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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#461

Post by apexalpha »

mike_hearn wrote: post #319

This sounds big enough to require a black start. Unfortunately, those are slow and difficult. If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up…

Would this be relevant here? Spain is connected to the French grid, and probably also Morocco.

The entire EU runs on one synchronised grid so from that perspective a single 'province' went offline, not the grid.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#462

Post by sofixa »

sph wrote: post #143
sofixa wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

As much as I am anti-Russia and against the invasion, this is absolutely not the place to start this flame war.

The thread I answered in had someone playing dumb as if there would be no reason whatsoever to consider Russia a hostile actor, I was responding to that.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#463

Post by pbmonster »

pxdm wrote: post #447
ethbr1 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious question for someone familiar with power at grid-scale -- How granular is load shedding? And how is this measured / tracked? In my head, I'm thinking of generators/plants, connected by some number of lines, to some amount of load, where there are limited disconnection points on the lines. So how do grid operators know what amount of load will be cut if they disconnect point A123 (and the demand behind it) vs…

I can speak for the GB case. Low Frequency Demand Disconnection (LFDD) occurs automatically and in stages when the frequency drops until it stabilises. The substations or feeders that are tripped off are not currently determined by real-time metering - instead they are pre-allocated based on their typical demand. This means that the system operator does not really know how much demand will be disconnected at any give…

> The substations or feeders that are tripped off are not currently determined by real-time metering - instead they are pre-allocated based on their typical demand. This means that the system operator does not really know how much demand will be disconnected at any given time.

This is wild. From a amateur technical perspective, it would only take a cheap hall sensor inside the transformer to have a pretty good guess of how much current has been flowing to the load.

Hell, put the hall sensor onto a board with a micro controller and a LORA transmitter and stick it to the outside of the feed line. Seems like an incredibly cheap upgrade to get real-time load data from every substation.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#464

Post by [deleted] »

doix wrote: post #208
0xTJ wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds more like a dystopian novel, where only the wealthy can afford stable power and everyone else is left without.

That is basically what happens in South Africa today. There are rolling blackouts and rich people with backup generators and batteries are unaffected. It's gotten to the point where richer cities (like Capetown) have their own power sources to mitigate the problem.

[deleted]

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#465

Post by fulafel »

leomca wrote: post #309
nacnud wrote: post #70

There's a map of realtime load flow here: https://gridradar.net/en/wide-area-monitoring-system (currently shows Spain and Portugal as 'offline')

The best source for data seems to be the European grid operator themselves: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/dashboard/show Spain's demand: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh... Spain's generation: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio... Spain's import/export with France: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF... The filters can be used to see simi…

Interesting that the recovery (edit: of load graph) is going at relatively steady 600 MW/hour, it will be a while if the pace continues the same way.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#466

Post by mlsu »

mike_hearn wrote: post #319

This sounds big enough to require a black start. Unfortunately, those are slow and difficult. If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up…

Does solar power make this process easier or harder? I know that with thermal plants you have a spinning mass that you have to synchronize, and phase shift is used to assess how hard the plant is working (and whether to trip a disconnect as we see here)

But with solar, how is the synchronization provided? In like a giant buck? Or in software somehow? Does the phase shift matter as much as in the electromechanical systems?

My intuition is that solar would make the grid harder to keep stable (smaller mass spinning in sync) but also may offer more knobs to control things (big DC source that you can toggle on/off instantly.. as long as sun is out). But I don’t actually know.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#467

Post by bob1029 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #319

This sounds big enough to require a black start. Unfortunately, those are slow and difficult. If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up…

> Thermal plants require energy to start up

It's not just about the power. System components cannot be brought to operating temperatures, speeds and pressures faster than mechanical tolerances allow. If a thermal plant is cold & dark, it can take days to ramp it to full production.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#468

Post by mike_hearn »

mlsu wrote: post #466
mike_hearn wrote: post #319

This sounds big enough to require a black start. Unfortunately, those are slow and difficult. If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up…

Does solar power make this process easier or harder? I know that with thermal plants you have a spinning mass that you have to synchronize, and phase shift is used to assess how hard the plant is working (and whether to trip a disconnect as we see here) But with solar, how is the synchronization provided? In like a giant buck? Or in software somehow? Does the phase shift matter as much as in the electromechanical sys…

Most solar and wind plants follow the inertial lead of the thermal plants. They can't synchronize without enough thermal generation being online. Supposedly there are efforts to change that, I don't know enough about grid engineering to say how far along that might be in Spain.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#469

Post by alickz »

red_admiral wrote: post #253

I'm going with: never attribute to malice what can be explained by ... an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid. I would want very strong evidence before I believe this is an attack. There is precedent for major power outages, a huge majority of which are not malicious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages I remember the day when the Swiss railway power networ…

>an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid

I only have a layman's understanding of power grids, but I thought they were incredibly hardened, with backups and contingencies in depth

Are the grids at this scale really this brittle? Would there be a death toll from this?

I also wouldn't blame malice without corroborating evidence

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#470

Post by Matthyze »

rich_sasha wrote: post #374

Grids are tricky, because the electric socket is kind of a leaky abstraction for heavy plant machinery in turbines of thermal plants, load balancing, synchronisation, and a gazillion other things I really don't understand. Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient? Solid state things tend to be less fiddly, hence my question. I remember reading at one point in the past that renewables were ac…

I'll give a somewhat simpler answer than Filligree has. The problem with renewable energy sources is that they are typically both highly variable and not dispatchable (i.e., controllable). The former leads to supply peaks that can exceed transmission capacity or supply lows that require compensating generation elsewhere. The latter means that energy generation can easily be increased or decreased as required, which is of course very helpful for grid management. Dispatchable generation can be increased if supply requires it, or multiple dispatchable generators can be 'redispatched' to relieve congestion in a part of the power grid (by rebalancing generation). Power from renewable sources can be decreased through curtailment, but that wastes the generated energy.
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