Have been abroad this week, but fortunately not on the Iberian peninsular or southern France. cascading blackouts like that are seriously no supposed to happen. Speculation ahead of a proper post mortem is interesting only on an ad hominem basis: what explanation does a particular party instinctively reach for, and what does that tell us?
The continental TV I have been watching hasn't been slow to wonder whether grid decarbonisation doesn't have something to do with it, whilst carefully phrasing this as what "some people" are speculating. Which suggests the green/progressive camp rather fears decarbonisation will ultimately feature in the account. It kinda has to, because there is so much continual changing and tampering going on, and in the middle of all this, the Bad Thing has happened.
A couple of things are worth emphasising. This genuinely is a very Bad Thing (albeit "could have been worse"), which isn't tolerable, even as a once-in-a-while event. It's up there with Boeings operated by competent airlines that fall out of the sky. Wholly unacceptable.
And: spin & framing notwithstanding, we will eventually get a proper account, which doubtless the greens (however technically ignorant) have been told. There is a whole world of grid expertise out there, that (a) wants to know; (b) can detect BS at a thousand paces; and (c) won't be slow to let us all in on what's been found.
ND
4 comments:
"And: spin & framing notwithstanding, we will eventually get a proper account, which doubtless the greens (however technically ignorant) have been told. There is a whole world of grid expertise out there, that (a) wants to know; (b) can detect BS at a thousand paces; and (c) won't be slow to let us all in on what's been found. "
I'll make a prediction - whatever is published will studiously ignore the Net Zero elephant in the room, and talk about 'lessons for the future' and 'technical solutions' to prevent it happening again etc etc. And the Net Zero cultists will ignore what happened entirely and continue on their merry way, because the alternative would be to admit they've made the mother of all errors, and deserve to be tarred and feathered (at best).
And its no good thinking that 'experts' telling the cultists they've got it wrong is going to have any more impact than a .22 on an elephant. After all grid experts have been telling them this was going to happen for years, so why would they listen now?
My prediction: Joe Bloggs will be invited to concentrate on the secondary issue - the perturbation that kicked off the problem.
Whereas the primary issue is why the grid was being run on the verge of instability. The answer is presumably to do with the high proportion of solar and wind power and the consequent low proportion being generated by stations with spinning kit - steam turbines, gas turbines - which provide the inertia to stabilise the system.
I assume that water turbines in hydro plant also provide useful inertia: anyone here know?
Anyhow, suppose I balance a pencil on its flat end. If someone sneezes nearby, or bumps into my desk, the pencil tumbles over. The key question isn't "sneeze or collision"? The key question is what sort of mug expects a pencil to stay stable indefinitely in that position?
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Of what I do not know I do not speak.
In the old days of synching 3 phase generators you had filament type light bulbs between the (stepped down) incoming 3 grid phases and your generator's 3 phases. You wound the steam pressure up until the lamps stopped flickering and all held dark (you were equal). Then you heaved the big switch to join the grid. That was the easy bit.
Then you monitored the current on your generator's phases and so long as you were sending power out all was well, just hold the steam pressure to keep it that way. If you started sucking in power your generator would act as a motor and try to suck the boiler dry - not good. So a delicate business for a control system to keep hundreds of tonnes of iron spinning and to keep hundreds of tons of coal loading into the furnaces to keep the steam up. All with long mechanical and thermal inertia lags.
So long as all the machinery was hefty and could stand a bit of abuse then careful work kept the show on the road. What happens now with fast reacting power sources I don't know. But even in the old days it was not unheard of for a violent surge to break the generator/turbine coupling and send it up through the power station roof. But the overall system usually kept going.
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