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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

bbc.com

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#981

Post by LorenPechtel »

bArray wrote: post #956
mike_hearn wrote: post #319

This sounds big enough to require a black start. Unfortunately, those are slow and difficult. If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up…

Just to add, I was at a University campus when the entire building's electrics went out and there was a significant pull due to relatively powerful computers in every room. They initially tried to bring the building back online altogether and failed. Then they tried to bring it back in sections and failed too. In the end they ended up going into each lab, turning every computer off at the wall to bring each lab's pow…

Yup. I used to work with a factory that had a bunch of really big machines. Turn everything on at once and the transformer out on the pole self-destructed. Note that the breakers didn't pop--the startup transient was short enough. The power company wasn't happy.

Or look at Apollo 13. The astronauts had turned off everything possible because they had lost their generator and only had their batteries. And it took a lot of furious planning by the guys on the ground to come up with a sequence of turning things back on that didn't cause the peak draw to go too high. Can't go too fast or it trips. Can't start too early because the power is limited, but can't start too late because the systems have to be up when they hit the atmosphere.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#983

Post by ksajadi »

sapiogram wrote: post #934
ksajadi wrote: post #723

Apparently Europ network came close to shutdown due to frequency drop as the result: https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1916914966663434493?s=46

The guy is an American political journalist, his opinions here have exactly zero value to me.

His opinions or his facts?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#984

Post by ksajadi »

celsoazevedo wrote: post #752
ksajadi wrote: post #723

Apparently Europ network came close to shutdown due to frequency drop as the result: https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1916914966663434493?s=46

Is that a reliable source? The guy started blaming this on renewables hours ago even though no one seems to know exactly what happened.

WSJ good enough? https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/spain-portugal-power...

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#985

Post by ksajadi »

leumon wrote: post #738
ksajadi wrote: post #723

Apparently Europ network came close to shutdown due to frequency drop as the result: https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1916914966663434493?s=46

Except that's not true: an auto shutdown only occurs at 47.5 Hz, at least in Germany, some countries have the limit even lower: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unterfrequenz

Thanks for the clarification. However the idea behind this hypothesis is that the inertia stored in physical generators is mostly responsible for keeping the grid stable and as less inertia exists in the grid the risk of this goes up.

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/spain-portugal-power...

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#986

Post by celsoazevedo »

ksajadi wrote: post #984
celsoazevedo wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a reliable source? The guy started blaming this on renewables hours ago even though no one seems to know exactly what happened.

WSJ good enough? https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/spain-portugal-power...

Good enough for what? I've read the article. It's speculating that solar could be the culprit as it was the main source of energy at that time, but the grid operator couldn’t say what exactly failed, only that they had "two separate losses of power generation in southwestern Spain, a second and a half a part".

If you look at the generation stats[0][1], everything from nuclear to gas to solar dropped. And it was solar and wind that kept producing most of the energy for hours after the failure.

If renewables were the cause of this blackout, then fine, but that's not what the WSJ article says. The guy who wrote the tweet you linked to was blaming renewables 2 or 3 hours after it had happened and the tweet contained wrong information, as pointed out by a different comment here. To me, it's not a good source.

Just to be clear, if renewables were the main reason behind this blackout, then let's blame them and point out their weaknesses and see what we can do to mitigate them (batteries?). What we shouldn't do is jump to conclusions before we know what the heck happened.

---

[0] https://i.imgur.com/J375gbQ.png

[1] https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#987

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

dxuh wrote: post #895
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if someone could build a realistic scenario into a game -- let's say some sort of smaller scale black start for, say, a space station. And throw in a unknown computer architecture for the in-game computers so that players need to RTFM to figure out how it works.

I tried to make something like this (not power specifically) for a game jam once: https://pfirsich.itch.io/arbitrary-complexity I took down the servers though, so you probably can't easily try it. I don't know if I added a way to configure the lobby server. I should have! It's open source though. And there is a video about that thing on my YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TPgfa7LbiI The game is bad and nothi…

Wow this really looks interesting.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#988

Post by ksajadi »

celsoazevedo wrote: post #986
ksajadi wrote: post #984

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSJ good enough? https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/spain-portugal-power...

Good enough for what? I've read the article. It's speculating that solar could be the culprit as it was the main source of energy at that time, but the grid operator couldn’t say what exactly failed, only that they had "two separate losses of power generation in southwestern Spain, a second and a half a part". If you look at the generation stats[0][1], everything from nuclear to gas to solar dropped. And it was solar…

I don’t think the argument (at least the one I’m curious about) is about renewables causing it but that with a growing portion of the grid coming from renewables a black start becomes more and more difficult.

I understand the physics behind this claim although I’d add a huge caveat that I’m not a power grid expert so put the comment here to see comments from experts

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#989

Post by Xelbair »

signatoremo wrote: post #755
Xelbair wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just in time" is a phrase I hate with vehement passion. You aren't optimizing the system, you're reducing safety marigns - and consequences are usually similar to Challanger. This is a solution that teenager put in management position would think of(along with hire more people as solution to inefficient processes), not a paid professional. Systems like electric grid, internal water management (anti-flood) shouldn't…

JIT isn’t about reducing safety margin. It was pioneered by Japanese companies, namely Toyota. They are known for risk adverse, safety first. > This is a solution that teenager put in management position would think of(along with hire more people as solution to inefficient processes), not a paid professional. What kind of comment is this? Toyota has been using and refining it for decades. It wasn’t invented yesterday…

It literally is reducing safety margin(buffers) of a whole distribution system by definition, and it is also being applied in places where it does not fit - like systems that should be resilient to disruption and/or anti-fragile.

I would expect a paid professional in management discipline to be aware of such nuance but alas proven wrong again.

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