Spanish solar blackout: Will we ignore the warning?

The usual critique of solar energy is that the sun doesn't shine all the time--and that's certainly true.  But millions of Spaniards, Portuguese and some French people spent hours without any electricity Monday as the over reliance on solar bit them in the culo.  You had to read widely to even hear about it in California since the Green agenda doesn't want to talk about these things.  The WSJ noted:

Life changed for Spaniards at noon on Monday. With the sun at its peak, the country’s largely solar-powered electrical grid shut down. Mere days before, Spain’s government had announced that its grid had for the first time run entirely on renewable power, with new records set almost daily for solar. Breathless declarations of victory flowed, in service of the government’s promise to phase out reliable nuclear power plants with many years of remaining service life. As in Germany, this promise is now the Spanish politicians’ nightmare.

The Financial Times had some of the numbers that lead to the collapse of the grid:

About 55 percent of Spain's supply was from solar sources when 15 gigawatts of electricity generation disconnected from the grid within just five seconds.  Several European experts said Spain appeared to lack enough firm power--readily available, reliable energy supply from sources such as fossil fuels or nuclear that can be reduced or raised--to kick in when the grid's frequency dropped sharply...an oversupply of electricity might have initially caused the problem.  Normally, the grid operator would have managed this by asking traditional plants to moderate their output but this was not possible because so few plants were on line.  Of the scheduled 26 GW of electricity supply on Monday, just 5GW came from non-intermittent sources.

About a fifth of the country's power normally comes from solar power, but hey, the government wanted to set a new Green record--and they have.  Traffic lights, electric trains, home medical equipment, internet access, ATMs---all of it down for hours.  My part of B'game was out for 50 hours two years ago during the big storms.  We have enough weather and vehicle accident-driven outages without adding more risk by virtue signaling.  As the Journal concluded:

Events will inevitably test any electrical system’s limits. A rational system should be designed to handle such events. Spain’s system was engineered politically, not rationally. It’s the latest lesson in how not to make energy policy. Will anyone learn from it?

Comments

[Paloma Ave]

Will anyone learn from it?

Of course not!

Not in the People's Republic of California.

The right to choose your source of power has been taken away from us, by the all knowing power of the democRATS.

The right to choose only applies to one thing!

[Fugit All]

Why you so mad, Paloma and Joe?

The freedom to choose includes the freedom to live somewhere else where reliance on fossil fuel extraction and processing reign supreme! Surely there still exist such places under the current regime.

Something tells me you enjoy the mild weather and pleasant community of our fair neighborhood with its abundance of interests, cuisines, and tolerance for choice in lifestyles? Where, if you buy a product, you will be informed if it may negatively impact your health... especially if it has been produced with petrochemicals? That fuel source that will definitely last forever lol...

But go on and continue to rant about the democrats. At least it's nice enough outside to go and touch grass after listening to that same old tune.

[Concerned]

Fugit All,
When did CA become tolerant?
I now fear every time I leave my Tesla parked in a public space.
Violence from the all knowing radical left does not create a comfortable environment.
Is forcing out all those who disagree with radical left policies your definition of freedom? It certainly isn’t diversity.

[Fugit All]

I think your discomfort about being a Tesla owner has more to do with Elon being an unhinged, unelected billionaire who loves eugenics and unambiguous salutes who also bought his unchecked access to the levers of power in this country than with Californians holding bias against electric vehicles, Concerned. YMMV.

Btw, you know you can peel off that Tesla logo with a heat gun and replace it with a Ford or Audi decal if you're so concerned, Concerned? Support your local businesses by sourcing those products here!! :)

[Jennifer Pfaff]

'Looks like a Ford dealership just opened on Auto Row after about a decade or so of being absent. Welcome back:)!

[JP]

Well there were at least seven fatalities from the blackout, so there's that. Should we tolerate that, too?

[Fugit All]

JP, I guess we could compare them against deaths from black lung...

Or those on oil rigs...

Or nuclear accidents...

I could go on, as you know; they weren't any less tolerable and their numbers are ten, hundred, or thousand fold.

[Paloma Ave]

Fugit All - You appear in the minority here.

[Just Sayin']

The Love it or Leave it wing of the Progressive party has weighed in! Didn't that kind of talk used to be called fascist? Just sayin'

[Fugit All]

A better example of fascism is a president who swears an oath to protect, defend, and uphold the Constitution saying he doesn't know if he needs to do that same thing once he gets into office. Or, you know, kidnapping and exiling citizens. Or sending armed men who to terrorize and burglarize a mom and her daughters in the middle of the night in Oklahoma City. Just sayin'

[Joe]

....I'll attempt to get this back on the track of grid resilience since nobody is going to change their minds on the rest of this.

The Weekend FT followed the piece I quote in the original post with a "FT Big Read" almost full-page dive into "Europe's looming grid crunch".

It adds more detail about the destabilization of the grid that happens when unpredictable power generation outgrows predictable, adjustable generation. Here are a few tidbits:

In a paper prepared for attendees, the IEA warned of a "complex array of interconnected challenges" on electric systems, including the fossil fuel-fired power plants being shut down before the system is able to cope without them.

That brings fresh challenges to running a system as complex as an electricity network: thousands of generators and users spanning hundreds of miles across which supply and demand have to be constantly matched and frequency kept perfectly stable.

The Energy Transitions Commission estimates that by 2050, in order to meet climate goals, electricity networks would need to expand from about 68 mn km of grid in 2023 to around 120 mn km, requiring about $800bn a year investment in the 2030s and 2040s.

Many parts of Europe's grids are more than 40 years old, and the European Commission estimates they need €584bn of investment this decade.

The emerging electric world is distributed, digital and adaptive. This is not a glitch to patch. It's a paradigm that must be rethought.
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I don't read any of that as particularly political. But ignoring it thinking some utility that can barely fund tree cutting and replacing 40-50 year old insulators is just going to magically do all this is dangerous. The figures above are for the EU. For the US they are probably pretty close to the same. Will we ignore the warning?

[George Washington]

For the record no US citizens have been kidnapped or exiled. Period.

[Fugit All]

GW, we don't know their names because they are minors and that's as it should be, but you are dead wrong. US citizens, children, including a child WITH CANCER have been removed from this country without due process. That's the definition of kidnapping (by the state) and exile: you can't "deport" a citizen.

Wake up.

[George Washington]

Why do you persist in spreading this misinformation when it is so easily debunked. No US citizens adult or child have been deported. Illegal mothers who were being deported CHOSE to take their US citizen kids with them instead of leaving them with legal US citizen relatives. Those are the facts. Get a clue.

[Fugit All]

LOL too much Fox News will rot your brain. The first step in deprogramming yourself is changing the channel. Best of luck!

[George Washington]

You know we have reached the Yorktown victory celebration when Fugit Small raises the white flag and leaves the field of battle. No luck involved just a more just cause and superior skills.

I look forward to the 250th anniversary of our great country and the retreat of those who would tear us down.

[Joe]

Don't take my word for it--this guy was there. Oh, and always carry cash - dollars, Euros, Yen, Pesos, whatever wherever:

Regarding Gabriel Calzada and Manuel Fernández Ordóñez’s op-ed “How the Lights Went Out in Spain” (May 1): My wife and I were in Mijas, a tourist town in the hills of the Costa del Sol, at the time of the outage. The disruption was total. No power, cell service, internet or running water. Tourists in Europe are highly dependent on tap-to-pay, so they carry little cash. Without cell service and the internet, electronic payment systems didn’t work. Banks closed at once making it impossible to get the cash needed to pay taxi drivers to get down the mountain. And forget about calling an Uber. The panic was palpable.

When I heard that the cause was oscillations, I told my wife the problem was likely the excessive use of solar. As an electrical engineer I know the electric grid requires a perfect balance between supply and demand, which is difficult to maintain with a high percentage of power coming from solar and wind. The passage of clouds can actually add to the instability. As the authors explain, without the shock absorbers of rotating synchronous generators, stability becomes very difficult to maintain. The result, as was learned on vacation, can be catastrophic.

Like the shady and windless summer the Germans faced a few years ago, this is more evidence that a grid that is highly dependent on renewables isn’t suitable for the needs of modern living. It’s physics, not good intentions that dictates this reality. Thankfully we had some cash and could pay a taxi to get us back to our condo.

Ken Kolkebeck

[Joe]

Bjorn Lomborg is peeling the Spanish onion about what happened during the massive blackout. From the WSJ:

Grids need to stay on a very stable frequency—generally 50 Hertz in Europe—or else you get blackouts. Fossil-fuel, hydro and nuclear generation all solve this problem naturally because they generate energy by powering massive spinning turbines. The inertia of these heavy rotating masses resists changes in speed and hence frequency, so that when sudden demand swings would otherwise drop or hike grid frequency, the turbines work as immense buffers. But wind and solar don’t power such heavy turbines to generate energy. It’s possible to make up for this with cutting-edge technology such as advanced inverters or synthetic inertia. But many solar and wind farms haven’t undergone these expensive upgrades. If a grid dominated by those two power sources gets off frequency, a blackout is more likely than in a system that relies on other energy sources.
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"advanced inverters or synthetic inertia"? One wonders if PG&E has added any of these gadgets?
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Madrid had been warned. The parent company of Spain’s grid operator admitted in February: “The high penetration of renewable generation without the necessary technical capabilities in place to keep them operating properly in the event of a disturbance . . . can cause power generation outages, which could be severe.”
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55 million people in two countries without power for half a day.........and the Spanish politicians appear to have learned NOTHING.