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2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

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Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#61

Post by martinald »

floatrock wrote: post #54
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…

So an incredibly cheap source of supply exceeded the demand, and the market rules and some trips caused cascading failures. Why is the problem the cheap source of supply rather than the market rules and incentives that made everything act the way it did? Your comment suggests move back to good ol' expensive fossil generation instead of looking at how to bring the market rules up to date with evolving technologies.

Because the only reason that solar is still generating power at negative prices is because they are getting subsidies to do it. Otherwise they would disconnect themselves apart from in extreme scenarios (control system down or something), and I bet when you are paying many tens of thousands of euro an hour you'd get someone to fix/manually turn it off sharpish.

Looks like there are a multitude of schemes of various vintages in Spain, which tl;dr basically give you a guaranteed price per MWh you generate. So imagine you get a 100eur/MWh subsidy for a (legacy) solar plant. The market price is €-20/MWh. You will still continue to produce power until the price reaches -100MW/h. Even worse are some contracts for difference (poorly thought through) which give you a guaranteed price regardless of what the market is at. So even if the price was -1,000eur/MWh the government or grid operator would still give you your €50/MWh (and the subsidy would be 1,050/MWh!).

The problem is if you reform this (and it is happening worldwide) solar is much, much less appealing. Because suddenly your solar plant which was getting (say) a guaranteed 70/MWh all year round suddenly does not make money for 6 months of the year at least at peak sun hours.

On top of all this, you have a lot of domestic solar in places like Spain. The grid operator _cannot_ control these assets in nearly all circumstances. They will continue to dump power into the grid regardless of the market price. This again will change but it requires an awful lot of work to retrofit invertors with remote control capability OR a lot of public backlash for charging end customers who bought solar in "good faith" now getting hit with peak time negative prices (so they change their behaviour).

I think my core message would be _any_ negative power prices is a sign of market failure. Acceptable in rare extreme occurrences, but the fact most of europe has highly negative prices very frequently is telling you the grid and market design is not able to handle what is going on.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#62

Post by javawizard »

egberts1 wrote: post #57
z_rex wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A spinning generator is not outputting 10x it's rated current over any significant amount of time. You can only add so much steam or fuel to a turbine, and the rotor has a lot of inertia, but not enough to account for 10X its rated capacity for a second. The electrical switchyards would trip nearly instantaneously if it's connected plant output 10X its rated input.

You can if the load was 10x under max. before getting tripped. Misaligned oscillation can occurs under ANY load.

Batteries would also be able to 10x if their load was 10x under max, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to GP's point.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#63

Post by diggan »

londons_explore wrote: post #19
decimalenough wrote: post #16

> Non-confidential version of the report of the committee for the analysis of the circumstances surrounding the electricity crisis of the April 28, 2025 Now I'm curious about what's in the confidential version of the report.

Based on the redacted bits, it is mostly company names and locations.

And more interestingly, the specific reasons various installations were unable to start up as they should have:

> Incidents detected during equipment start-up - Firstly, there is information consistent with the fact that several installations with the obligation of autonomous start-up were finally unable to provide this service in a stable manner, joining the system only once voltage had arrived from outside (from another of the "islands", normally anchored in one of the interconnections). This slowed down the start-up of the "skeleton" of the electricity system that would later make it possible to replenish the supply to demand.

The rest of the ~2 pages in that section is redacted.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#64

Post by mlyle »

plorg wrote: post #59
Yeask wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a simple and great explanation.

It's also just unfounded conspiracism and factually incorrect.

> It's also just unfounded conspiracism

I don't see that.

> and factually incorrect.

Then substantiate your point.

Stability is one of the things grid operators pay for-- not just production.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#65

Post by lobochrome »

javawizard wrote: post #62
egberts1 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can if the load was 10x under max. before getting tripped. Misaligned oscillation can occurs under ANY load.

Batteries would also be able to 10x if their load was 10x under max, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to GP's point.

The inverter would melt presumably.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#66

Post by mslansn »

baq wrote: post #21
pdpi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm reading from that quote is that the issue wasn't renewables as such, but an issue of power generation reacting too quickly and too intensely to price fluctuations. "Renewables" only matter insofar as they're the sort of generation that, under the current regulatory regime, get to react to those pricing changes.

The report goes to great lengths to avoid certain words or phrases. The market failed here, it didn’t price in risk of grid collapse correctly.

[flagged]

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#67

Post by Rodeoclash »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #58
giantg2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to build a dam, you just need the pipes and pumps for an existing dam (or elevated natural basin).

I thought you needed two dams. One higher than the other. You pump water back and forth between the two to generate or capture energy. Is it that common that dams are already existing in nearby-ish pairs with the sufficient height difference? And that we haven't done this already? Doing this is good where we can. But it has geographical limitations. Batteries don't so much.

My layman's understanding is that most locations that are suitable for pumped storage already have pumped storage built on them.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#68

Post by mlyle »

stephen_g wrote: post #56
shakow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but the market moves fast because renewables (or, more precisely, wind & solar) move fast. There is not much fast trading to be done on a nuke/gas/coal/hydro powerplant ramping up or down, but there is a lot of instability (and thus market volatility) to be found in fast varying solar/wind conditions.

That's inaccurate on the whole though, because while those big generators can't move fast, demand can move fast! Which is a difficult problem to manage in baseload grids. Renewables just change one set of challenges for another set, at the end of the day it's all manageable.

> because while those big generators can't move fast, demand can move fast! Which is a difficult problem to manage in baseload grids.

Don't forget rotational inertia. This gives the system a high-frequency response mode: it can resist sudden demand changes through stored kinetic energy, effectively acting as a low-pass filter with a fast dominant pole.

As you get a smaller share of generation with rotational inertia, you need a lot more buffering on short to medium timescales.

And, of course, it doesn't help for longer timescales that in many places renewable production slopes off in the late afternoon right when demand slopes upwards for cooling.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#69

Post by xwolfi »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #10

Reads very similar to some blackouts we had in Australia. Weakly connected grids with vast geographical distances leading to oscillations that took down the grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout Completely solved with lithium based grid storage at key locations btw. This grid storage has also been massively profitable for it's owners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve#R…

But Australia is tiny: 27M people. Just Spain is twice as big, and the European grid serves 500M people, we don't have the same problems, and probably can't solve them with the Australian solutions.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#70

Post by scrlk »

robocat wrote: post #45

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 m…

I suppose other system operators might have better a state estimator and wide area monitoring system. But real-time system operation is universally an engineer sitting behind a desk, looking at their screen, and trying to make the best decision with whatever data they have.

The actions that were taken did not strike me as out of the ordinary.

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