By Paul Homewood
I’m sure you’ve all read about that power cuts in Spain and Portugal yesterday. They are a reminder of just how reliant our societies have become on electricity.
Such power cuts are now much more serious affairs than merely “the lights going off”, which I remember well from my younger days in the 1960s!
It’s far too soon to know what went wrong, but the chart below shows actually happened. At 12.30 pm, the grid was running normally at around 32 GW, with 19 GW of that coming from solar.
Gas power was virtually non existent at just 2 GW.
Thirty minutes later the Spanish Peninsula grid had almost totally collapsed to 12 GW.
.
Is it just a coincidence that the collapse occurred just at the time that solar power had maxed out for the day?
Many energy experts have rightly commented that, regardless of the actual cause of the problem, the almost total lack of spinning reserve, provided by thermal generators, made it much more difficult for grid operators to react in time to correct the situation. As Kathryn Porter commented yesterday:
“In a low-inertia environment the frequency can change much faster. If you have had a significant grid fault in one area, or a cyber attack, or whatever it may be, the grid operators therefore have less time to react.
“That can lead to cascading failures if you cannot get it under control quickly.”
It is also worth noting that it was largely natural gas which enabled the grid to be put back into shape during the rest of the day.
The best analysis I have seen so far is from the New Zealand Energy website, which writes:
At 12:35pm on Monday there was a massive country wide grid failure leading to a blackout in Spain that also affected parts of Portugal and France.
The impacts were staggering. Everything stopped, and I mean everything. To the extent that farmers were having to deliver water to people stranded in the countryside when their trains unexpectedly ground to a halt. Its worth taking a look at the country wide chaos that ensued to appreciate how dependent modern societies are on the electrical network, there is mountains of it in the news.
But what was the cause of the issue?
From what I can establish so far, this looks to be the result of a large frequency drop of 0.15Hz which would have created synchronisation issues across the entire network leading to wild oscillations as grid protection equipment switched out asynchronous loads and other parts of the network attempted to pick up the slack.
Worth reading the full analysis here.
One final thought – the EU regularly pats itself on the back, claiming that its integrated electricity network is able to address the regional imbalances of shortages and surpluses.
That system was of no use at all to Spain this week.
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Author: Paul Homewood
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