ric, do you mean that there is not the usual voltage present, or that there is a break in the conductors connecting the inverter output to the grid?
What I’m considering is that some local solar farm is providing almost exactly the load to an area it serves, so that it is connected to grid, but the grid is providing/drawing almost no power. Then the grid disconnects and the farm loses its frequency base – does the solar farm realize that immediately? How? Does mechanical inertia in the load (refrigerators, pumps, fans, etc) keeps things going? For how long? Eventually things have to fall apart or the cut off system has some other way to maintain the 60 Hz supply and be in phase when the grid eventually reconnects and resumes providing/drawing almost no power.
If the grid has disconnected, then the solar source should not be supplying power to the grid. The solar farm detects the disconnection in milliseconds. No need for AC output after this. No point.
When the grid comes back on, there are many different methods used to ensure that the inverters used are synchronised before the inverter reconnects. They can be found on the internet.
“It seems to me that if we could broadcast a 60 Hz (or 50 Hz) reference frequency, then the DC renewable sources could listen to that and stay in sync with it.”
They could, but it misses the point. If load on the grid increases, the effect on spinning machinery is to provide a drag – ie slow it down. The only long term remedy is to generate more power. Inertia does that in the very short term, with kinetic energy from the wheels. But the frequency drop is the signal to the grid control to increase generation. Inertia just gives more time.
Inverters for solar and wind can be controlled to any frequency you like. The near equivalent is a grid forming inverter (GFM). It picks up the stress on the grid, and tries to restore the frequency. In doing so, it injects more power, which is what the grid needs. That power has to come from a battery. Ultimately, the grid needs more generation, but like the flywheel, the GFM with battery gives more time for that to be started up.
GFM’s just have extra control circuitry which adds a few percent to the cost of the inverter.
“GFM’s just have extra control circuitry which adds a few percent to the cost of the inverter.”
I think you have just forgotten about the cost of grid sized batteries and their maintenance there Nick?
You don’t need a grid size battery, or at least not a big one. It doesn’t take much to beat the storage capacity of a flywheel, and you need a power delivery capability which is a substantial fraction of the inverter’s usual power.
But batteries pay off, so people are building bigger ones.
And Nick changes from a region with a population of 58 million to a tiny island of 70,000 people that produce absolutely nothing.
Very funny attempt !!
Its a tiny battery with a tiny electricity use on a tiny island.. and they still use 41% oil.
JET Culham has been using flywheels to provide massive power injections for fusion experiments since the 1980s. Power delivery is not a problem. Energy storage for flywheels is however limited.
Batteries do not pay off, except to the salesman.
Nick you usually at least read so why don’t you try a power engineering discussion on GFM’s not the Eco activist rubbish you are trotting out
https://utilitymagazine.com.au/the-rise-of-grid-forming-inverters/
They actually can be part of the problem and in several already reported incidents ARE part of the problem.
Now transgrid has been looking at your own back yard Nick with your little Eastern States oscillation problem
https://www.transgrid.com.au/media/diyb5fng/2403-aurecon_maturity-of-grid-forming-inverter-solutions-for-system-strength.pdf
They explain risks likely expenditure requirements and an even offer an alternative and they are actual power engineers NOT ACTIVISTS.
From your first link:
“GFMs offer several advantages in the evolving power grid. They can emulate the inertial response of SGs, crucial for maintaining frequency stability as RES penetration increases and system inertia decreases. GFMs also enable the formation and operation of microgrids, which are essential for providing reliable power in remote areas and enhancing overall grid resilience.
However, the adoption of GFMs is not without challenges. Their control algorithms are inherently more complex than those of grid-following or grid-supporting inverters, requiring advanced modelling and real-time processing capabilities.”
IOW, they are good, but you have to program them right. We can figure that out. It only has to be done once, and the rest can follow.
The capacity requirement of batteries and GFMs for a major grid is huge, and extremely costly.
Much easier and far less costly just to build coal, gas and nuclear
The problem is not just of programming them, but incorporating them into a dynamic system. As Red Eléctrica admitted, trying to model interactions across the grid of inverter based sources is an extremely hard modelling problem. We have seen quite a few major grid disturbances that prove intractable to modelling, with therefore no understanding of how to mitigate or prevent them. They go outside the solution space of even AI modelling.
We?
My point is really two fold:
1) Provide synchronization with a highly reliable signal that is not part of the generators on the grid. Imagine a grid (microgrid if you will) that is solely powered by wind, sun, and batteries.
2) Provide synchronization with a highly reliable signal that tied to the the inertial generators on the grid but is transmitted outside of the grid so that if a grid connection that was providing/drawing little power fails, the micro grid can keep on running nearly exactly as it had been.
How do you keep that signal highly reliable over a transport network connected to a multiplicity of devices. Telephone companies have had this problem for decades, ever since the introduction of digital central offices. It ain’t an easy thing to do, requiring an expensive network of timing signal with multiple heirarchy levels.
I didn’t say it was easy, especially since it has to track the vagaries of inertial generators. I pointed out above that broadcasting over WWV won’t work. Perhaps a key would be having an invariant reference that could be produced locally for a while (GPS, atomic clock, whatever) and allow the grid to reconnect only when it has recovered enough to be in close sync with the microgrid – either by looking at its own local oscillator or (much more sensibly) the phase of the microgrid. (And both end have to know the reconnect is about to happen.)
However, I’m much more interested in ways to keep the microgrid running at the right frequency when disconnected from the grid.
Use GPS time signal, and synchronise to either up or down crossing point. More accurate than the constantly varying grid frequency. However, you need to synchronise to the actual grid frequency before reconnecting because it may be well away from absolute values. An electric clock using grid frequency as a reference should be totally accurate at least once a day, if the grid operator is doing a good job.
While not connected to the grid, an ICE generator generally works fine, and its frequency might vary wildly. Just listen to one.
GPS is not available 24/7/365. A good storm and you lose GPS.
And?
A massive single point failure.
It patches the symptoms but ignores the root cause.
Fascinating discussion but loses sight of the stated goal, which is not reliable, affordable energy.
Why are they doing this? To alter this graph. And how’s that working out?
Funny. Due to local volcanic activity, the lab was moved 200 miles away more than a year ago.
Funny how CO2 demonstrates a residency time of hundreds to thousands of years in that graph.
That has nothing to do with my topic.
Did you read the entire article you referenced?
“Increasing the maximum current flow is possible, but it requires increasing the capacity of the power transistors and other components, which can significantly increase cost. So most inverters (both GFM and GFL) don’t provide current surges larger than about 10 to 30 percent above their rated steady-state current. For comparison, a synchronous generator can inject around 500 to 700 percent more than its rated current for several AC line cycles (around a tenth of a second, say) without sustaining any damage. For a large generator, this can amount to thousands of amperes. Because of this difference between inverters and synchronous generators, the protection technologies used in power grids will need to be adjusted to account for lower levels of fault current.
Sounds like you would need 20-50 GFM generators to match one regular generator’s short-term capacity on the grid. Each one added would increase complexity to the grid along with an increase in the ability to coordinate them in the case of a major failure. That’s not a very confidence building result.
Now consider the failure rates, aka reliability, of all those extra chunks of hardware.
All that says is that if you want a GFM to exactly emulate the capability of a SG, you’d need to spend some money. But should you want to do that? There are a lot more GFMs. IEEE goes on to say:
“As we progress toward a future grid dominated by inverter-based generation, a question naturally arises: Will all inverters need to be grid-forming? No. Several studies and simulations have indicated that we’ll need just enough GFM inverters to strengthen each area of the grid so that nearby GFL inverters remain stable.
How many GFMs is that? The answer depends on the characteristics of the grid and other generators. Some initial studies have shown that a power system can operate with 100 percent inverter-based resources if around 30 percent are grid-forming. More research is needed to understand how that number depends on details such as the grid topology and the control details of both the GFLs and the GFMs.
Ultimately, though, electricity generation that is completely carbon free in its operation is within our grasp. Our challenge now is to make the leap from small to large to very large systems. We know what we have to do, and it will not require technologies that are far more advanced than what we already have. It will take testing, validation in real-world scenarios, and standardization so that synchronous generators and inverters can unify their operations to create a reliable and robust power grid. Manufacturers, utilities, and regulators will have to work together to make this happen rapidly and smoothly. Only then can we begin the next stage of the grid’s evolution, to large-scale systems that are truly carbon neutral.“
This isn’t an answer at all!
If 30% of an all-inverter grid have to be GFM’s you have only compounded the problem of syncing frequency and phase around the overall grid. Saying it won’t require technologies more advanced than we already have ignores the very real fact that if they exist today then why aren’t they being used today to stabilize the grid and prevent occurrences like Spain?
They are going to end up using an external timing network just like phone companies did as digital carrier systems proliferated.
The IEEE is generally a very poor source of information nowadays, they have head-over-heels into pushing green mania, witness the last phrase of your quote.
Part of the instability is these inverters react too fast causing second generation transients.
It doesn’t work quite like that. Transmission lines and reactive demands introduce lags into the frequency that depend on the topology of power flows, so synchronisation has to rake account of these factors if you want to centralise it via a timing standard. Frequency also changes in response to changes in the supply/demand balance that are corrected by the control room requesting specific adjustments to restore a better balance across the geography.
LRC has natural resonance. That has to be accounted for in long transmission lines.
GPS does not work everywhere and it is not 24/7/365 reliable.
Forest canopies are a problem.
Urban echoes are a problem.
Storms/clouds are a problem.
Solar storms are a problem.
Might was well hook them up to the internet. (big sarcasm)
Everything is a problem if you try hard enough to make it so.
However, generators manage to access extremely accurate time sources somehow or other. On the internet, the Network Time Protocol is accurate enough, I guess. A reasonable HAQ (high accuracy quartz) keep accurate time to within 5 seconds per year. Good enough to check whether rotors are spinning within say, 1% of nominal.
My smartwatch seems to show me fairly accurate time under forest canopies and the other things you have mentioned. F35 aircraft apparently has 857 deficiencies currently. They are still being produced, sold, and used – problems and all.
But somehow or other, grids generally manage to stay synchronised in useful ways – even across national borders, and over thousands of kilometers. Somebody must be doing something right.
Everything is a problem if you try hard enough to make it so.
The job is to increase reliability so future blackouts are minimal.
That means addressing reliability issues and performing analyses of alternatives.
It means doing relevant what if scenarios.
However, generators manage to access extremely accurate time sources somehow or other.
But you can only guess?
On the internet, the Network Time Protocol is accurate enough,
Have you ever performed a latency test.
Your smart watch no doubt has a crystal or some other clock source, so even if it is GPS equipped, it keeps running when you are in a parking garage.
But somehow or other, grids generally manage to stay synchronised in useful ways – even across national borders, and over thousands of kilometers. Somebody must be doing something right.
The point is to keep doing something right.
Are you implying that a generating station cannot access similar technology?
Don’t need to – it’s built in. That’s why it’s quite accurate.
No guess – I made a statement.
If you say so. What if a gang of youths steal a few kilos of copper from some random place – unknown in advance?
You’ve never used an oscilloscope have you? How about a frequency counter? A frequency counter capable of measuring 100 Mhz can display multiple decimal places at 0.000060 Mhz. I’m not saying these devices are used in manual mode at a generator but the measuring capability is there.
Haven’t I? Those lying Chinese! Sold me something pretending to be a Digital Storage Oscilloscope, to replace an American thing which had a CRT, also pretending to be an “oscilloscope”!
You need to get a refund from the MindReading Institute.
/sarc off
OK. Convince me of the relevance of that irrelevant word salad, and I won’t disparage you. Sound fair?
Nope, not going to waste my time educating you. You’ve just indicated by your response that you have no idea how to utilize the appropriate test equipment to monitor frequency, phase, and amplitude.
I sincerely doubt you have ever designed and built equipment and using these and other equipment to measure it’s operation.
Read this article to obtain a preliminary education.
https://www.eeeguide.com/frequency-measurement-lissajous-method/
If you want an EE education, go get one. Even an electronics trade school should cover some of this.
Thanks. I appreciate it.
You definitely need to get a refund for those mind-reading courses.
By the way, your “educational” link is a wee bit out of date –
Oh dear, the Digital Storage Oscilloscope (which you claim I have never used, and don’t own), doesn’t have a “Cathode Ray Tube tube”, or deflection plates.
What to do?
Take more unsolicited advice from someone who seems both ignorant and foolish, or not?
By the way, to generate Lissajous patterns, you also need a frequency source or two. May I suggest the following to you –
Relaxing, you see.
Found one by googling huh?
I have my own. An old Heathkit, an HP with temp controlled crystal timebase, a NIDA 444, and an HP 8651A (RF). Counters also.
And in case you didn’t notice, you need a scope with access to the deflection plates. My nice new LCD digital scope doesn’t have that. My CRT Textronic does, and my old Heathkit does. The frequency response of of the vert amps doesn’t matter since they aren’t used nor is the timebase.
You only need one frequency generator, the DUT is the grid and supplies one source. Don’t know why you mentioned using two generators.
That’s because you were so busy trying to be disparaging, I guess. You’re using the grid as a frequency source, aren’t you? Plus another frequency generator to get your Lissajous figure.
By the way, my DSO which you claimed I don’t have, has a non-existent manual (according to you), which states the following –
Maybe your digital oscilloscope is cheap and inferior, unlike my fine Chinese product. Oh wait, you say I’ve never used an oscilloscope. I must be dreaming!
Feel free to be disparaged.
“represented by”. Do you understand the difference between sampling that your scope has and putting up a simulated display versus direct connections to the deflection plates of a CRT.
And yes I do have a nice Rigol 1074Z for everyday use.
Hang on there!
You implied before that I didn’t even possess n oscilloscope, saying –
Now you say I have used an oscilloscope. What changed your mind?
You’re all over the place, and trying to say a digital display of a Lissajous pattern is completely different from its analogue counterpart in any significant way! You don’t have “direct connections” to CRT deflection plates, but you know that don’t you?
At least you had the brains to buy a fine Chinese oscilloscope. Good for you!
Hopefully, you have learned to engage your brain before hammering away at your keyboard. I don’t really need to be disparaging, do I?
But you are, constantly.
All it takes is for someone to disagree with you and it spews forth.
At least I quote what I’m disagreeing about, and provide some facts to support my disagree .
You’ll note I’m not disagreeing with your comment, so you have no reason to disparage me <g>.
The Spanish blackout is a great example of what happens when you begin with a stable and controllable system then convert it into an unstable uncontrollable one.
The increasing presence of renewable and thus instantly variable outputs on the grid, makes stabilisation procedures complex and increasingly fragile. The likely initiation of the failure was nothing more unusual in the atmosphere than a cloud crossing the array immediately dropping the power available. It might just as easily have been a maintenance team short circuiting something and tripping out the facility. It really does not matter what initiated it. The system had been allowed to evolve into an unstable state.
The issue is, the build up of weather dependent generation has create a fragile system that is not inherently stable.
The rules need to be changed.
Renewables should not be allowed to occupy more than say 20% of grid supply. If we had that limit then a stable grid would be maintained and all the chat about needing massive instant power supply from batteries would disappear, it would not be necessary.
The situation we are evolving world wide is worrying.
All essential services, energy being just one, are being made more fragile more prone to instant cut out. Electronic money being another area where just one brainless hacker can take down bank transactions. A ransom group can close down major health providers, hold them over the barrel by hacking their servers loading malware and so on.
We need to consider stable systems and make stability a priority.
To do that we have to drop the Woke DEI, ESG, Net Zero and all the other destabilising practices that have captured the interests of the ‘modern’ world.
I am just off to saddle up my horse and check on the water wheel…..actually, remove honey from the bees in fact.
You comprehend fully.
Add to the mix the new report of Chinese subterfuge.
No doubt selling the copper to those Yellow Devils, the Chinese! Fiendishly cunning, those Orientals! Maybe they didn’t understand Spanish, and confused red electrica with tren electrica. The train electric grid must be pretty fragile, if stealing a bit of cable can bearing it to its knees.
/pathetic_humor off
Stanford sciencey folks have the answer to the fickles problem-
Scientists caution against charging electric vehicles at home overnight
They can get stuffed.
Here in the UK (yes, home to pretty much the highest power prices in the western world!), we have a home charger for my wife’s company EV. Power costs are 7.00p per kWh between 23:30 and 05:30 and 28.8 pence per kWh for the rest of the time. There is no way in the world that our deluded regulator is going to make any significant changes to that ratio so they can whistle if they think I’m going to charge during the day.
A clever chap would charge his cheap disposals “solar” batteries with 7p power, and sell it during the day at 28.8p, or whatever feed-in tariff there is. A few fake solar panels on the roof, and who would know? Electrons are electrons.
Only joking, of course!
That is essentially how pumped storage makes money.
Pump up using coal and gas fired electricity when they are cheap and there’s plenty to spare…
… then use the pumped hydro power when the grid cost gets high enough.
It actually helps the gas and coal stations because they don’t have to drop down their output as much when demand is low.
We will soon be in a position where uncontrolled solar surpluses become a problem for the grid on sunny days. We got close as early as March this year, with wholesale negative prices in the middle of the day. Quite a bit of new capacity is coming this year and next.
We just need continent sized batteries that can be charged during the day.
Or sea water electrolyzers to produce hydrogen that we can cook food and heat our homes with! Why hasn’t anyone thought of that?!
/s
I dunno. Apparently the people in charge are both stupid and idiotic.
/h
I have heard seemingly sane people suggest that instead of expensive battery storage, people can connect their EV batteries to the grid to help out when there is low wind and solar power.
Are there more than 10 very good reasons why trying to jumpstart the British National Grid from my car battery is not a good idea?
Yes, but you only need 1.
What would be the point of the EV if you have a depleted battery?
Your virtue will still have been signaled.
But not the right turn, Clyde.
From the link: “Recent research shows charging habits are more complex than expected. Most drivers prefer plugging in at home or nearby, especially overnight. While this offers convenience, it creates problems for the power grid, which is already under stress during peak evening hours.”
Why would anybody not expect EV drivers to prefer the convenience of “plugging in at home or nearby, especially overnight”?
Especially when they need to get to work in the morning.
And public chargers charge fancy prices and 20%VAT.
If you can find one and if you have the time to wait inline.
So, now not only implementing command economy where the government tells the people what the can and cannot buy, we have behavioral modifications based on government fiat.
And the basis of this is CO2?
I better not exhale any more.
There is another issue that, I think, deserves more attention. The GloTEC data showed a massive surge in total electron count when the grid went down. Some believe that a pulse of solar wind made it through the Earth’s magnetic field and smacked the Iberian Peninsula.
GloTEC | NOAA / NWS Space Weather Prediction Center
If someone is skilled at scraping data, the archives should contain the data to demonstrate the TEC spike.
Ben Davidson (I know) pointed this out Earth’s Pole Shift Hits Another Level
The weakening of the Earth’s magnetic field is a big deal and it gets little attention.
I couldn’t find the data to support the claim. The idea was rejected by the Spanish Met and others. There were no reports of consequent damage to other electrical items. Nor was there any effect in nearby locations such as Gibraltar and North Africa across the Strait. It seems a bogus idea.
The data is available for anyone with the time and skills from the GloTEC site. If you listen to the first part of the Ben Davidson video he describes the animations as he looks at the video of the daily TEC on April 28th. Unfortunately, the animations only provide the recent 24 hours.
I’ve seen the video, and I tried hunting for the data he refers to about 2 days after the blackout. He offers no precise links – just talks in airy fairy terms. I post stuff, not claim I’m seeing something on my screen that you can’t see – which is what he did. He also talks about the F-layer – the satellite monitoring it was lost in 2022 and has not been replaced. I concluded it was all a con for the gullible, especially since Occam’s razor offers far better explanations of events.
Not saying it is true or false and not taking the time to validate it.
However, there is a very real point to consider. If solar variations can knock out that system, is it really a good idea to go forward with anything like it?
If a bearing failure can bring a grid to its knees, you might specify different bearings, or you might accept that nothing is perfect.
By solar variations are you talking about solar variations (the Sun’s variable output), or more likely, the output from photovoltaic generators?
I assume that grid operators and engineers have a good idea of what they are doing. If they don’t we are all in deep doodoo. Joking aside, solar and wind power are intermittent, costly, and unreliable. Solar plants like Ivanpah have turned out to be quite pointless – the designers convinced themselves that heat could be “stored”, and otherwise intelligent people believed the “experts”.
As I said before, my worthless opinion is that “renewable” power generation has niche utility only. The supposedly “renewable” Drax power station burns wood chips. A Great Leap Forward? Even steam locomotives gave up burning wood to produce power.
Might as well go back to Stanley Steamers converted to burn wood chips instead of liquid hydrocarbons! I suppose I’ll be accused of disparaging Stanley Steamers. Not at all, if someone wants to give me one, I’ll gratefully accept it.
Don’t go off topic. The article to which I responded said solar wind (electrons, etc.) knocking out a grid.
Why not? The commenter said –
Some believe, some don’t.
Are you trying to be disparaging? I find that deeply offensive!
/sarc off
Lighten up, Frances.
— Quote from Stripes
And?
I suspect that one of the problems relates to the location of storage. Spain has quite a large capacity of pumped storage, which for obvious reasons us mainly located in the mountainous North (with further capacity in Northern Portugal as well). Supposedly there was some 3GW of pumping to absorb solar surpluses ahead of the apagon. That power had to be routed across the country from the solar dominated south, using up transmission capacity . It was nit handily located to absorb local surpluses and prevent them from creating transmission system overloads.
You can look at the locations of Spanish hydro here
https://database.earth/energy/power-plants/hydro-power/spain
There are almost no grid batteries in Spain. The local grid rules make it hard to get connected or to have an economic operation. Presumably this has been motivated by protectionist instincts from the owners of pumped storage. I expect this will change as they consider the aftermath of the Gran Apagon.
There is a similar conflict building up in the UK, with proposals for a large volume of pumped storage along the Great Glen hoping to tap into Northern Scottish wind surpluses. Interestingly, Drax recently withdrew plans to increase pumping capacity at the existing Cruachan site. But also there have been protest noises from the grid battery industry at the prospect of cap and floor subsidy arrangements for new pumped storage projects, allowing them to undercut batteries and capture some of their business in providing ancillary services. At the moment the most profitable batteries are in Northern Scotland.
https://timera-energy.com/blog/locational-dynamics-driving-differences-in-gb-bess-revenue-stacks/
I just look at my house when the power comes back on after it’s been off an hour or so. I immediately get HVAC units firing up, water heaters, refrigerators, ice maker, standby UPS’s and all the lights my wife left on (although LED). That’s quite a surge plus times all the houses in my neighborhood. Multiply that times an entire country and getting the grid back up is a daunting task.
LEDs often create quite a strain for the power they draw. Try looking at power factor specifications for LEDs. 0.5 is not uncommon, at least among cheaper offerings. Better than 0.9 is rare. Grids often demand reactive compensation for larger loads at <0.95 power factor, or charge for providing reactive power themselves.
Story Tip
Chinese inverters with embedded comm.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-found-chinese-inverters-2025-05-14/
Trust them they’re from Beijing and they’re here to help change the climate.
The last line in the time sequence picture says “estimated unserved electricity cost of $8,000/MWh”. What does it mean? I read elsewhere that at the blackout time the cost of electricity was highly negative.
Here’s an overview
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619022001130
“… additional synchronous condensers or procuring fast frequency reserves (FFR)…”
This is cure, not prevention. Cures often don’t work in all cases.
Coal, gas and nuclear are prevention so don’t need the cure. The solution is simple, go back to what works and is cheapest.
Patching the symptoms rarely, if ever, cures the root cause.
– Rogue communication devices found in Chinese solar inverters
– Undocumented cellular radios also found in Chinese batteries
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-found-chinese-inverters-2025-05-14/
Good excuse if a US grid fails. Blame it on the Chinese!
Solution – don’t buy anything made in China.
Did the solar panels and inverters come from China? Perhaps a test run grid shutdown?
I don’t see it mentioned here, but a guy named Stuttaford at National Review covers a great irony- during the blackout, solar panels on apartment buildings produced electricity, but residents could not use it in the building! Something about “islanding” being too expensive.
Is there any cost too great to tap into free electricity?
Paul: “Islanding” is a term that refers to what happens when the external electric utility goes down and a solar PV system continues to source electricity onto the grid. This is very bad for a number of reasons, especially safety for anyone needing to work on the lines. Another is synchronization, if multiple power systems are still connected in an outage, they cannot sync to each other which is also very bad. To prevent such problems, DC-AC inverters are required to disconnect themselves from the grid very quickly, within less than one power cycle, if they can no longer sense the grid frequency and voltage.
The only way an apartment building could continue to use its local solar system in an outage is if a physical breaker is thrown to isolate the building’s electricity wiring from the grid, and the inverter is switched over to standalone mode. When power is restored, the steps must be reversed to go back to using utility electricity. Thus extra $$$.
Same thing when you have a auto start generator on your house or RV. A transfer switch must be used. It can be auto or manual.
Our big telephone offices had the same setup to switch from grid to batteries and back. High pressure air powered switches to push the big contactors back to the grid. People don’t realize the safety issues with high voltage/current switching.
Jim, I understand that some BEV chargers can deliver a megawatt to the battery. There are some EVs with 800 V architecture, so that would mean about 1250 A peak amperage. I know that “switching” in this instance is not technically the same as sudden disconnection, but the thought of working on such a system, possibly with an energised battery but faulty control circuitry – showing a black screen or some immobilising error condition, would be a bit worrying.
I certainly wouldn’t want to short 800 v by putting a tool down where some protective cover had come off!
I agree with you – even where no “switching” is involved.
Watch this video, and there are plenty of others.
Electrical plant-room explosion caught on tape.flv
Jim,
I guess some tool he was using slipped, or he undid something he shouldn’t have. Accidents happen. If he was working on grid infrastructure, who knows what that could have precipitated?
Thanks.
Boy, the left loves to lie about things. And gaslight. What miserable creatures.