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Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

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Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#111

Post by Rygian »

wortelefant wrote: post #42
darkwater wrote: post #3

The fact that there is not a single root cause but several ones makes me instinctively think this is a good report, because it's not what the "bosses" (and even less politicians) like to hear.

It is very carefully worded, but variable renewables are holding the smoking gun here. This is why spain now requests a better connection to french nuclear now. This reckless overbuild of variable generation is a valuable negative example, wind and solar without adequate hydro or nuclear is dead

Your statement is wrong.

The report describes that there was no mechanism to dispatch the reactive power of renewables separately from the active power.

In page 452, item numbered 1 states "RES power plants follow fixed power factor" (RES = Renewable Energy Sources). The source of this finding is in section 4.2.1.

In page 208, footnote 35, the reference is given to Royal Decree 413/2014 of 6 June, which mandates this fixed power factor. The Article 7, section e), states that renewable energy sources must follow the instructions given by the operator to set power factor, and only if the distribution lines support it.

And footnote 36 describes how this worked in practice on the date of the outage: renewables were told, by email on the previous day, which fixed power factor correction to use the following day.

--

This lack of dynamic dispatch of reactive power was a known problem, already reported in 2022 [1]

[1] https://www.eldiario.es/economia/competencia-reconocio-julio...

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#112

Post by javier2 »

red_admiral wrote: post #21
darkwater wrote: post #3

The fact that there is not a single root cause but several ones makes me instinctively think this is a good report, because it's not what the "bosses" (and even less politicians) like to hear.

Yes, a lot of modern engineering is good enough that single-cause failures are very rare indeed. That means that failures themselves are rare, but when they do happen, they're most likely to have multiple causes. How to explain that to non-engineers is another problem.

we are not as complicated as the national grid, I have been here for nearly 10 years now, and our outages have gone from single cause, two causes, or now its nearly always 3 things that need to go wrong at the same time.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#114

Post by cameldrv »

red_admiral wrote: post #21
darkwater wrote: post #3

The fact that there is not a single root cause but several ones makes me instinctively think this is a good report, because it's not what the "bosses" (and even less politicians) like to hear.

Yes, a lot of modern engineering is good enough that single-cause failures are very rare indeed. That means that failures themselves are rare, but when they do happen, they're most likely to have multiple causes. How to explain that to non-engineers is another problem.

This is almost universal in aviation. They always talk about the "accident chain." Essentially everything that can kill you with one mistake is illegal through training and operational requirements and engineering and maintenance regulations.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#115

Post by anthk »

unmole wrote: post #35
bluebarbet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might have been less fun if it had been in the depths of winter. The fact that it was a balmy sunny day in springtime made it a pleasantly novel experience, I agree. Of course, the "sunny day" seems to have been correlated.

We're talking about Spain. How bad could a winter really be?

TL:DR Spain is not just Andalusia, and the US is not just Texas.

Spain is like a condensed minigame map of the US. Remember when the Morrowind videogame looked megadiverse because of the mountains generating lots of different terrains and curves? That's Spain. You cross a mountain tunnel by car and your warm 28C degrees in May at Leon somehow shifted to a cloudy, gray sky with 15 degrees in Asturias in -literally, measured by clock- ~10 minutes.

You would think that you where somehow abducted and teleported from a UFO in the road. But no, it's just the rough nature.

And the Winters in Leon are bipolar being a dry, continental climate. So you can have scorching summers... and freezing winters with -10 degrees with ease.

So, yes, Winters outside the Mediterranean sea can be rough.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#116

Post by holgerschurig »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #100
singhrac wrote: post #16

I think people underestimate how valuable these reports are, so I’m very glad that detailed investigation is done here. Every major grid operator around the world is going to study this and make improvements to make sure this doesn’t happen on their grid. In a lot of ways it’s like investigations into airplane crashes.

Every major grid operator around the world is going to study this and make improvements to make sure this doesn’t happen on their grid. You mistyped "Every major grid operator is going to get their lawyers to reword their contracts to make sure they can't get sued when this happens".

Spotted the US-american assuming their law system is used world-wide.

If over here a lady buys a hot coffee in a McDrive, drives away, spills the hot coffee on their legs and makes a car accident due to this ... she won't be able to sue the McDrive. There's no fine-print or "Coffee is hot, you dumb person" writing needed anywhere. She could be lucky if she doesn't get fined for endangering others by her stupid actions.

So, if we have a power outage here, the courts don't suddenly get busy. Because there simply no one is suing.

Fun fact: despite this bad power outage, the power grid systems in Europe are still better (even way better) than in the US. There is a comparable statistics measure called "SAIDI" --- system average interuption duration index. And duration wise, per custom and year, the US power grids are worse than over here than in most of West Europe: (US SAIDI 2020: 1.3 hours, German SAIDI 2020: 0.3 hours). That's a factor of more than 4 on the worse-iness of US power grid!

That could be an indicator that suing at the tiniest chance isn't helpful macro-ecnomical. Or that a general suing culture (with legalese trying to protect one from the economic risks) aren't actually helping improving things in the general sense, although they reduce the risk of getting bankrupt. But society-wise, a sue culture is most probably a negative: you spend energy/time/money on things that aren't necessary in saner law systems.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#117

Post by pseudohadamard »

holgerschurig wrote: post #116
pseudohadamard wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every major grid operator around the world is going to study this and make improvements to make sure this doesn’t happen on their grid. You mistyped "Every major grid operator is going to get their lawyers to reword their contracts to make sure they can't get sued when this happens".

Spotted the US-american assuming their law system is used world-wide. If over here a lady buys a hot coffee in a McDrive, drives away, spills the hot coffee on their legs and makes a car accident due to this ... she won't be able to sue the McDrive. There's no fine-print or "Coffee is hot, you dumb person" writing needed anywhere. She could be lucky if she doesn't get fined for endangering others by her stupid action…

  Spotted the US-american
Really? Where?

We had a problem some time ago with a major power outage due to operator negligence. When it came to assigning blame it turned out the corporate structure was such that it was impossible to sue the operator. Since it was in effect publicly-owned, the public would have been suing itself.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#118

Post by pseudohadamard »

holgerschurig wrote: post #116
pseudohadamard wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every major grid operator around the world is going to study this and make improvements to make sure this doesn’t happen on their grid. You mistyped "Every major grid operator is going to get their lawyers to reword their contracts to make sure they can't get sued when this happens".

Spotted the US-american assuming their law system is used world-wide. If over here a lady buys a hot coffee in a McDrive, drives away, spills the hot coffee on their legs and makes a car accident due to this ... she won't be able to sue the McDrive. There's no fine-print or "Coffee is hot, you dumb person" writing needed anywhere. She could be lucky if she doesn't get fined for endangering others by her stupid action…

Separate reply for a separate topic: You're repeating the urban-legend version of the McDonalds lawsuit, not the real story, which you can find in numerous places, e.g. https://www.ttla.com/?pg=McDonaldsCoffeeCaseFacts. tl;dr, it was repeated wilful negligence by McDonalds, they'd already injured several hundred other people through it. They knew it was a serious problem but kept doing it anyway.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#119

Post by icehawk »

roenxi wrote: post #96
cpgxiii wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Caveating that I'm not really sure it was even an out-of-design event but if it was then it is case closed and the swiss cheese model is an inappropriate choice of model to understand the failure. This is not how safe systems are designed and operated. Safety is not a one-time item, it is a process. All safety-critical systems receive attention throughout their operating lives to identify and mitigate potential saf…

> The choice of DBA tsunami height was clearly an underestimate, and underestimates were identified for Fukushima and other plants prior to the accident but not acted upon. Not much of a swiss cheese failure then though. The failure is just that they committed hard to an assumption that was wrong. My point is that unless it is actually an example of multiple failures lining up then this is a bad example of a swiss-ch…

I don't think you understand how a swiss cheese failure happens. They're not independent or semi-independent. Latent failures, expose active failures, like:

"Committed hard to an assumption that was wrong"

Then causes damage to the seawater pumps along the shoreline, and flooded emergency diesel generators.

That causes total loss of AC and DC power.

Loss of AC and DC power causes the reactor to overheat.

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