The reducing amount of inertia due to renewable generation is a problem well known to the professionals that run the grid and they have warned politicians. The problem is that the politicians put in charge of energy are left wing Eco nut cases driven by ideology and they won't listen. I see the major outage in a Spain as a good thing and a warning. frankly I hope it happens here in the UK if that's what it takes to get our particular Eco nutcase sacked. We need a return to sanity in the pursuit of net zero. I'm not saying abandon progress, Just put a grown up in charge that will use some pragmatism.
Major power grid issues in Portugal, Spain and parts of France
- Thread starter alarmguy
- Start date
I don't think we were in any doubt that the pursuit of net zero was behind the blackout some how but the actions of the solar generators shutting down on economic grounds was willfully destabilising for the grid and they didn't seem to care.
It's not just that net zero seems to be recklessly pursued but the way that energy generators are being rewarded seems dysfunctional.
The problem is that batteries are being auto bid...they can change output in cycles, not seconds and minutes. So whe the market dispatch engine is shifting bid stacks rapidly...you get this...
AZjeff
$50 Site Donor 2023
What I want to know is where does the electricity go when it gets to the end of the wire??
Well that was a big part of the problem- voltages increased on the Spanish grid as a result of reducing flow to to France and Portugal to try to improve stability. The substations supplying various towns can adpt to a slow increase of voltage by switching transformer taps, but it uses an electromechanical mechanism that moves slowly. A sudden increase will cause the substation to trip (disconnect itself from the grid) due to overvoltage. Of course that caused further voltage increases on the remaining grid.
A solar farm would always want to sell all the power they have all day long, unless they are in position to increase the price by creating a shortage.
The problem in this incident was never a shortage of energy.
AC grids are really fickle and this sort of blackout has happened several times before, even when all generators were conventional.
Last edited:
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Great thread on this by Xiao Wang on twitter:
Not that simple - High influx of renewables pushes prices negative. In Oz down to -$1,000/MWh ($1/kWh) when retail is $0.36 (ish). in Spain it was down to minus a Euro (BTW, Oz peaks can be $20/kWh).
In Oz, you can see the renewables carry negative prices down to their floor (their perMWh subsidy) thenthey pull t...so yes, they'll "pay" to make energy until they net zero....so if toggling around this trigger point...
