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Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

arstechnica.com

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Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#71

Post by diggan »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #66
showsover wrote: post #9

That was a fun 10 hours or so that we were without power in most of Barcelona. Some barrios had ~some~ power but most of us were without. The one thing that surprised me is how quickly rumors started about power being out in Portugal (true), France (true to an extent), Belgium (false), and the UK (false). Walking back home from work you heard the names of Trump being mentioned as well. It's a bit scary to personally…

Spain and Portugal had to deny a fake social viral that said power was out across most of Europe and the Russians were cutting undersea cables. On the upside, more people at all levels are going to be more prepared if it happens again.

Most people I spoke to around Maresme area yesterday believed someone incompetent made a mistake somewhere, and that was the reason. Some people jokingly suggested cyber attack/Russian probes, but afaik no one took those seriously.

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#72

Post by vvillena »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #68
boxed wrote: post #5

99% up now. It's pretty impressive how fast they can get the system up and running again considering how seldom they need to do these types of things.

Initial estimates went from "No idea" to "Could take days". In the end it took about 12 hours to restore most of the power in two countries. There are some knock-on effects from trains being in the wrong places, but a solid result overall.

This is not correct. The REE press conference held about two hours after the start of the blackout gave an estimate of 6 to 10 hours, which was about right. Any other estimations were misinformation.

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#73

Post by pbmonster »

flysand7 wrote: post #53

Oh man, this reminds me of factorio. When you miscalculate your power needs and your generators eat up the fuel that isn't being produced enough. I've had to make a bootstrapping mechanisms and power switches for some of my powerplants to ensure I can get it back up in case it goes down and I can then re-enable my factory bit by bit.

Unfortunately, you can't simply hand-feed 100 coal into all the Spanish thermal plants and then plop down two more to be on the safe side until you've fixed supply...

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#74

Post by [deleted] »

jsjohnst wrote: post #63
brohee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASML says 1.3 MW for a single system. So off by three orders of magnitude. https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2024/a-sustainability-m...

Thanks for sharing the link! 1.3MW really isn’t that high of a load though. Thats a very straightforward load to be able to support via diesel generators. As an example, a typical large datacenter uses an order of magnitude more power, yet stays online following a grid outage.

[deleted]

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#75

Post by abe_m »

Tade0 wrote: post #61
justlikereddit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The groundwork for the blackout will inevitably come back to a buildout and reliance of renewable sources that do not have spinning mass that can do frequency synchronization. There are costly means to compensate for the lack of spinning baseload but actually building these devices have been neglected, to no ones surprise.

Why would you need a spinning mass when you have an inverter which can produce a range of frequencies and outputs and it all boils down to coordination? Looking at power generation reports it's the plants relying on inertia (like nuclear) which were disconnected and haven't been reconnected since: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES/72h/hourly

At the time I'm writing this, there appears to be about equal (hydro + gas) = (solar + wind). It appears they are running a significant portion of the grid with high inertia generators.

In a control system when you have an actuator that is much more responsive than the load, you can get into instable operating regimes where. On a small scale, when you are setting up servo motors, there is an inertia matching ratio for stability. In some of the systems I set up it was 10:1 load inertia:motor inertia. If you exceed that, you end up with elasticity between the motor and load that the motor can locally be above set point, and the control tells the motor to slow down, while the load has not yet reached set point. The motor is then too slow, and the control tells it to go faster, and you get the motor oscillating around the speed of the load.

On the grid you can have similar elasticity. An inverter many km away can get too far ahead in the AC cycle, then when that signal reaches the local inverter, the local inverter slows down, but the remote inverter has already slowed down, and by the time that slower wave gets to the local inverter, it is already too slow, and so the local inverter starts to speed up. If you get the frequency "right" you can end up with a positive feedback loop. With a high inertia rotating generator, the system is damped and slow enough to respond you don't change set point faster than the signal can propagate.

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#76

Post by pfdietz »

jsjohnst wrote: post #63
brohee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASML says 1.3 MW for a single system. So off by three orders of magnitude. https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2024/a-sustainability-m...

Thanks for sharing the link! 1.3MW really isn’t that high of a load though. Thats a very straightforward load to be able to support via diesel generators. As an example, a typical large datacenter uses an order of magnitude more power, yet stays online following a grid outage.

It's 1743 horsepower.

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#77

Post by tomatotomato37 »

justlikereddit wrote: post #45
Animats wrote: post #8

Spain is mostly back up. Plant startup is only the first step.[1] It's load pickup. Here is a PJM training module on load pickup during system restoration.[2] It gives a sense of how touchy the process is. Power network control has good control over generation and transmission, but limited control over load. When load is turned on, there are transient loads with different time constants. There's a huge load for the f…

The groundwork for the blackout will inevitably come back to a buildout and reliance of renewable sources that do not have spinning mass that can do frequency synchronization. There are costly means to compensate for the lack of spinning baseload but actually building these devices have been neglected, to no ones surprise.

Unfortunately that pretty much just leaves solar panels, as wind/hydro/concentrated solar/geothermal all rely on a spinning mass moving at a mostly consistent speed, though at least hydro can black start itself relatively easily

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#78

Post by pjc50 »

rdtsc wrote: post #67
lifty wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are downvoted but this rings true to me.

Just like there is vibe coding, this is vibe downvoting: “they are probably right, but kinda feels like they are dissing renewables, and I like renewables, better downvote just in case”

You're right, but: the renewables "debate" is a massive tar-pit of bad faith arguments. People are tired of rehashing that. The best solution is not to slow the rollout of renewables but to accelerate the rollout of battery storage.

(also we're a bit early for a proper postmortem, but that's an inevitable reality of social media, got to get the talking points in before the facts)

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#79

Post by nuthje »

AStonesThrow wrote: post #43
showsover wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring to the fact that generally people prefer cold beer, not room temp beer.

> generally people prefer cold beer Do they? But why? Why would they? Are they simply accustomed to tasting it that way? I should say "not tasting it" because chilling a beverage basically kills its flavours, and they never make it to your tongue correctly. I would say that many people would be surprised and amazed if they tasted such things as Pepsi without ice, and without coming right out of the fridge. Unfortunat…

This stuff is panel-tested out of the wazoo. There's a reason bitterness, hoppiness, alcohol levels, differ market by market, even on brands of the same brand/line extension.

Beer also does not require refrigeration throughout the entire supply chain, they happily sit in a warm warehouse waiting to be picked up by an unrefrigerated truck, only to be cooled at the outlet or consumer.

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#80

Post by khafra »

abe_m wrote: post #75
Tade0 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need a spinning mass when you have an inverter which can produce a range of frequencies and outputs and it all boils down to coordination? Looking at power generation reports it's the plants relying on inertia (like nuclear) which were disconnected and haven't been reconnected since: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES/72h/hourly

At the time I'm writing this, there appears to be about equal (hydro + gas) = (solar + wind). It appears they are running a significant portion of the grid with high inertia generators. In a control system when you have an actuator that is much more responsive than the load, you can get into instable operating regimes where. On a small scale, when you are setting up servo motors, there is an inertia matching ratio fo…

Seems like a simple cybernetics problem, especially if it's point-to-point. If there's many different inverters on the same circuit, you might need something like a directed graph, but there should be simpler, more local solutions.
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