2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#41

Post by probablypower » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #38

londons_explore wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nor are brief periods of multi-gigawatt draw/dumping as needed. Actually this is typically an issue for grid batteries. Spinning generators can easily briefly go to 10x the rated current for a second or so to smooth out big anomalies. Stationary batteries inverters can't do 10x current spikes ever - the max they can get to is more like 1.2x for a few seconds. That means you end up needing a lot of batteries to prov…

That... doesn't sound correct. Inverters are the cheap part, you can literally wire as many as you want in parallel. Batteries have immense power availability, with most chemistries you can trivially deliver the entire capacity in half an hour or so (more like 5 minutes with lithium cells). Basically I'm dubious. I'm sure there are grids somewhere that have misprovisioned their inverter capacity, but I don't buy that…

You can google "system inertia" as a starting point.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#42

Post by pdpi » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 10:53 PM UTC

pkilgore wrote: post #36

fuoqi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Temporary negative prices have been caused by the renewable generation which exceeded the grid demand at the time, which then evolved into the nasty feedback loop caused by the reaction of renewable generation to those conditions. You simply do not get such situation with traditional generation, it's the direct consequence of the intermittent nature of renewables and its high ratio in the total generation. Also, have…

Where is the market for someone to get paid to pump water into a reservoir and let it fall down later for $$$?

That market exists, but the window of time here is like twenty minutes. Pumps have inertia and take time to spin up, you can't HFT load and generation.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#43

Post by eldaisfish » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 11:02 PM UTC

fuoqi wrote: post #9

matsemann wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the quote literally spells out it was market forces, not some instability in solar generation? Your other comment probably got flagged because it started with a huge straw man and had multiple unwarranted jabs in it.

Temporary negative prices have been caused by the renewable generation which exceeded the grid demand at the time, which then evolved into the nasty feedback loop caused by the reaction of renewable generation to those conditions. You simply do not get such situation with traditional generation, it's the direct consequence of the intermittent nature of renewables and its high ratio in the total generation. Also, have…

you are correct, but your analysis is not popular here. You will soon be presented with several reasons as to why renewable energy is not the problem and how batteries are the one true solution to these problems.

The reality is that electricity is complex and that renewable energy presents a new set of problems, problems to which we do not yet have complete solutions.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#44

Post by eldaisfish » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 11:04 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #31

philipkglass wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the operator report linked in another comment by leymed [1], the problem was not a lack of spinning mass (inertia) but voltage instability. From page 16 of the PDF: The incident was NOT caused by a lack of system inertia. Rather, it was triggered by a voltage issue and the cascading disconnection of renewable generation plants, as previously indicated. Higher inertia would have only resulted in a slightl…

Obviously I’m as good of a grid operator as I was a stealth bomber expert on the weekend, but superficially that just doesn’t seem right. Maybe I’m underestimating how much spinning mass would be required, but that still qualifies as ‘not enough was present’.

please can you explain what doesn't seem right?

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#45

Post by robocat » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 11:06 PM UTC

Individual generators monitor Voltage, Frequency, and reactive power (≈ how much current is out of phase with voltage) to make decisions about injecting more or less power into the network. This is just historically how they've always been doing it.

Due to interactions between different generators, there can be instabilities causing voltage or frequency or reactive power to deviate outside of spec. A simple example might be two generators where one surges while the other drops back, then vice versa. The measurement (by the network operator) of these effects is poor for Spain - shown by the simple example that they have large oscillations that they couldn't explain.

There's path dependent healing and correction of problems by different generators, which overall leads to network stability. However the network operator here is not actually resolving cause and effect, and does not have the insight to manage their stability properly.

In this case you can see them trying a few things to inject changes that they hope will bring stability - e.g. tying many connections hoping that adding generators together into one network will resolve to a stable outcome.

Are there countries that have a better design for their electricity network control systems?

Disclaimer: I don't design electricity networks nor electricity markets. And the above is ignoring loads (loads are mostly less problematic for control than generation).

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#46

Post by plorg » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 11:09 PM UTC

pkilgore wrote: post #36

fuoqi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Temporary negative prices have been caused by the renewable generation which exceeded the grid demand at the time, which then evolved into the nasty feedback loop caused by the reaction of renewable generation to those conditions. You simply do not get such situation with traditional generation, it's the direct consequence of the intermittent nature of renewables and its high ratio in the total generation. Also, have…

Where is the market for someone to get paid to pump water into a reservoir and let it fall down later for $$$?

If you read the report there was a significant amount of solar being produced at low prices and being pumped for storage. Further, the pumped hydro is the first load to be disconnected to balance demand on their system.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#47

Post by Nextgrid » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 11:10 PM UTC

rcarmo wrote: post #11

Page 130 is where the actual human readable summary is. Although the previous pages were pretty detailed in explaining the cumulative instabilities. Sadly, some news outlets are probably only going to look at the recommendations and read "cybersecurity" and (even though they are common sense recommendations) assume there might be more to say about the matter.

There's been a shit-ton of misinformation about cyberattacks within the first hour of the outage, and the public were unfortunately very receptive to it, so I guess they're trying to preempt those concerns?

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#48

Post by rcxdude » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 11:10 PM UTC

probablypower wrote: post #41

ajross wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That... doesn't sound correct. Inverters are the cheap part, you can literally wire as many as you want in parallel. Batteries have immense power availability, with most chemistries you can trivially deliver the entire capacity in half an hour or so (more like 5 minutes with lithium cells). Basically I'm dubious. I'm sure there are grids somewhere that have misprovisioned their inverter capacity, but I don't buy that…

You can google "system inertia" as a starting point.

This is what batteries can provide very well.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#49

Post by eldaisfish » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 11:13 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #38

londons_explore wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nor are brief periods of multi-gigawatt draw/dumping as needed. Actually this is typically an issue for grid batteries. Spinning generators can easily briefly go to 10x the rated current for a second or so to smooth out big anomalies. Stationary batteries inverters can't do 10x current spikes ever - the max they can get to is more like 1.2x for a few seconds. That means you end up needing a lot of batteries to prov…

That... doesn't sound correct. Inverters are the cheap part, you can literally wire as many as you want in parallel. Batteries have immense power availability, with most chemistries you can trivially deliver the entire capacity in half an hour or so (more like 5 minutes with lithium cells). Basically I'm dubious. I'm sure there are grids somewhere that have misprovisioned their inverter capacity, but I don't buy that…

it is technically correct, but so are you.

More inverters in parallel will achieve the same end goal - fast frequency response.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#50

Post by rcxdude » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 11:15 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #31

philipkglass wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the operator report linked in another comment by leymed [1], the problem was not a lack of spinning mass (inertia) but voltage instability. From page 16 of the PDF: The incident was NOT caused by a lack of system inertia. Rather, it was triggered by a voltage issue and the cascading disconnection of renewable generation plants, as previously indicated. Higher inertia would have only resulted in a slightl…

Obviously I’m as good of a grid operator as I was a stealth bomber expert on the weekend, but superficially that just doesn’t seem right. Maybe I’m underestimating how much spinning mass would be required, but that still qualifies as ‘not enough was present’.

You very much are underestimating it. Spinning mass helps even out very short term fluctuations in supply vs demand. Like on the timescale of tens of seconds, even when the whole grid is spinning mass. Even 10x the inertia in the grid would have maybe bought a few extra minutes, because the problem by the point the grid was collapsing was there were not enough plants online to provide the demand.

(Spinning mass on its own doesn't do much to deal with the voltage fluctuations. It's entirely something that's reactive to grid frequency, which is the most 'global' indicator of supply vs demand in a grid, since it can't fluctuate locally. But voltage and current can vary wildly in different parts of the grid, and required separate management)