Why didn’t their massive gas and nuclear save them?
Not that simple.
https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1916893181876326868?t=LNdxd2WlfbDpl8pDj_Cohw&s=19
Seems the lack of inertia in renewables causes it to disconnect from the grid.
Thanks for posting. I read through the thread. What I don’t understand is why there was a partial power failure in a French location at the same time.
The grid instability caused the Spanish and French electricity interconnection through the Pyrenees mountains to split, resulting in a general collapse of the Spanish system, Red Electrica’s chief of operations Eduardo Prieto told reporters on Monday evening. Some areas in France suffered brief outages on Monday.
Spain is one of Europe’s biggest producers of renewable energy, but Monday’s shutdown has already sparked debate about whether the volatility of supply from solar or wind has made its power systems more vulnerable to such an outage.
John Kemp, an energy analyst and public policy specialist, said finding clear root causes for the sequence of failures that contributed to the blackout could take investigators several months
kneejerkers will continue to kneejerk
1 Like
Something to do with shared connectors possibly. I skated over the article but there was a reference to a Switzerland/Italy episode that that resulted in a 12 hour blackout in massive sections of Italy in 2003
I really thought transitioning energy sources on a planetary level was as simple as unplugging and plugging back in.
Reportedly 99% of the power was restored by Tuesday morning, with only the Madrid-Barcelona rail line suspended.
1 Like
Losing interconnectors without warning is absolutely brutal on an energy grid. With gas or water you have time on your side to work out how to redirect flows to make up for a hiccup. With electricity, the solution needs to be instant. If instant doesn’t happen, everything shuts down.
We saw it with South Australia. It happens routinely with isolated energy grids in Australia. The fact that it doesn’t happen more regularly is absolutely astounding considering the pace of change, so this in a way demonstrates how much good engineering is happening globally to mitigate this risk.
I’m very curious to find out what went wrong here. Almost certainly the answers being invented in the hours after the event are wrong. It might drive more investment into stability infrastructure like spinning reserve flywheels, grid forming inverters on large fast discharge batteries or some other big surge option that can keep the grid stable for a short period when things get shaky.
1 Like
I’ve found the EL El Pais a useful on line source of information on possible reasons for the failure,
1 Like
5 Likes
