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2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

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Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#91

Post by mlyle »

plorg wrote: post #85
mlyle wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's unfounded conspiracy to bang on about how "they are clearly hiding something". Read the report. Power systems are complicated and not as easy as just "build another nuclear plant". It was (by regulation) conventional units that were required to provide voltage support, and it was in part their failure to operate according to their requirements that lead to the voltage excursions that caused the system collapse.…

> It's unfounded conspiracy to bang on about how "they are clearly hiding something".

It's also a bit of a straw-man to put your own version of what someone's saying in their mouth.

Buying insurance and other mitigations against rare circumstances, outside of well regulated and well understood products in stable marketplaces, is really hard. You need to do your homework with the counterparties and be sure that incentives align well enough to get what you want.

Unfortunately, when you set up an incentive system, you tend to get exactly what you pay for-- whether that's what you want, or not.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#92

Post by eldaisfish »

fuoqi wrote: post #83
floatrock wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Why is the problem the cheap source of supply rather than the market rules and incentives that made everything act the way it did? I explicitly mentioned this line of argument in the GP. The problem is that renewables only sometimes cheap and plentiful and often not when we want it. Even without accounting for the politically-driven preferential treatment covered in the sibling comment, from the purely technical poi…

a couple of things to add to an excellent explanation.

I'm glad people are coming around to accepting that renewable energy has problems. We have some solutions to these problems but we do not have experience with them.

I agree entirely - the externalities of renewable energy are significant and are not paid for by the source of the problem - the renewable generators themselves.

Just as one example, what is the solution to an extended wind drought, say of a week or ten days? All the batteries in the world could not store enough energy for that.

A major challenge with renewable energy is that it is intermittent and variable but also unpredictable. it is impossible to predict wind speeds more than 24 or 36 hours out and even those predictions are often inaccurate. just building more wind turbines or solar panels won't cut it.

There is also the reluctance of grid operators to use the capacity available in renewable energy generators. The majority of wind turbines are capable of active and reactive power control but most grid operators either don't use this capacity or use it minimally.

A distribution connected wind turbine could do wonders for reactive power control but this is rarely done. More grid operators should pay for reactive power, like the UK is starting to do. This should also be sourced from EVs and small solar inverters.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#93

Post by outside1234 »

londons_explore wrote: post #12
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…

> 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…

What batteries CAN do however is go from 0W to their capacity watts in milliseconds. It is their instant-on ability that is disruptive.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#94

Post by gusgus01 »

pdpi wrote: post #42
pkilgore wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not fully informed about pumped storage, but twenty minutes is more than enough for most hydroelectric plants to go from 0 to full power, and that's probably the case for pumped storage as well. Eg,

In the case of Cruachan Power Station: “It takes just two minutes for a turbine to run up from rest to generate mode,” says Martin McGhie, Operations and Maintenance Manager at the power station. “It takes slightly longer for the turbines to run down from generate to rest, but whatever function the turbines are performing, they can reach it within a matter of minutes.”

https://www.drax.com/power-generation/in-energy-storage-timi...

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#95

Post by tacticus »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #40
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…

Agreed. The relatively small battery substation linked above can output 2GW of equivalent inertia generation (a measure to align batteries to inertial power systems) when needed. That's an entire power station they can match for short periods of time. Link: https://www.energymagazine.com.au/sa-approves-world-first-ba... Australia's largest power plant has 2.9GW of inertial generation assuming all generators are runni…

> assuming all generators are running at 100%.

which they won't ever be given the habits of coal plants to suffer outages whenever it's convenient to pump the price up.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#96

Post by perching_aix »

fuoqi wrote: post #83
floatrock wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Why is the problem the cheap source of supply rather than the market rules and incentives that made everything act the way it did? I explicitly mentioned this line of argument in the GP. The problem is that renewables only sometimes cheap and plentiful and often not when we want it. Even without accounting for the politically-driven preferential treatment covered in the sibling comment, from the purely technical poi…

This makes sense to me to an extent, however, I do not entirely follow. You say:

> Properly accounting for those externalities and adding them to the cost of renewable generation is possible, but politically unappealing.

Implying this was/is not done and should be done. As a certified fan of looking out for (cost) dependencies, I agree with this to put it very mildly. I find it unlikely this wasn't done however, rather, I think renewables were likely onboarded harder than the externalities were taken care of to allow for it, possibly due to political pressure and/or mismanagement. Or at least, that rings all too familiar to me personally, not just from real world topics, but even from work. But then what you actually propose is:

> There should be a limit on how much intermittent generation we can have depending on the preparedness of the grid and we should pay less for power from such sources, not guarantee purchase from them!

Which is a different concern.

Also, this reads to me awfully like just flowery language for "hey, what if the obviously bad thing that happened wouldn't be allowed to happen anymore" with the logic retconned into it, but then I'll never have a way of proving or demonstrating that conclusively.

Finally,

> We need to remove the existing subsidies on renewables which made sense in the early days, but not now. Let the generation sources play at the even field.

This further doesn't follow from even your own explanation (i.e. "which made sense in the early days but not now" is not a substantiated claim). It's just your own political stance on the matter to the best I can tell.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#97

Post by amluto »

eldaisfish wrote: post #92
fuoqi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why is the problem the cheap source of supply rather than the market rules and incentives that made everything act the way it did? I explicitly mentioned this line of argument in the GP. The problem is that renewables only sometimes cheap and plentiful and often not when we want it. Even without accounting for the politically-driven preferential treatment covered in the sibling comment, from the purely technical poi…

a couple of things to add to an excellent explanation. I'm glad people are coming around to accepting that renewable energy has problems. We have some solutions to these problems but we do not have experience with them. I agree entirely - the externalities of renewable energy are significant and are not paid for by the source of the problem - the renewable generators themselves. Just as one example, what is the solut…

> There is also the reluctance of grid operators to use the capacity available in renewable energy generators. The majority of wind turbines are capable of active and reactive power control but most grid operators either don't use this capacity or use it minimally.

I wonder how much is the near-complete inability for grid operators to communicate with smaller systems. My little solar inverter is capable of reactive power control over a respectable range of phase angles, and the grid operator has absolutely no ability to invoke this ability short of whatever formula the combination of PG&E, the various regulators, and the UL stuck into some standard for how small inverters are supposed to behave under various voltage and frequency conditions.

Never mind that inverters could also be fooled into thinking they’re islanded and therefore disconnect themselves if the grid frequency is too far out of range. This is usually designed to occur at above-nominal frequency, which is at least mostly not what happened in this event.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#98

Post by Maxion »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #87
floatrock wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most economically-suitable locations for pumped hydro have been built out already. You can always use a ton more concrete and force new locations, but the best locations have already been utilized and scaling law of batteries has brought them to the point where they're more competitive than new hydro for this kind of use.

Most economical locations for hydro generation have been built out already. Pumped hydro doesn't require flow like generation does, so there are thousands of times more suitable locations. Those haven't been built out.

At least in my country they have. They keep trying to build a facility but anything they come up with, the ROI just isn't there.

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#99

Post by bigbacaloa »

laurencerowe wrote: post #89
xwolfi wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't dismiss lessons from Australia. It has slightly higher electricity consumption than Spain (273 vs 265TWh/annually [1].) And there are limited interconnections to France [2]: > That problem may not have been entirely Spain’s fault, El País said. “Interconnections with the rest of the continent continue to be much fewer than the European Commission recommends, not because Spain isn’t interested, but because…

[dead]

Re: 2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]

#100

Post by mlyle »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #86
mlyle wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

> in the late afternoon right when demand slopes upwards for cooling. Demand rises because that's how people have their system set up. That cooling load can be shifted earlier in the day by using a slightly smarter thermostat to precook your house when the electricity is plentiful.

> Demand rises because that's how people have their system set up. That cooling load can be shifted earlier in the day by using a slightly smarter thermostat to precook your house when the electricity is plentiful.

You can do this a bit, but the insides of houses don't have that much thermal mass and the best insulated houses add a pretty large phase delay that makes the quickest rise in internal temperatures during the late afternoon as framing in the attic heats up.

I don't have a lot of luck in accomplishing meaningful precooling in my house. My best plan is to suffer until the late afternoon, turning on the AC at the end of the peak demand period when at least outside temperatures are lower, my AC units are shaded, and the cooling is more efficient.

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