What Happened in the UK Blackouts?

>I hear this kind of misconception fairly often and so it is worth noting that you don't need 1400 MW of battery to protect from this event.

I would be interested in any papers or literature that have led you to this conclusion.

as soon as (generation - load) 0 the frequency is going to change. If you lose 200MW of generation and have 100MW of batteries that are configured with 0 or very small amount of droop they see some small change in frequency and crank out 100MW to try and stop it from falling further. Then they are maxed out, there is still 100MW of imbalance for conventional generation with governors to take up, which they will as the frequency falls as if the trip had only been 100MW in the first place. How is this not a 1:1 relationship, 100 MW of batteries displace 100MW of lost generation?

For this event in the UK in particular it appears the issue is that the large windfarm, and 500MW of small embedded or distributed generation are en masse improperly configured or by nature are not able to ride through any small transient wobble in frequency. TFA didn't show us what voltage these plants saw.

Although a 200MW steam turbine also tripped due to the same lightning/transmission line trip event, so clearly it was subjected to something that exceeded instantaneous thresholds and had to trip immediately. And then that steam turbine tripping caused the gas turbines at the same plant to trip which indicates there are some design or operational issues at that plant.

Also is 20s reclose time for a transmission line standard? I've only configured distribution line reclosers but it was more on the order of 1s for the first reclose and maybe 7s for the second?

Yes, they were built to a spec. According to the official technical report[1] these trains DID NOT experience anything outside that spec. The shut down was not supposed to occur. The trains are simply defective and both manufacturer and operator testing failed to reveal these defects. There is no other reasonable conclusion. Defective, inadequately tested trains.

> Having an expert test that all the safety systems are still working properly after they've been exposed to conditions they weren't designed for also seems prudent.

This bit of guesswork is also contradicted in the official report as the manufacturer has committed to providing a system update to permit operation to resume WITHOUT any of your supposed 'prudence.' Resuming operation on power recovery without intervention by technicians is the specified, expected behavior. This is a separate defect that also survived whatever obviously inadequate testing regime was supposedly in effect.

> Do you think people should pay higher ticket prices / more tax to fund trains that can tolerate a wider range of input frequencies, given how rarely these sorts of events happen?

Since the official conclusion and subsequent response by the manufacturer both show the trains were specified to tolerate these conditions the extraordinary costs you imagine are a fiction; the cost has already been paid. No higher ticket prices required. And since these conditions were specified we also know they were indeed anticipated despite their infrequency.

Both the manufacturer and the operator failed here. They got caught with their pants down. You may not like hearing that for whatever reason but that's the bottom line and inventing excuses won't change it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973513