by Russ Schussler (Planning Engineer)
On April 28th Spain, Portugal and parts of France suffered a major grid outage. A formal evaluation will likely be released at a later date cataloging many of the contributing factors and system deficiencies. Unfortunately, such reports often provide more confusion than clarity, as they tend to prioritize the triggers for system outages over the underlying causes. Post hoc it is easy to look at the vast data available and construct favored narratives about how the outage might have been avoided. This piece will look at “advance” warnings that point to the true cause of the blackout in Spain, Portugal and parts of France.
Core Insight: It has long been predicted that replacing conventional synchronous generators, which rotate together with the grid, with asynchronous inverter-based resources like wind, solar, and batteries will increase the risk of blackouts. Grid planners recognize that unanticipated adverse events—such as line outages, generator trips, substation failures, and major faults—will continue to impact power grids. Their challenge is to ensure the grid is robust enough to withstand and recover from such disturbances without major consequences. Proponents of wind, solar, and batteries may attempt to attribute blackouts to the adverse events that triggered the outage, rather than to flaws in the underlying system. This is akin to blaming an automobile’s brake failure on the conditions that necessitated sudden braking, rather than on the failure of the braking system itself. While lessons learned may help mitigate risks from adverse events, such occurrences cannot be entirely eliminated from grid operations. Reducing the risk of blackouts depends on enhancing grid robustness.
My Warnings and Predictions
My May 7, 2015 posting, Transmission planning: wind and solar noted the following:
The grid is built upon and supported by heavy rotating machinery. Synchronous spinning generators combine with power lines and loads to make up complex electro-mechanical machine that must maintains stability. Stability refers to the ability of the system to stay in synchronism, balance loads and generation and maintain voltages following system disturbances. Intermittent generation (wind/PV solar) does not rotate in synchronism with the grid. As such they do not have performance characteristics that support the grid as well as synchronously rotating generators (hydro, coal, gas, nuclear plants) do. The system must be able to ride out power imbalances caused by faults and outages. Greater penetrations of non-synchronous generators (inverters used for PV Solar and Wind) tend to make the system, all else equal, less stable….
The power grid does not always operate as planned. Extreme weather, unanticipated outages and a host of other factors can result in the system operating somewhere outside of planned conditions. Generally, the system is robust enough to handle most departures without problems. For more severe departures from planned conditions the re-dispatch of generating resources is a major tool for the system operators. As the amount of intermittent generation increases, this tool will become blunted from a lack of qualifying capable dispatchable resources…. …. There are suggestions that intermittents could better mimic conventional generation, but it would incur significant costs. ….Building a surplus of renewable resources to sit idle waiting to back each other up and respond as needed is economically implausible at this time.
Greater penetration of renewable resources will limit the options available to operators while at the same time increasing uncertainty around expected generation patterns. To accommodate such uncertainty the choices are to: 1) increase grid costs and infrastructure, 2) limit the operational flexibility of the grid , 3) increase generation costs through backup generation resources or 4) live with increased risks and degraded reliability. Likely all four are and will continue to occur to some extent as the penetration of intermittent resources increases.…
(W)hen intermittent resources only make up a small percentage of total system generation, the adverse impacts are masked by the margin and robustness built into the system… As penetration levels rise and renewables replace non-intermittent conventional units, they will have major impacts upon grid costs and reliability.
The next year in January of 2016 I elaborated on those points in a piece entitled Renewables and grid reliability. It’s worth a full read, but I will reference the key points here:
- There has been a high value placed on having an extremely reliable bulk grid as the costs and consequences of bulk grid outages are severe
- The bulk grid supports and is supported by conventional rotating generators (Coal, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, biomass) which provide “Essential Reliability Services” (ERSs)
- Wind and solar provide increased reliability risks because they are new changing technologies, they are intermittent and they do not as readily provide ERSs
- Current high levels of reliability depend upon experience gained over time through the gradual adoption of new technologies
- Wind and solar can be made to provide approximations of ERSs, but that requires significant increased costs and reduced generation output
- Because of the complexity of impacting factors and the high level of reliability maintained for the US grids, systemic degradation of the reliability of the grid is hard to detect and measure
- The amount of renewable penetration that can be accommodated will vary from area to area and power system to power system – There is not a single answer
- Because conventional resources produce an abundance of ERSs, accommodation of low levels of renewables may be accomplished with negligible risks
- Because current renewables do not provide adequate ERSs high penetration levels provide significant risks
- Between the above two levels there is a gap of (wicked?) uncertainty.
- For assessing grid reliability, the maximum penetration of wind and solar during times of stress is the key number not the “average” contribution of wind and solar
- Increased penetration of such asynchronous resources, all else equal, will likely adversely impact bulk grid reliability
- As the penetration level of asynchronous generation increases this will either increase cost, limit operational flexibility, degrade reliability or most likely result in a combination of all three factor
A decade ago, major power systems were still sufficiently robust, so the risks from emerging problems were minimal at the time. The above statements warned that such concerns would eventually arise if trends continued. At low levels of penetration, the additional risks were small, but as penetration increased, the risks grew exponentially. By the time of this posting, Wind and Solar Can’t support the Grid in December of 2024 the existing risks had become clear:
Unlike conventional rotating generation, wind and solar do not readily supply inertia and other essential reliability services. As penetration of wind and solar resources increase, grid reliability decreases. The challenges of increasing wind and solar increase exponentially as you increase their share of generation. Policy makers, academics and others seeking to increase wind and solar are focusing on the wrong problems (intermittency) and failing to study the real operational problems inherent in inverter based generation from wind and solar.
On February 19 of this year in this post Unraveling the Narrative Supporting a Green Energy Transition, I outlined the major issues by addressing the misleading and false claims of the “green energy narrative” through bullet-point rebuttals. The points about inverter-based generation are particularly worth reviewing for those seeking more detail. After considering these factors and analyzing reviews of grid outages, it became clear that wind and solar were significantly degrading grid reliability in many areas, and much was being done to conceal this fact. I felt confident that upcoming grid outages would be linked to high penetration of wind and solar.
When an outage occurs, you can always choose to point a finger at any of the multiple things that went wrong. (#44, #26) Some traditional fossil fuel technology will always be included in the set of things that were not right. (Loss of just renewables doesn’t usually cause big problems because apart from energy, they don’t support the system while in service.) For various reasons, advocates insist the finger should be pointed away from renewables (and the gap in needed system support) and at the conventional technology that was not perfect when the outage occurred. It’s critical to note that conventional technology is never perfect across a large system, however we were able to make reliable robust systems that could easily accommodate such imperfections. But now the presence of less dependable resources and inverter-based energy makes systems far less robust, even during times when those problematic resources are working well. It’s a near sure bet the next large grid outage will be largely caused by problems associated with high levels of wind and solar penetration, whether those resources are available during the outage or not.
Major Outages Following my Posting
Since my February 19, 2025 prediction was published, two major blackouts have occurred. The first, six days later, left 98% of Chile without power. Limited reliable information is available about the Chilean outage, which was caused by a 500 kV line outage. Although Chile has significant hydro resources, many were offline, and the system relied heavily on wind and solar at the time. The system collapsed due to “unwanted activations” of electronic and special protection systems. At best, the issue likely stemmed from the learning curve associated with the complex protection schemes required for wind and solar generation. Our experience with conventional technology has developed over decades, so glitches with newer systems are expected. However, with accelerated efforts to integrate large amounts of newer technology, more such glitches are likely. A more serious concern is whether the complexity and challenges of high levels of asynchronous inverter-based generation are, as warned, inherently overwhelming.
More information is available about the blackout impacting Spain and Portugal. Two large solar installations tripped offline, followed by the loss of an interconnection to France. This created a generation shortfall that caused the system frequency to drop dangerously. Large amounts of asynchronous resources (wind and solar) disconnected from the system in response to the frequency drop, leading to the system’s collapse.
Frequency control is an essential reliability service supported by rotating machines with inertia. Such machines would have limited the frequency drop and helped the system recover from the excursion. More load shedding based on automatic underfrequency protection could have delayed the collapse and possibly saved the core grid. Inverter-based generation exacerbated the collapse and did little to prevent it. This collapse resembles one in South Australia caused by a lack of inertia.
What Are They Saying About This Outage?
Remarkably, many are focusing on the problems caused by a lack of inertia and the challenges of inverter-based generation. The core issues driving this blackout are clearer than in most cases.
Predictably, others are deflecting blame from wind and solar. The Spanish Prime Minister blamed Induced Atmospheric Vibration (IAV) for introducing frequency oscillations, claiming extreme weather caused corona discharge, which created electrohydrodynamic (EHD) forces. These forces allegedly caused low-frequency oscillations that worsened the situation. IAV may have triggered outages or aggravated the situation, but as noted, there will always be triggers stressing the system. The system should have been robust enough to withstand this disturbance, but it wasn’t due to lower levels of inertia.
Reuter’s advises, Don’t blame renewables. Blame “management of renewables”. They suggest more conventional generation or devices like synchronous condensers should have been online to support the system—effectively admitting that Wind and Solar Can’t Support the Grid. Undoubtedly, other system components were also malfunctioning. As I mentioned earlier, a thorough review will provide data that can be shaped into narratives to deflect attention from the root causes.
An expert from Madrid argues that the triggering event wasn’t an N-1 event (where the system loses its single most impactful element) but an N-2 event (a double contingency). He does not blame inertia, as the system isn’t required to have enough inertia to survive an N-2 event. He suspects one of the events was caused by RoCoF relays, which interrupt generation when frequency changes rapidly. Note that frequency problems tied to low inertia caused the loss of solar facilities and the system collapse.
I may not have heard his best arguments fully and correctly and they may be refined further. He likely knows more about the technical specifics of the occurrence than I do, but I suspect our differences are more philosophical then technical. He seems to be saying that: 1) the system performed outside the bounds of study protocols, 2) the causes of the two events leading to the double contingency are unclear (though RoCoF variations may have caused one), and 3) since the event was outside study criteria, low inertia isn’t to blame.
I counter that system planning was insufficient. Systems should remain stable across many N-2 events, as many double contingencies have less severe consequences than the worst N-1 event. This N-2 event doesn’t seem particularly severe compared to potential N-1 events. Moreover, both RoCoF issues and large frequency deviations are worsened by low inertia and mitigated by higher inertia. This blackout has the fingerprints of low inertia everywhere.
How Should We Define the Cause of Blackouts?
Consider the Suzuki Samurai, a popular automobile in the 1980s with a stability problem: it frequently tipped over. Proponents of these vehicles pointed out that rollovers were often accompanied by sharp turns, adverse conditions, road grading, unanticipated obstacles, or the behavior of other vehicles. Despite these complicating factors, Samurais were much more likely to tip over than other cars due to their tall, narrow body, high center of gravity, and short wheelbase. These characteristics made the car nimbler in off-road situations, particularly at slower speeds. Proponents could argue that if other cars drove more slowly and were equally nimble, Samurais wouldn’t need to swerve as much, reducing rollovers. Sweeping changes to perfect the world—such as ensuring all roads are well-graded, lowering speed limits, or preventing dogs and children from running into the road—could theoretically eliminate the Samurai’s problems. Similarly, calls to “modernize the grid and its operations” so wind and solar can perform without causing problems are overly idealistic. The Samurai needed to be safe in less-than-optimal conditions that drivers might encounter. Likewise, the grid must be robust enough to survive many issues claimed to “cause” blackouts. Trying to improve the world while making the Samurai’s base narrower and raising its center of gravity is a fool’s errand, as are efforts to eliminate grid problems so wind and solar can function without conventional generation.
A 2016 post entitled Renewables and grid reliability explained:
I will share a planning secret. We don’t really think that the specific outage and the specific conditions which were identified in the study will actually occur and the system will be “saved” by that particular fix. We have learned over time that planning that way results in a system that is sufficiently robust so that system operators can sufficiently recover when unanticipated events happen across variety of circumstances. Planners will model the new technology as best they can, but if adoption of new technology is rapid, they will not have the needed experience behind them to justify confidence in the models.
Low inertia and the fact that many inverter-based generation resources tripped offline during the frequency excursion caused the blackout. While it’s true that without the triggering event, no outage would have occurred, systems cannot be designed to avoid all serious unanticipated events. Power systems should however survive most rare, once-in-fifty-year events, whether anticipated or not.
If low inertia (among other issues with asynchronous inverter-based generation) makes N-2 outages and cascading events more likely, planning criteria must change. If the many models for dispersed inverter-based generation are collectively less accurate than considerably fewer models for large central generating stations, planning must change. If the protection schemes are grossly more complicated and prone to failure, planning must change. All this will increase costs and complexity and incur more failures in meantime directly attributable to wind, solar, and batteries. Proponents might ask, “We never had to plan for N-2 events before; why now?” The answer is simple: these changes are necessary to maintain reliability. RoCoF, mentioned earlier, is a newer metric developed solely due to high penetration of inverter-based generation, as detailed in ENTSO-E’s Inertia and Rate of Change of Frequency. RoCoF “protection” contributed to this blackout. It cannot be overemphasized that adapting to increased inverter-based generation will complicate planning, raise costs, and create more opportunities for failures.
The Evidence of Increasing Risk has been here a Long Time
The January 2014 posting, Renewables and grid reliability, included a graphic from NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation). This figure showed the system response to a 2,750 MW generation trip in actual and forecast years, based on additions of asynchronous resources. The chart clearly illustrates that the system responds less favorably each year as the amount of inverter-based resources (shown in parentheses) increases.
This same trend emerged in Spain and Portugal. It’s no surprise that the risk of blackouts grew as inverter penetration increased. In fact, a similar outage occurred in the Spanish system in2021, but higher inertia levels at the time prevented a disaster.
Increased penetration of asynchronous inverter-based generation degrades several metrics critical for system reliability. Grid experts have long been aware of these issues but have struggled to effectively reach and convince key audiences. The charts, data, and explanations may be clear, but most people won’t heed the message until they face a harsh wake-up call.
Conclusions
Proponents have long dismissed predictions that increased wind and solar use will raise costs and reduce reliability. Despite calculations on paper suggesting that large-scale integration of wind and solar is cheaper, real-world evidence shows they increase costs. Despite claims about reliability, previous outages have demonstrated the potential for wind and solar to heighten blackout risks. Pressure has been applied to frequently to distract from the real issues and real-world impacts.
It cannot be emphasized enough: the grid must be robust enough to survive major contingencies in an imperfect world. We must stop listening to those who, after an outage or blackout, insist the problem was unexpected events on the grid rather than the fact that grid reliability has been degraded by increased penetration of inverter-based generation.
Similarly, those who claim that wind, solar, and batteries can be made to support the grid more effectively must be challenged to acknowledge their current real-world capabilities and set reasonable expectations for future performance. Making inverter-based generation perform well enough to support a grid is a complex and extremely challenging problem.
Reuters’ suggestion to “not blame renewables, but rather the management of renewables” is particularly infuriating. Grid managers, tasked with maintaining stability, have been ignored for far too long. Grid and generation decisions are often driven by political rather than engineering considerations. The challenges of using and managing inverter-based generation have been acknowledged for years. Blaming those struggling to manage what’s been thrust upon them, while excusing renewables, is blatantly unfair.
Wind and solar have a place, but their appropriate levels vary by region based on current and foreseeable capabilities, not unrealistic hopes. Hopes for the future are admirable, but there’s a vast gap between what might one day be possible and what is practical and proven today. Reliable electricity is too critical to depend on unproven technology.
The recent blackout should serve as a wake-up call for policy makers. If it doesn’t, more events will follow, with increasingly severe consequences.
Note: Thanks to Chris Morris for edits, ideas and discussions around this topic.
‘Grid planners recognize that unanticipated adverse events—such as line outages, generator trips, substation failures, and major faults…’
…like, the acts of godless despots who hate the ideals of Americanism and drop bombs on urban centers in neighboring countries and dictate outcomes at the point of a bayonet?
OH, you mean like Israel does, using “americanism” money, bombs and aircraft.
Israel has been under long term attack by Hamas. Hamas stated goal is the destruction of Israel.
The primary problem with this is they drop too few bombs.
meant… e.g., Russia dropping a missile on an apartment building in Ukraine…
What are the “ideals of Americanism” nowadays? I ask because it seems to me we are divided into two radically different and opposing groups, which in turn are divided into groups which barely talk to each other.
“What are the “ideals of Americanism” nowadays?”
They’re the same as the founding, based on tenets of classical liberalism (the Right only). Though I understand the reason for the question.
The Left have gradually divorced themselves from U.S. classical liberal roots, the political philosophy underpinning the Founders creation of the Constitution/Bill of Rights and the concepts behind Federalism, beginning late 19th century. Classical liberalism went out of favor during this period when political philosophy splintered into factions: Neo Liberalism, Progressivism and Conservatism. The Left initially embraced each philosophical faction to varying degrees, but have since ventured far beyond the nations foundational principles. The Left abandoned U.S. classical liberalism entirely in the early 60’s (Blue Dog conservatives bolted from the party), these became known as the Rights Neo Conservatives.
U.S. conservatism is the only philosophy remaining that still embraces U.S. classical liberal roots. The political definition of conservatism is to have a sympathetic appeal to an earlier political philosophy, for the U.S. this represents classical liberalism.
Conservatism (the U.S. version of conservatism is uniquely based on classical liberalism, other nations are not). U.S. conservatism is ironically the most progressive philosophy, it embraces individual liberty, and freedom—foundational principles—these are what embody creative capitalism, invention. All other political philosophies are demonstrably regressive, in that they gravitate towards collectivist principles that minimizes individual liberty. The U.S. Left have increasingly gravitated towards EU soft socialism between the 20th-21st century, today they’re indistinguishable to EU collectivist politics. These nations have gradually fallen behind competitively, they’re ironically kept afloat by U.S. capitalism.
The liberal fascistas in government believe no one that succeeds really deserves it. Half the country feels that way. It gets their goat that their own self-defeating attitudes prevent them and others from achieving by getting out and just doing it.
The rich will soon be genetically enhanced. Why would they every worry about you or me after they become immortal?
https://phys.org/news/2025-05-ai-dna-genes-healthy-mammalian.html
Edward J. Wegman got up before Congress (Committee on Energy and Commerce) to let everyone know the kind of monkey business Michael Mann and his gaggle of sycophant ‘hockey stick’ fabricators were up to and no one on the Left, in academia or in the government cared because Mann said what they want to hear.
Russ, I have been debating this inertia problem with my youngest son (who has a Masters in Electronics and Controls Engineering) and I have concluded its possible to build (a very expensive) inverter-capacitor-storage battery combination to create synthetic inertia. The problem I see is that this doesn’t solve intermittency nor the fact that solar doesn’t generate at night.
Frenando comment touches on a few issues, stability, intermittency and the LCOE.
The LCOE computation only includes the cost of generation and some of the costs of transmission. It doesnt include the cost of stability and intermittency which is currently borne by fossil fuels. Solving the intermittency requires a combination of storage and redundancy. The current LCOE assumes all the electricity produced by Wind and Solar is used. Once the redundancy is ramped up, then there will considerable overproduction on the “good Days” in which such excess will be wasted, thus throwing the denominator in the lcoe comp significantly downward.
I think that is what is happening in California (CAISO). Huge amounts of solar on the grid by law. Curtailment with controls engineering can provide ERS. CAISO also uses up to 10GW of battery at peak. I think it is working. They do have forced blackouts (PSPS) where they blame fire hazard but it is really a supply/transmission issue. The end result is $0.50/kWhr retail prices. https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf
Most of their investment is in updating and expanding transmission.
Yes. With energy storage, capacitors, power electronics… you might be able to do good job of mimicking an electro-mechanical machine. With a lot of effort it might smoothly respond to the inputs and outputs of electric and magnetic waves with voltage and current at appropriate angles. You would also have the capability of making it perform differently than conventional generators. Some would say you could make it respond “better”.
My experience with power electronics and their impacts on the grid is that settings that are ‘better” for a part of the system in response to one trigger, might be worse for other parts of the system and other triggers. I remember some uncertainty about a setting in a model for one of LADWPs HVDC lines. I knew the HVDC line operated at constant gamma in the steady state, but what about under transient conditions – did it vary then? The sheets we with modelling values for this were blank on that subject and some beginning engineer had just figured we could use the steady state value because that’s all we had. There were reasons to think that was not true. I spent months trying to track down any international expert that could help enlighten us. Basically no one knew. The simulation runs I did showed that if it operated one way it allowed increasing flows on one set of paths by 500 MW, but decreased capability a few hundred MWs on a different interface. I changed companies before figuring out what it did, how it was modelled and if we could control it what would be best. All this control allows for a lot of uncertainty. Now imagine a bunch of smaller and more numerous inverter controls from different production run, from differing manufacturers s and imagine how good the data might be.
How do you make it “better” in any one instance, when there are many other elements out there with such freedoms and all may or may not be modelled right and they all may be tinkered with. Stability analysis calls for the modelling of all kinds of differential equations varying across many elements. The math to optimize a system with such freedom is staggering.
So, I think it is a good thing for people to work on developing specific applications to allow specific inverters to perform better. We are at that stage on the technological front. But it is way too premature to expect that the grid may soon be able to accommodate and be transformed by large amounts of such elements. Let’s see how we do at the first step before thinking this is the solution for widespread implementation across a system with more and more inverters and less and less conventional machines.
I wonder if genetic engineering is good analogy. We can do single gene edits and edits on small sets of genes. It’s in the challenging but possible range to modify multiple genes for complex traits. But we can’t make organisms from scratch or even redesign organisms with extreme changes. Post hoc fitting inverters with synthetic inertia, introducing lots of new inverters with synthetic inverters at high significant levels might be on par with making a human with gills.
I was wondering recently about how HVDC lines would respond to upsets. Apparently we don’t really know.
Models are always approximations and never perfect. Hopefully margin combines with their collective performance.That was a long while back. They probably have fixed that one.
Balance on a grid is typically guaranteed by three things:
(1) a complex network of interconnected lines, known as meshes, that distribute electrical flows across the grid to prevent overloads.
(2) interconnections with neighboring countries’ grids, which allow energy to be imported or exported as needed to balance generation and demand.
(3) “mechanical inertia.” Synchronous generators—the large spinning machines that generate electricity in power stations—also store a lot of energy in their very large rotating parts
Demand Stability:
Electricity demand tends to be fairly stable during the middle of the day, although often higher in the morning breakfast and later dinner hours.
Of all the many potential problems with solar energy, the best hour of the day should be the noon hour on a sunny day with good weather. That describes the conditions of the blackout.
Every prior blackout in history has been caused by something other than solar energy or wind energy. Including Texas in 2021.
It is premature to jump to any conclusions about the root cause of this blackout.
One lesson learned:
Political inertia
Most people immediately jumped to conclusions based on whether they liked or hated solar energy!
Richard The cause of the Texas grid failure of Feb 2021 is extremely distorted by the advocates.
A) The short term immeditiate cause was the lack of winterization
B) it was the shift to wind and solar and the associated pricing structure that crippled the cash flow necessary for proper maintenance.
C ) lastly and most importantly, the loss of wind 90% in texas and 60-70% loss across the entire north american contintent showed the wind and solar are not the solution. The wind draught lasted around 6-10 days across the NA contintent
Texas 2011 and 2021 were both caused by a temporary shortage of just in time gas production due to extremely cold weather causing wellhead freezing. . Winterization is too expensive for the very rare Texas extreme cold weather. Problem first discovered in 1980’s.
Never fixed
Windmills can not be blamed for a lack of wind. Happens frequently. Texas 2021 had sufficient fossil fuel backup for that record US wind drought … except there was not enough gas!
Texas built a lot of windmills from 2011 to 2021
ERCOT fools
Not the solution for a temporary shortage of just in time gas production
Waste of money
Electrified gas line compressors too
Made the gas shortage problem even worse in 2021
More gas power plants in 2021 would not have helped because there was not enough gas for them. Unless they had on site gas storage … which Texas should consider doing.
Coal and nuclear would have worked in the extreme cold weather.
richard – my comment was in reference to the texas blackout not caused by wind and solar
My points are correct
The massive strategic planning errors were the cause of the tactical failure. Dont lose sight of the strategic error by focusing on the tactical failure.
winterization in Texas is not “maintenance”
It is a large private sector investment for the possibility of being needed for a few very cold days every decade. That investment has been rejected by many gas exploration companies.
Natural gas production can be significantly reduced during very cold weather. This happens because cold weather can cause equipment to freeze, leading to shutdowns, and also impact access to gas facilities due to poor road condition
The gas shortage for a few days in 2011 and 2021 is not a strategic planning error. — solutions were known and expensive. The obvious alternative to wellhead winterization was a few days of gas stored on site at each gas power plant.
I suppose the chosen solution was to assume global warming would fix the problem and reduce the risk. The cheapest solution. Didn’t work in 2021. But it might work in future decades.
since 2021, The Texas Legislature alone has allocated over $10 billion to upgrade infrastructure, winterize facilities, and create programs designed to improve overall grid reliability. And that doesn’t even include private investments made by energy providers to stay compliant with state mandates.
Winterize natural gas well: $20,000 – $50,000 per well
Winterize natural gas plant: ~$500,000 per plant
Upgrade Wind Turbines with Internal Heating: $400,000 per unit
98,709 active gas wells x $50K = $4,935,450,000 ($4.9B)
176 active natural gas plants x $500K = $88,000,000 ($88M)
15,300 active wind turbines x $400K = $6,120,000,000 ($6.1B)
Texas is booming.: more people are using more electricity and to keep up Texas will need to increase supply dramatically.
ERCOT reports that 99% of major power plants have implemented winterization measures. But critics question whether these upgrades will withstand another storm of Uri’s magnitude. any good reason to trust ERCOT?
The problem is not at the power plants.
It is at the wells.
In 2024, Texas added the most residents in the nation, gaining over 562,000 residents. This brings the estimated population to 31,290,831 as of July 1, 2024., up 2 million from the end of 2020 at 29.2 million
Richard, an acquaintance explained noon in late April and early May has been historically the worst time of the year for grid instability in Spain. He explains the weather is mild, there’s no need for AC nor heating, and there’s plenty of sunlight. The grid operator is under instructions to allow solar and wind to take as much share as possible, and orders the gas turbines to shut down. This drops system inertia and frequency begins to show glitches.
I suspect the blackout was caused by standing orders to max renewables (meaning solar and wind because hydro is closed, allowing it to be used at night). I checked over the historical record and saw one day when they actually ran 90% solar and wind for an hour. The Red Electrica president is a real estate registrar who went into politics, makes half a million euros a year, and functions as the government’s stooge. And the government is focused on woke ideology, period.
We need to get government out of the business of providing energy. “Since the modern nation-state was invented around the year 1500, a succession of countries have taken turns at being top nation, first Spain, then France, Britain, America… I am telling the next generation of young students, who will still be alive in the second half of our century, that misfortunes are on the way. Their precious Ph.D., or whichever degree they went through long years of hard work to acquire, may be may be worth less than they think.” ~ Dyson
Russ makes the following comment in the 2nd paragraph –
“Proponents of wind, solar, and batteries may attempt to attribute blackouts to the adverse events that triggered the outage, rather than to flaws in the underlying system.”
That is similar to proponents comments on the Feb 2021 texas gfrid failure. All due to lack of maintenance – yet the pricing structure of renewables is such that revenue is insufficient to cover maintenance. Proponents are missing the Why of the Why.
Also worth noting how renewable advocates treat stability issues very superficially. Jacobson’s 100% renewables for the 145 countries is a good example.
Could The Planning Engineer (or someone else) give us a mini-tutorial on how one might address the RoCoF problem using power electronics, and maybe some information about the experience and cost of that.
Try this and the link in the article for background. https://www.nojapower.com.au/expertise/2020/understanding-RCOF-protection
I would think RoCoF relay would like be priced similar to other trip devices of the same scale/magnitude/
A few points to rebut the certain rebuttals to an excellent article.
The first is that grid engineering is a very complex discipline which tends to glaze over the eyes of politicians and laymen. That leaves engineers wide open to a counter charge that if they are exact in their language, they lose communication to every body except a few technically trained people. If they attempt to communicate to the culture, some talking head, with an agenda will find error or disinformation in an engineer’s dialog on controversial issues. A d***** if you do or d***** if you don’t situation are the only alternatives. So I simplify.
If your grid is supported by solar cells and a cloud floats by, you lose juice. This brilliant discussion states that if you have spinning generators, which often takes hours to heat up the massive thick metal components, needed to withstand thousands of pounds of pressure, that is OK. The few back ups synch and lock in within seconds, as controlled by dispatchers and the lights stay on. If the system relies on non existent batteries, as large as a big buildings, they can lock in the supply juice for minutes, not hours or days. Green grids do not have these needed back ups due to cost. A reliable green grid costs far more than a society can pay. thus as the fraction of the grid supplied by green energy increases, the reliability will plummet without some type of hideously expensive back up power, juice at point A with guaranteed parameters.
Spain’s nukes shut down safely as engineered, providing no juice.
I have come to this. Mankind is learning the hard way, without fire, we all will die. So if climate change is a real and present danger, man kind must and will follow the dinosaurs into extinction. Modern life is not possible with fire. When a grid collapses people die, livelihoods end, social unrest increases. It is happening everywhere where green energy policies dominate.
America’s power plants are creaky, far beyond their design life. Consider New York city without juice for a year.
I engineered nukes, every type of fossil plant (carbon fuel), pieces of the grid and assessed advanced technology for decades. I recommend frugal living, and prayer.
A correction with apologies to all.
Modern life is not possible WITHOUT fire.
Old engineers cannot type… Pretty good with numbers though.
… need to figure out how if we’re going to occupy Mars.
Thanks, PE. As always, good piece.
Last Monday I arrived at Lisbon Airport from Sao Paulo just half an hour before the power went off. Has a 25 hour stopover instead of the scheduled 4 hours and instead of a direct flight to Manchester went via Malaga and Amsterdam. Door to door journey time was 50 hours instead of 21 hours.
I was grateful grateful for backup generators, which after an hour, provided limited power for water and some light. But refrigeration and air conditioning was out.
Note that both Portugal and Spain have been in a headlong rush for renewables. In March Portugal achieved over 90% of electricity production from renewables for the first time. On April 18 was the first weekday when Spain had 100% of electricity production from renewables. At the time of the blackout over 60% of Spain’s electricity production came from solar.
How long were you disconnected from cell phone and internet service? I heard there was a spike in Starlink traffic. Being cut off from all communications with no idea when you can contact anyone can be super stressful. Nice to hear of a first-hand experience.
Am not sure, as did not use the Internet too much. After about 7 hours my son was able to create a WiFi hot-spot for a young lady to make a WhatsApp call.
People were charging phones from the back of the automatic check-in boths and by unplugging hand dryers in the toilets.
Instead of employing inverters why don’t they use motor-generators to furnish power? You will now have the inertia and a clean power source.
My limited knowledge of inverters tells me they don’t produce pure sine waves, and they have harmonics.
An AC motor-DC generator combination is feasible, but it costs too much.
Charles k May: “Instead of employing inverters why don’t they use motor-generators to furnish power? You will now have the inertia and a clean power source. ….. ”
Fernando L: “An AC motor-DC generator combination is feasible, but it costs too much.”
As it concerns the Net Zero transition, money is no object. The transition into a wind and solar future is a decision being made by politicians who don’t care what it will cost.
The Chinese will happily sell these politicians all the wind turbines, all the solar panels, all the batteries, all the control systems, and all the DC-AC motor-generator combinations
needed to make all these various renewable energy systems work together, technically at least.
If the price of electricity doubles or triples as a consequence, the politicians don’t care.
And one reason why the politicians don’t care is that if the recent election in Ozonia a.k.a. Australia is any indication, the political constituencies which voted these politicians into office don’t care either.
Beta: “As it concerns the Net Zero transition, money is no object.”
I’ve agreed with your sentiment for a very long while, but I’m starting to see distinct cracks in the armor for net zero resolve, not so much with zealots, but from the power brokers who drive politics on the geopolitical stage. Net zero will remain a political objective, but it will be taken less seriously. I believe net zero will become mostly lip service, though CO2 will still likely decline substantially—mostly by default, because of competition.
The before paradigm shift is driven fundamentally by follow the money sensibilities, the rationale is to grab as large a piece of the global AI competitive pie as possible, it’s a land grab. The losers will fall to the bottom of the geopolitical pecking order. This means that solar/wind —where zealots hold hands and otherwise ride unicorns bareback in a hypnotic dream state towards nirvana—becomes greatly diminished. The focus will increasingly land on nuclear, namely small reactor innovation specifically, at least initially.
Populations know what insolvency feels like on a personal level, bottom-up leveraging plays a role in this transition. Those politicians playing the survivor role are feeling the heat, they’ll need to either maneuver, or be forced out.
Article:
“Few nations that have signed onto the Paris Agreement are meeting its decarbonization goals, but with 31 nations—including the United States—signing onto a separate $300 billion pledge to triple nuclear energy generation by 2050, those aims remain viable, panelists at a May 1 discussion on nuclear energy expansion concurred.
This shift has been long overdue,” said William Magwood, director-general of the Nuclear Energy Agency, a Paris-based liaison of government organizations that coordinates practices and policies related to advanced nuclear technology.
The numbers have been telling us for years that nuclear was going to play a substantial role if we were going to meet the objective many countries have set for themselves, to reduce CO2 emissions.
Speaking during a Center for Strategic & International Studies’ Nuclear Energy Expansion presentation, Magwood said there are many obstacles to overcome in expanding nuclear power worldwide.
But he predicted that within five years, there will be “a sort of democratization of nuclear.
There’s a real strong possibility you’re going to see nuclear power plants in Kenya, Philippines, Indonesia, countries that really haven’t had this before,” he said.”
https://thepatriotlight.com/560775/small-reactor-innovations-spur-global-interest-in-nuclear-energy/
The Madrid expert based its claims on the fact that there were two unrelated circumstances, one after the other, which is far too soon to tell.
What would happen if they were correlated, which is most likely possible? We would have had an N-1 event (if they were), and the blackout would not have occurred at all if the system had had sufficient inertia.
JL, this is what I have been able to piece together thus far:
The grid went unstable minutes before the first solar plant disconnect in Extremadura. It recovered partially for about 1.5 seconds and then the second disconnect took place. The second disconnect caused more instability, and this led to the French disconnect. The French disconnect jolted the system and all the generation plants in Spain shut down. The Continental Europe system frequency graph shows a serious dip to 49.86 Hertz at that point, but the REE system doesn’t display frequency to the public so it’s difficult to confirm exactly what happened. The Continental dip tells me the French are being smart by refusing to increase transmission capacity to the Iberian peninsula, because as things stand a group of teenagers stealing copper cable in Aragon could actually shut down all of Europe.
A study of the green program in Spain showed that, two jobs are destroyed for every one green job created; and, all of the supposed green jobs are all subsidized and don’t last.
Good report, thanks, but too long for a pollie to read. Maybe cut it down to:
This blackout has the fingerprints of low inertia everywhere.
Yesterday I read an article about research on one of the Hawaiian islands which extolled the effectiveness of grid forming inverters in providing simulated inertia and how they are the answer to stability issues in non-synchronous systems. Are they?
This is the article.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/electric-inverter
Tony – Good article. Thanks.
Russ S or Chris M
Can either of you provide insight on the grid following inverters vs grid forming inverters and which type Spain had, which type Broken Hill in Australia had , and what type inverters are needed to even have wind and solar feed into the grid?
thanks – Just need some education / insight.
Grid forming inverters are associated with large battery banks. I am not up on the technology enough to know if any solar or wind plants have them, but I am not aware of any that do. At Broken Hill the battery had the former, the rest of the plant there the latter. The grid operator did not allow the battery at Broken Hill to run in grid forming mode, even when islanded because it didn’t meet specification.
It is almost certain that all the solar plant in Spain (there was little wind generation that day) had grid following invertors. That is part of the problem that PE means when he says they don’t support the grid. Inverter based system have current limiters to stop the feed in when the voltage of the grid drops like during a fault. They often trip it out Synchronous plant doesn’t have these. Low voltage ride through capability. The lack of that tripped a lot of South Australia out.
Chris,
Having grid following microinverters I am a little familiar with grid profile settings. When the grid drops even for a second all the microinverters drop offline for 4-5 min.
I wonder if having each grid-following inverter could have multiple real-time frequency reference signals by a wireless/fiber regional network that could dynamically adapt to this kind of grid instability? Might not cost that much if it was easy to retrofit existing systems.
Jack That has been discussed and discounted before on a number of PE posts in the threads. You can’t get the timing needed. At 20 milliseconds between cycles, your timing needs to be in microseconds. You also need the right phase angle for the current too. Otherwise you turn the plant into a giant arc welding display.
Due to a remanent interest in power gen I read the article by Tony Taylor. And also tried to figure the article on RoCof version17.
Something seems not right to this old eng.
Heavy spinning rotors of great mass have a lot of Angular Momentum (intrinsic energy). But that large mass also has great inertia; an inability to respond to fast speed changes.
So if a rotor is off frequency by some amount in a fault, connecting a grid forming inverter at different frequency however small will likely not result in fun.
Maybe the reason jacksmith4tx says ” microinverters drop offline for 4-5 min”. There are other issues. Conventional turbines respond to load pick-up according to a governor droop characteristic (if I recall set to some 4%). Even in a very small grid that spelled trouble between generators (fiddled settings, load-set over-ride, —).
Plus that it seems the system motto is “every man for himself”.
Pretty sure something like this would work at the speed of light. If any of the qbits go out of sync all clients could compensate nearly instantaneously. Of course this isn’t commercially available yet but I bet the Defense Department would be their first customer.
“University of Rochester and RIT develop experimental quantum communications network
The Rochester Quantum Network uses single photons to transmit information over dual fiber-optic telecommunications lines.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1082808
“This is an exciting step creating quantum networks that would protect communications and empower new approaches to distributed computing and imaging,” says Nickolas Vamivakas, the Marie C. Wilson and Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Optical Physics, who led the University of Rochester’s efforts. “While other groups have developed experimental quantum networks, RoQNET is unique in its use of integrated quantum photonic chips for quantum light generation and solid-state based quantum memory nodes.”
Jack It would help your case a lot if you actually did calculations before making statements.
If the sender and receiver of a speed of light 60Hz signal are just100km apart, that is about 7° out of sync (if my fag packet maths is right). How far is it across the biggest AC grid? At microsecond timing, the grid frequency isn’t stable.
But the signal speed is not the issue, it is the response and processing speed of the equipment converting a signal into something that goes into the grid. That has to be done at extremely reliability for high voltage and high current. I suspect those type of issues are plaguing the development of grid forming inverter power.
But the real killer is the current system with high speed turbines spinning generators is simple, proven performance and cheap. No alternatives come anywhere close to that.
Yes, I was hoping that Russ Schussler would put up a thread on this. Now I’ll watch the to’s and thro’s and wriggles.
The power loss occurred about 5 days prior to a general election of the Federal Govt in Australia. I am now able to say with absolute certainty that a sufficient majority voted for the Spanish experience.
The Aus MSM reported the power loss for about 24 hours after it occurred, then memory holed it. It had obviously dawned on editorial staff that publishing details would not help curating preferred election propaganda.
As small but concerning blackout side effect was my accidental listen to Australia’s science communicator expert Dr Karl Sven Woytek Sas Konkovitch Matthew Kruszelnicki, aka Dr Karl.
His public broadcast talk was within two days after the start of the Spanish blackout. Words in and around his talk were connected with education of school children. (I was dozing in the wee hours and did not catch the follow-up details).
Dr Karl stated emphatically that the Spanish blackout could not be blamed on “renewables” which in Australia essentially means electricity from solar panels and windmills, sometimes including hydro.
I have strong objections to our school children being fed propaganda pap. Geoff S
The blackout cost Spain about half a billion dollars in short order. A high price to pay for “green” energy.
Spain’s biggest ever blackout wiped almost €400 million ($454 million) off the economy, according to an estimate by the country’s largest domestic bank.
LINK:www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-06/spanish-economy-to-have-a-400-million-hit-on-blacko-caixabank-says
I think the GloTEC data tells the tale of what happened. It looks like there was a solar wind intrusion through the Earth’s magnetic field causing a huge downward pulse of ionized particles centered on Portugal/Spain. Unfortunately, the animation of the data is only for a day, so if you didn’t look last Monday or early Tuesday you won’t see it. My guess is that we will see more of these events as the Earth’s magnetic field contians to weaken.
Pingback: Ya hay datos segundo a segundo del apagón, y lo complican todo aún más
Pingback: usatoday24
Pingback: Xataka – Ya tenemos segundo a segundo los datos sobre el gran apagón en España. Lo complican todo aún más – Yacal
Pingback: Ya tenemos segundo a segundo los datos sobre el gran apagón en España. Lo complican todo aún más - Nicolás Jiménez Silva
Pingback: Casting blame for the blackout in Spain, Portugal, and parts of France – Climate- Science.press
A ‘water battery’ is a relatively inexpensive way to store excess wind power energy- essentially pumping water uphill.
I think more wind turbines helps stabilizing the grid.
But why the net-zero policies? CO2 doesn’t pose any danger to Earth’s climate.
CO2 is the plants food. The present CO2 content (~ 400 ppm) is of a trace gas in Earth’s atmosphere.
Plants suffer from the CO2 deficit, plants actually starve for CO2.
Pitty the policies makers do not see that.
–
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Pingback: Ya tenemos segundo a segundo los datos sobre el gran apagón en España. Lo complican todo aún más « SerNoticias.com.mx
Here in Australia we are very interested in global progress of renewables-based clean electricity grids. However only a few serious observers are concerned about feasibility. So the Spain/Portugal failure is seen as a significant wake-up call. For us the situation is even more alarming. Nuclear is illegal here and there are no international connections, as in Europe, to reliable neighboring grids with adequate inertia. Politicians have unquestioning faith in an ultimate 100% solar/wind/storage (batteries + pumped hydro) clean power solution. They throw around new higher “% renewables” targets as if it’s a Sotheby’s auction. The lack of evidence for feasibility is clearly of no concern to them. We are sleepwalking into disaster. And the silence of qualified engineers in the industry is very sad, as is the role being played by our famous national scientific research organization, CSIRO, in influencing public opinion and aligning it to political demands.
Quote from TB: “– there are no international connections, as in Europe, to reliable neighboring grids with adequate inertia.-“.
Which to my mind is shifting responsibility to a neighbor. Who understandably would prefer to survive your disturbance by disconnecting.
Quote “–the silence of qualified engineers in the industry is very sad –“. The politico who has to provide medicine for someone else would prefer to buy him snake-oil than listen to a doctor first.
There is also trouble on the domestic level – protecting and maintaining a domestic supply in an area with solar panels and inverters of dubious quality.
Pingback: Ya tenemos segundo a segundo los datos sobre el gran apagón en España. Lo complican todo aún más - Optima97.com
The high cost of cheap energy:
Rapidly building a record amount of offshore wind is central to UK Energy Minister Ed Miliband’s ambitious plan. While reaching the clean grid target was already challenging, the cancellation of one of the biggest wind farms in the world will make it harder to achieve. And with Orsted citing insufficient returns as the reason for halting the project, it may mean UK consumers need to pay even higher prices to deliver the government’s plan.
LINK:www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-07/uk-clean-power-goal-slips-further-out-of-reach-as-wind-farm-axed
I provide a few memories from listening to experts, long dead, on facts that control your survival. Without juice all electronics become a grain of sand. My information, US – 60 Hz, came primarily from the era of manual control.
Plant operators knew their power plants and expected loads; snow storms, heat waves, rush hour, etc. About 5% of the load had spinning reserves, heated up equipment, ready to quickly take load. All drains were open, spitting water, then screaming from steam flow. A drop of water is verboten in a steam turbine, spinning at 1800 or 3600 RPM. That never changes. The 15” diameter solid metal shaft at the front end is twisted 20 degrees from the generator end, the brake. The frequency, and phase angle are wholly controlled by the excitation current in the generator.
At the command, all eyes are riveted on the synch meter, aligning the generation to the grid; collars are damp with sweat. Done right; nothing is noticed with lock in. Copper pipes filled with coolant carry 22,000 VAC from the generator to the nearby low voltage side of the main transformer. Done wrong and the grid will snap the plant into alignment as guano and mill scale fall from above, the large buildings shake and the boss discusses your mother.
They are called power plants.
P E Hails may be relating from the experiences of others. It is different when seen by one’s own eyes and then the problem lands in one’s laps.
A drop of water in steam destroys the thrust bearing and the rotor discs weld to the diaphragms. Much head scratching but simple answer – finis.
“Done wrong —” the grid will snap a 15″ shaft after the fifth or so event. It seems rarely realised that turbine design stresses are at the limit of the material used. From top temp limit, temp fluctuation stresses, creep limits, LCF, graphitisation in older materials/alloys, metallurgical defects, etc.
And lately electronic control inputs that ignore all these factors and try to make a heavy rotor do the tango.
Yup. All true.
Now consider a turbine – generator, operating at very high stress, temperature, creep, defect limits, at 80% of the time, built, and on line since Korea or “Nam. They are far beyond their engineering design life.
This is what holds our grids up. Our real experts now lie in graves as the US built little for two generations. It takes a generation, after a degree, to get the scars, “to have the problem land in your lap”.
How did our green energy “leaders” let this happen? They want to restart old relics, abandoned plants, with new people with no experience. Plant and support staffs were laid off a decade ago. Did the TG experience a snap-on start decades ago? How many? What cracked? When? What was the repair weld rod made of? Pre heat info? VE or SE? How?
Thank you melitamegalithic.
PE Hails, thank you for the reply.
There are so many things that can go wrong; many not even dreamed up during study years. Like chromium digesting bacteria that would turn the best stainless pumps into something like termite eaten wood. Or the sodium digesting bacteria that inhabit the diesel fuel/sea water interface in tanks and leave their sh*t in the G/T fuel and mess up the hot-gas path. Is the conventional generation system being taken for granted?
Solar cells were tested first in the Med some 60 yrs ago, where they did not survive long the strong sunlight – and were forgotten. I never heard more on that problem, not even now with so many on rooftops. So what is the actual service lifetime?
On wind? My interest is how to use it when the grid is not there. The subject of this thread is something I have long felt coming. For another day.
We still have some of our machines on manual synchronisation. It is a real art getting it to sync smoothly. Been at a couple of rough ones where the dust gets shaken off the rafters. However, the general point is true. There are plenty of photos around when a generator tried to synchronise out of phase to a grid. Basically wrote off machines.
With auto sync those days are gone. With the unreliables and power electronics, their protection devices limiting current flow are unlikely allow a malsync to fry the electronics, but the devices don’t help the grid either.
The high cost of cheap electricity:
The spread between power prices in Europe’s two biggest electricity markets climbed to the highest so far this year amid scant wind generation in Germany.
German day-ahead power for Thursday rose 4.3%, pushing the premium over its French counterpart to the widest since December. The growing disparity highlights the ongoing volatility gripping Germany’s energy system, which is increasingly reliant on renewables — sources that are dependent on weather.
LINK:www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-07/german-power-hits-year-s-biggest-gap-over-france-on-wind-lull
Supposedly, some investors were really excited about German stocks. They must know something I don’t.
‘The claim that cheap solar and wind energy is taking over from fossil fuels is a dangerous, expensive lie.
‘There’s a clear correlation between more solar and wind and much higher average power prices.’ ~ Bjorn Lomborg
It is both terrifying and revealing that a site devoted to climate science by world class experts has digressed to highlighting the abysmal failure of green energy policies. It is now clear. Without fire and, today, fission, for some, mankind cannot survive. (There are other technologies in the mix, useful but ignored here, second decimal factors, for those who tout disinformation.)
History teaches us, the near term struggle over green energy will result in ever increasing, unsurvivable costs. People are and will suffer, e. g. a long term gird collapse. But if not corrected, it will end in war. That will escalate to fusion technology, thousands of H bombs.
Our governance has failed us.
The idea that increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 — put there my humanity burning fossil fuels for energy — has so permeated Left-thinking people that all Western academia, the government education complex and bureaucracy and the liberal media see no other truth. The real truth is that the Earth’s climate is unimaginably complex: far more complex than government scientists appreciate. Global warming and cooling are regulated by natural factors over which we have very little understanding and no control; and, compared to natural variation, humanity’s CO2 plays a minor role.
This article doesn’t mention the cost of these “fixes” for wind and solar unreliability. I’m sure there’s a good reason to leave it out!
To maintain frequency stability, grid operators are turning to batteries and other energy storage solutions, which can correct frequency deviations instantly and provide synthetic inertia.
LINK:www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-09/spain-blackout-highlights-critical-need-for-grid-resilience
There is a good reason why the fixes aren’t costed. The costs are unknown. A major reason for this it is not known if the proposed fixes will actually work. Even if they do work, how many would be needed? As well as equipment like batteries and syncons, There are also all the transmission lines and switchyard. Then there is management of all the complexity.
Even if the costs aren’t known, what can be said is the cost of electricity will be a lot higher and the supply will be less reliable.
Why can’t an asynchronous generator with a three phase rotor powered by a highly responsive VFD be able to sustain the phase lock as the inertia spins down using much more of the total spinning inertia than a mere torque impulse?
Why do you want something so complex with many potential failure points? What you propose hasn’t been proven on even the MVA scale, let alone the 100s of MVA.
People don’t realise just how much inertia is needed. If people take the average turbine generator as maybe 500MVA and has an inertia constant of 5, there is 2.5GWA. Take off the turbines and spin it up with a pony motor, it will drop the inertia to about 1GWA. The pony motor needs to be always running and will consume about 4-5MW off the grid.
The rule of thumb for stable grid operation is the sum of all the MVA ratings of synchronous generators on the grid should be >5 times the MW being generated. The European Grid document PE linked to has a very good (and understandable discussion on inertia. Note a machine on part load still supplies all the inertia. That is how South Australia supplies its grid inertia in the middle of the day. Dispatch gas turbines on at minimum load (and pay a lot extra to do that).
From the data published about the Spanish generation at time of trip and a few assumptions about load distribution, I calculated the inertia constant as less than 2. No wonder it plummeted like a stone when the French disconnected.
The other thing is that inertia only slows the rate of change of frequency down, preferably to less than 0.25Hz/s though on bigger grids, this decline rate has to be slower. This allows protection and extra generation on governor control to work. The latter is critical. Without load shedding, the frequency won’t recover and the protection will time out. Then it will get very black.
So to replace the synchronous turbines, you would need massive amounts of inertia from synchronous generators and a lot of charged up batteries. Typically for a grid, it should be 1.5 times the largest unit on the grid (which may be a single transmission line). How big is the consumers’ checquebook?
Correcting what I wrote. The pony motor just spins the generator up to grid speed. Once synchronised, it is the grid which spins it. Still has the continuous parasitic consumption.
Pingback: Del Vaticano a Silicon Valley: fe, poder y futuros posibles | Ajuste de Cuentas
I add to this excellent discussion of power generator engineering but on a beyond weird forum on climate science.
One significant cost matter for nuclear power cost estimates is the “long tail of the uranium fission cycle”. Since the 1950s, the need for long term handling and storage (and/or processing) of the lethal off loads from nuclear power plants has rested with the federal government, once the material leaves the power plant property. American now has some 70,000 tons of this material stored on-grade at power plants throughout the nation. The federal government has not taken anything but has spent the money and the decades with no results. It has never accepted the concept basic of cemeteries, accept “it” in the box it comes in, bury it deep and leave it alone. The storage cask is like a brick, unlike power plants, there are no active systems required to work during or after any natural disaster, earthquakes, etc.
The concept was to empty the spent fuel pool which holds it for years which allows it to cool off after it is removed, screaming hot, from the reactor,. Then put it in “garbage” cans, over 100 tons each, mostly metals, weld the lids closed and store it in the back yard until it has a place to go, the responsibility of DoE, with NRC overview. A spot beneath the Pyramids would work, except of the occasional flood. The containers are called dry casks. Dracula’s grave in the basement of a remote mountain would be better. However, in the middle of active combat in no man’s land as in Ukraine’s war is highly unsafe This disaster could come to America; our enemies know this. We have been protected by DoE’s experienced boss, Sam Brinton until recently. Man knows how to tunnel through rock; we know the cost, important but modest, in the scale of a energy technology which works. Other nations bury it deep.
The log jamb was Harry Reid and the NRC boss who deemed nuclear power is, per se, unsafe. That decision killed the nuclear power industry but not government spending.. That debate and policy decision has been a disaster. Our Legislative and Executive Branches have failed us.
I led the team who engineered the first real US ISFSI; (Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation), away from the power plant, dry cask facility; there was an earlier politically defined facility. One must watch disinformation charges.
R. L. Hails, Do you have any thoughts about the new technology designed to recycle spent nuclear fuel?
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/curio-solutions-awarded-gain-voucher-advance-new-spent-fuel-recycling-process
https://www.energytech.com/energy-efficiency/news/55270552/recycling-spent-nuclear-fuel-curio-energy-northwest-exploring-potential-at-power-plant
I do not know.
I was a line, not staff, engineer, whose job was to pull world class experts together in a meeting and serve them coffee. Then sense who should be in the group but absent, and go get them: grizzled tunnel engineers, heavy hauling engineers, geologists, nuclear physicists, fuel experts, shielding engineers, licensing types, even bird experts and security detection types. (Birds show up on the scopes, as foreign attackers; how do you respond to the threat? )
You can put new fuel in your pocket (not recommended) but once activated a grain is lethal. The fuel is not spent, only perhaps 5% is consumed in the reactor but the fury of neutrons flux degrades the container, the pin. It loses a tiny amount of material properties, e.g. shock resistance, is deemed spent and removed to a pool to cool off for perhaps a decade. It will be radioactive for millions of years.
The government was, by law, to open a “permanent” storage facility, “… on or before January 1998”. At enormous expense, tens of billions, it built a new tunnel deep inside Yucca Mountain Nev. for this purpose. It holds nothing. (There are other facilities for weapons material of which I know nothing. I stay in my lane.) I ignore those who do not contribute but erect nonsense polysyllabic objections. I do not rely on non-existent technologies to accomplish the mission.
My team, working eighty hour weeks, developed the dry cask facility independent of the power plant but colocated, “:in the back forty”, as an interim measure while the government accomplished its mission. It never did. As time moved on, the spent fuel pools now groan with inventory. All civilian spent fuel is now stored in pools or at-grade dry casks all over our nation. This is vulnerable to the bad guys.
Like a casket, the material should be stored in the container it came in but be retrievable for reuse, reprocessing into reusable fuel, over and over again That is the sole economic hope for the viability for nuclear power. Robotics, now, will be useful. There are many reprocessing schemes
It is not allowed in the US although the basic program has not changed since it was envisioned in 1954.
Thanks, I’m mainly curious if there are estimates for throughput the process might achieve at scale. Perhaps the results attained at Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station trials need to be completed first to answer this question. But the press release states that the technology is a viable path forward for clean, and reliable power. It sounds promising.
When proposed by Pres. George W. Bush, I got the impression at the time that permanently storing spent nuclear fuel at the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository was opposed by legacy Western academia, i.e., emeritus professors involved in the creation of the two a bombs dropped on Japan (all of whom doubtlessly have all since passed).
Bless’m, these are some of the the same folks that brought us the global warming catastrophism meme. Effective long-term storage of nuclear waste is as easy to envisage as an entombed pharaoh. Pick a spot above sea level in the Mojave desert, for example, by an existing mountain and rail line- all of which exist there- and create a man-made pyramid of, e.g., compacted trash and fill dirt from a nearby mountain to build an enduring pyramid to house nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years. Who knows, tourists might actually come to view the largest man-made pyramid in the world!
Fyi, if anyone is interested- I have the long abandoned town of Rice is available for sale sale. A 500-ft high pyramid there would the tallest pyramid in the world. A rail line actually runs through the town, the Santa Maria mountains are pretty close and at over 2,000 ft. have a lot of dirt…
Pingback: Stop These Things’ Weekly Round Up: 11 May 2025. | ajmarciniak
A judge has requested that Beatriz Corredor, the Red Electrica president, be investigated for “Damage caused by gross negligence” as part of the general investigation of the blackout. This investigation is required because it is alleged that several people died, and economic damages were very high.