Yes. Its a very easy way to confuse greens and paint solar energy as better than it is by using PEAK output rather than AVERAGE output.
I.e. 'Britain has 4GW of domestic solar capacity. Britains average demand is 30 GW.
WOW!. 7% of all our electricity comes from solar!
NOT!
The average output of those panels is 400MW. And almost none of that comes in the darkest months of winter when it is needed the most.
And if Euean Mearns is to be believed, that solar took more energy to erect than it will ever pay back, making it utterly pointless in terms of carbon emission reduction anyway, and if the rest of the skeptics are correct, carbon reduction in the atmosphere won't do anything except hamper plant growth.
Pretty much any directly coupled AC generator generator is a motor and will normally sit there happily taking mains power to spin, until something causes it to try and spin faster when its internal phase advances and it starts to push the current along as a true generator.
However in grid terms 60 seconds is 'instant' anyway. There is enough energy storage in all those spinning rotors on the grid* to cope with fluctuations in demand on that sort of timescale.
*'intermittent renewable' energy excepted. The electronic converters have no sort of storage in them such as that afforded by huge spinning turbines.
Years ago I was on board an aircraft used as a research tug by Decca radar. There was this whining noise in the cabin... 'what's that?' 'that's the rotary converter to generate mains voltage from the batteries' 'Ugh! why not have a (then newfangled) transistorised inverter!?' 'because that rotary convertor can survive the 50% voltage drop we get when pulling up the undercarriage, for 30 seconds'
I did work out that if Loch Ness could be raised 500 feet, and filled with water, it would supply Britain for the whole winter, and you could use solar panels to recharge it in summer.
Of course 10 nuclear power stations would be a lot cheaper. And far less dangerous.
Indeed, this is so and consumes 4MW from the grid just to keep the turbine running in air synchronised with the grid so that it is only a trivial matter of "Opening the Tap" and increasing excitation to reverse the energy flow from 'motoring' to 'generating'.
The ten seconds time is that required to operate the penstock valve(s) but I believe it takes another two seconds for the turbine's automatic governor control to fine tune and stabilise for the generator loading.
The only thing I can't recall is whether this "Hot Standby" mode (spinning the turbine in dry air) applied only to one of the 6 turbine/ gensets or whether to more than just the one or, indeed, all 6 gensets.
This "Hot Standby" mode is fairly trivial to implement[1] so I'd be surprised if at least one other genset didn't also have this feature if only to cover for routine maintenance on the "Primary Hot Standby" genset. Even if they never intended to run more than any one genset in hot standby (4MW running cost), including this feature, I would imagine, on
*all* 6 turbines could provide useful diversity of plant usage.
[1] Basically, it's simply a matter of leaving the genset connected to the grid after being run up and synchronised then shutting off the water to let the generator motor on as any such generator would do in the absence of mechanical drive from its prime mover whether steam or gas turbine or, in this case, high pressure water jets.
The Francis turbine in this case remains dry in order to minimise unwanted drag (even so, it still needs energy input from the grid at a work rate of 4MW). The only extra complication that may arise out of such a motoring mode might be a cooling issue due to the lack of water flow within the turbine itself.
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