General 6 Days After Celebrating 100% Renewable Power, Spain Has Biggest Blackout in History

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Papi Chingon

Papi Chingon

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Oct 19, 2015
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View: https://Twitter.com/dwnews/status/1916895119153799379



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rmenergy

rmenergy

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Mar 27, 2021
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Rambo John J said:
rmenergy @rmenergy any thoughts or news
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One of the last x posts linked mentioned inertia, or lack there of. That’s a factor I bring up regularly with these discussions but it seems to go over peoples head.

Spinning turbines are electromechanical coupled to the grid. When a system disturbance hits, the physical mass of those turbines helps to arrest the frequency decay before the governor droop system respond.

I literally had a CAISO gen desk dispatcher sitting at my desk training today. We went over a few of these scenarios & what California & WECC as a whole interconnection experiences with all these renewables on the system.
 
Rambo John J

Rambo John J

Baker Team
First 100
Jan 17, 2015
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rmenergy said:
One of the last x posts linked mentioned inertia, or lack there of. That’s a factor I bring up regularly with these discussions but it seems to go over peoples head.

Spinning turbines are electromechanical coupled to the grid. When a system disturbance hits, the physical mass of those turbines helps to arrest the frequency decay before the governor droop system respond.

I literally had a CAISO gen desk dispatcher sitting at my desk training today. We went over a few of these scenarios & what California & WECC as a whole interconnection experiences with all these renewables on the system.
Click to expand...
So they have been running with lower turbine inertia, and therefore more susceptible to failure?

Pardon my small brain in large head, I was born this way.

Thanks for the response.
 
Enock-O-Lypse Now!

Enock-O-Lypse Now!

Underneath Denver International Airport
Jun 19, 2016
12,394
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rmenergy said:
One of the last x posts linked mentioned inertia, or lack there of. That’s a factor I bring up regularly with these discussions but it seems to go over peoples head.

Spinning turbines are electromechanical coupled to the grid. When a system disturbance hits, the physical mass of those turbines helps to arrest the frequency decay before the governor droop system respond.

I literally had a CAISO gen desk dispatcher sitting at my desk training today. We went over a few of these scenarios & what California & WECC as a whole interconnection experiences with all these renewables on the system.
Click to expand...
Any drills planned for May 17th-19th?
 
rmenergy

rmenergy

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Mar 27, 2021
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Rambo John J said:
So they have been running with lower turbine inertia, and therefore more susceptible to failure?

Pardon my small brain in large head, I was born this way.

Thanks for the response.
Click to expand...
Yes. I don’t operate over there so can’t tell you for certain what caused their cascading outage. I can say for certain that the more inertia you have on the system, the better frequency response resilience you will have. You’ll also have better reactive power capabilities with the additional reactive resources from the turbines
 
C

CuddleBug

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Nov 18, 2023
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It is being reported that it is now mostly back up. It was down for 18 hours, what if it's weeks or months? We've been on borrowed time, I think in the last few years we were barely missed by a gigantic coronal mass ejection from the sun. It's going to get ugly if one finally hits again and takes out satellites, electricity and fries a majority of electronics. As soon as AI takes over at least that will be its primary goal, how to ensure it survives and never loses power, it'll be solved quickly then.
 
rmenergy

rmenergy

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Mar 27, 2021
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CuddleBug said:
It is being reported that it is now mostly back up. It was down for 18 hours, what if it's weeks or months? We've been on borrowed time, I think in the last few years we were barely missed by a gigantic coronal mass ejection from the sun. It's going to get ugly if one finally hits again and takes out satellites, electricity and fries a majority of electronics. As soon as AI takes over at least that will be its primary goal, how to ensure it survives and never loses power, it'll be solved quickly then.
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AI isn't taking over the power system any time soon. There are several functions that are already automated but there are also several functions that computers can't process due to bad/suspect data as well as worker safety. When comms go down, everything becomes manual as the systems can't process information correctly.
 
C

CuddleBug

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Nov 18, 2023
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rmenergy said:
AI isn't taking over the power system any time soon. There are several functions that are already automated but there are also several functions that computers can't process due to bad/suspect data as well as worker safety. When comms go down, everything becomes manual as the systems can't process information correctly.
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Understood, but not any time soon will be sooner than anyone thinks.
 
rmenergy

rmenergy

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Mar 27, 2021
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CuddleBug said:
Understood, but not any time soon will be sooner than anyone thinks.
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I have 14yrs until retirement. It won't be ready then or for another few decades after I retire. It won't be ready until humans are no longer the ones doing actual work in the field making repairs. Even at that, for AI to be able to interpret bad data being transmitted without human interaction, good luck.
 
C

CuddleBug

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Nov 18, 2023
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rmenergy said:
I have 14yrs until retirement. It won't be ready then or for another few decades after I retire. It won't be ready until humans are no longer the ones doing actual work in the field making repairs. Even at that, for AI to be able to interpret bad data being transmitted without human interaction, good luck.
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I bet you start seeing robots doing field work before your retirement. Maybe not all of it, but they will be in the mix.
 
rmenergy

rmenergy

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Mar 27, 2021
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CuddleBug said:
I bet you start seeing robots doing field work before your retirement. Maybe not all of it, but they will be in the mix.
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Utilities isn’t an indoor manufacturing facility/assembly line work. The conditions & remote areas that have to be transversed, as well as the varying & non standardized equipment makes the use of automation not just impractical but not encouraged. Utilities aren’t even considering replacing line crews with robots due to these & several other factors
 
Papi Chingon

Papi Chingon

Domesticated Hombre
Oct 19, 2015
29,861
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Michael Shellenberger:

This is truly bananas: all of Europe appears to have been seconds away a continent-wide blackout.

The grid frequency across continental Europe plunged to 49.85 hertz — just a hair above the red-line collapse threshold.
The normal operating frequency for Europe’s power grid is 50.00 Hz, kept with an extremely tight margin of ±0.1 Hz. Anything outside ±0.2 Hz triggers major emergency actions.

If the frequency had fallen just another 0.3 Hz — below 49.5 Hz — Europe could have suffered a system-wide cascading blackout.

At that threshold, automatic protective relays disconnect major power plants, and collapse accelerates.

And it’s disturbingly easy to imagine multiple scenarios where that could have occurred…


Renewables don’t risk blackouts, said the media. But they did and they do. The physics are simple. And now, as blackouts in Spain strand people in elevators, jam traffic, and ground flights, it’s clear that too little “inertia” due to excess solar resulted in system collapse.
 
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CuddleBug

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Nov 18, 2023
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I guess I don't understand how a grid frequency dropping too low can create major blackouts, is there an easy way to understand it? In my mind I just don't get why there wouldn't just be brownouts or loss of service in some places and not total blackouts.
 
MountainMedic

MountainMedic

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Sep 28, 2017
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Someone in France ran the blender while Someone in Spain fired up a vacuum. We were one bag of microwave popcorn away from total destruction.
 
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