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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"

#131

Post by gizmo686 »

pjc50 wrote: post #78
rdtsc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The specific issue identified by the parent would not be helped by batteries. Like solar panels, batteries output DC voltage, and have no inertia on the AC side.

The solution in either case is the same. Put enough smarts in the inverter for it to have "synthetic inertia". If we didn't have the ability to do something like that in inverters, the solution would be something like flywheels to augment the chemical batteries.

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

#132

Post by hnuser123456 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #128
hnuser123456 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mid-line pumps do, but "offshore pumps" that pull water from lakes don't actually use any electricity. Otherwise, they would have to build a whole new mechanic for how you power your first water pump. Maybe you'd have to make iron buckets and bring 10 buckets of water to your boiler to get it started, then the offshore pump could use the brief moment of electricity to start pumping water continuously. Maybe you'd hav…

I think you're talking about factorio, right hnuser123456? In satisfactory, all pumps need water and there is a special kind of power plant that doesn't need pumps/electricity to kickstart the factory. It's special because it needs items the player has to manually gather and only runs "on demand" (shuts off if enough power from regular plants is provided) Strong recommendation to give it a try if you haven't already.…

Oops, sorry... I played a lot of both around the same time, and got them confused :)

My girlfriend had more fun collecting leaves for the biomass burners and playing the tetris game in the workshop while I built the conveyors and calculated ratios... I let her keep adding leaves even once we were burning coal, but she eventually noticed leaves weren't burning anymore :)

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

#133

Post by joshstrange »

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.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one nodding along with the article going "Yep, I've dealt with this in Factorio" (aside from the frequency stuff which would complicate matters for sure).

In Space Age, more than once I've needed to fly across the solar system to hand-restart a generator when I didn't have my fail-safe setup correctly. Normally I setup a SR latch to fall back to the power generators (whatever type they are) _only_ on a sub-grid when capacity falls below 20% (and alert me) since if you lose power completely, hand-feeding is the only way to fix (unless you have another air-gapped power storage/generation set up). It sucks when you hand-feed and then see all your power generation still struggling because you accidentally left in 1 copper wire to a pole outside your "air-gapped" grid. Having to slowly rebuild on Aquilo solar->nuclear->fusion is tedious, after making that mistake once I make sure I didn't have to travel back again to fix the grid... After the 2nd time it happened I finally fixed it for good.

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

#134

Post by LorenPechtel »

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.

I think they went out of their way to make a mess of the power situation. It's a PITA to build in load-shedding, almost as if they were trying to handicap solar. And not all buildings even support being disabled by control. Running my radar only during the day is good enough for keeping an eye on expansion, yet the only way to do that is isolate the radar.

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

#135

Post by LorenPechtel »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #125
m4rtink wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also in Satisfactory pumps need power to run, so coal power plants quite realistically won't start without extra power (unless you have a water tower on the input).

Mid-line pumps do, but "offshore pumps" that pull water from lakes don't actually use any electricity. Otherwise, they would have to build a whole new mechanic for how you power your first water pump. Maybe you'd have to make iron buckets and bring 10 buckets of water to your boiler to get it started, then the offshore pump could use the brief moment of electricity to start pumping water continuously. Maybe you'd hav…

What I think they should have done is have the offshore pump use power but any building adjacent to fluid simply picks it up, no pump needed.

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

#136

Post by LorenPechtel »

K0balt wrote: post #110

I can only imagine the difficulties facing technicians and engineers black starting a nation-scale grid. I operate a microgrid facility in Hispaniola and have wonderfully cooperative users backed by a separately powered communications and control system. Even for us, a facility serving a small neighborhood and farm, a black start must be performed as a careful choreography of systems and loads…and we can just pick up…

Honestly, I suspect a true blackstart would fail, too many desperate people trying to survive, keeping the people who need to get places from getting to those places. We already see the roads fail when people are fleeing wildfires.

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

#137

Post by LorenPechtel »

myself248 wrote: post #95
zeristor wrote: post #46

I am no expert, however with solar power and more grid batteries (I don’t think Spain has many grid batteries) wouldn’t it be possible to charge the batteries and use that to drive a ‘black start’. Sounds simple, and I appreciate from experience a huge amount of prep and validation needs to be done in the background.

At an extremely abstract level, it is conceptually simple, but most inverters are designed with safeguards to prevent exactly this. They only produce power when the grid is up, and in phase with it. Because if not sequenced and interlocked, islanding behavior can result in back-powering parts of the grid that are supposed to be disconnected and down for maintenance, or creation of desynchronized islands that then cau…

It's not just a matter of monopolies, but risk tolerance. Only dance to the master's tune is a failsafe measure, ensuring a malfunctioning (or deliberately hacked--think of people using gay extension cords to plug generators into their house rather than the expense of a proper transfer switch) inverter doesn't electrocute a lineman.

If everyone's inverter can feed the line you have a situation where you can never be confident the line is dead and you must always work the line as if it were hot.

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

#138

Post by AStonesThrow »

mrguyorama wrote: post #127
AStonesThrow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There is so much more to enjoyment of consumption than just "taste". Smell, touch, look, mouthfeel, nostalgia, temperature, color, other various human factors (ie I always eat this with my friends), sounds, cost ALL of these affect your experience of consuming something. Your insistence on ignoring the holistic experience because cold things don't react as well to produce taste sensations is misguided. Never mind tha…

> enjoyment of consumption

Yes, in fact, there is nothing to kill my enjoyment more than a watered-down icy beverage that murders my tongue and esophagus as it goes down.

Since my youth I’ve been a choral singer and musician. I’m quite sensitive to keeping “my instrument” in top condition. Therefore I take offense from anyone who says that [Scoville levels] of spice should be calibrated for murder, or that beverages should be as close to freezing as possible.

This is doing violence to the consumer, and it’s simply unjust across the board. If I had a nickel for every butt-hurt counter girl just because I asked for “no ice please”; if it really hurts your bottom line then charge double? Consumers aren’t actually afforded much choice about the temperature of food we consume, are we?

There is basically no scientific or cultural reason for food or drink to be consumed while it is cold [below 40°F]. Simply marketing and capitalism because of food safety and profit. Therefore I need not kowtow to someone’s haughty decree that soda is somehow designed to be drunk that way.

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

#139

Post by jsjohnst »

bob1029 wrote: post #104
jsjohnst wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the power consumed by the light source for one photo tool on one line. There are thousands of tools. Material handling robots, compressors, HVAC, pumps, an entire data center within the factory, etc.

> This is the power consumed by the light source for one photo tool on one line.

Actually, it’s not if you read the linked article. Try harder with your indignant reply next time to an entirely factual post. Sheesh!

Further, here’s a >one hundred megawatt generator installation (yes, used, but it’s always call for quote otherwise online) for a small fraction of the price of the EUV machine in case I need to further prove my point.

https://www.uspeglobal.com/listings/1705462-used-100-mw-2004...

There’s also multiple GE LMS100 generators installed in Texas and they each provide ~115MW of power. So not unprecedented for installation in the state either!

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

#140

Post by Incipient »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #123
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.

More recent renewable inverters (solar PV and wind) and battery storage both have grid forming power control support. Term of art is "synthetic inertia" and makes spinning baseload obsolete. This has been shown under real world conditions most notably in South Australia with the Tesla Megapack based Hornsdale Power Reserve, which stepped in to maintain grid inertia when a coal plant exploded in 2021. For a more robus…

Batteries on the grid are really more for load smoothing; demand/supply peak flattening and transient spikes. They're really too expensive to do what someone would think of as "storage".

Our recent govt installation is reported at $1.6bn for 2000MWh, which is incredibly expensive, and can't scale to run the grid, simply smooth load/demand diurnal curves.

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