Induced atmospheric oscillations.

And batteries. And pumped storage, and intercontinental interconnectors. And and and.

Because no one dares admit the facts. Renewables on the intermittent kinds are total utter PANTS and should never have been allowed to connect to any grid anywhere

The auto generated sig seems very appropriate tonight

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

I read 15GW in 5 seconds, seems to be 4GW of nuclear as well as solar.

As I found with gridwatch you simply don't see sub minute fluctuations on ANYTHING in the online data.

It only takes 5 seconds of well below 50Hz to start a whole cascade of disconnects

It's called solar farm inverters

Well the batteries are there to prevent what happened in Spain. To keep the grid up for a minute or two while overloaded bits are disconnected...

They cant even manage 5 minutes, let alone 5 weeks

About as high as the odds that the data will not vanish immediately if it implicates renewable energy

Not from official sources, but this site takes a reading per second, and does some statistical analysis on them

yeah. Ive been thinking of building a power monitor instead of having a smart meter and monitoring frequency *every cycle* and uploading any data that falls outside limits.

The real issue is however how many cycles of bad frequency does a windfarm or solar farm need to try and disconnect.

I read somewhere that many German factories were having to go DC and re-generate 50Hz because the grid relaxed its frequency standards to accommodate GreenCrap™ and the rapid fluctuations stressed their synchronous AC motors to destruction.

This is the latest I've seen:

"Red Eléctrica said it identified two power generation loss incidents in southwest Spain – likely involving solar plants – that caused instability in the Spanish power grid and contributed to a breakdown of its interconnection to France, according to Reuters."

As I said, a cloud passing over the Sun...

Interconnectors exist between grids (e.g UK and Europe) but as far as I know, not within grids.

I was wondering, day to day does France have any control (other than by agreement) over how much power Spain sucks or squirts, similarly between Spain and Portugal etc? Sure, as a last resort they could pull a plug, but is it all agreed that between such and such hours, country A will under-generate by x GW and country B will oversupply by x GW, and the wires will "sort it out"?

Didn't all of Europe have an issue a few years ago, that synchronous clocks were getting adrift because some countries weren't pulling their weight?

I think the mere fact they are calling for "no speculation" guarantees they know ...

A trillion? Basically UK government revenue from tax for a year. So wouldn't happen.

The point is to hit a compromise, and have sufficient balance between renewables and other - 'other' most likely being nuclear and gas. I don't think anybody suggests 100% renewable until cheap storage comes along.

If the problem in Spain and Portugal is anything to do with the solar panel inverters, then unless better inverters come along grids with a high proportion of renewables will be inherently unstable.

The most reliable grid is one based on nuclear and gas, especially if the North Sea storage facility is re-opened so that it could be filled up with cheap summer gas ready for winter. That would be rather cheaper than a £trillion per Dunkelflaute for battery storage.

So the system needs to be designed and operated properly.

The system needs to include renewables. As I say, it needs compromise and balance. If cheap storage comes along, great. If not, do what you can with what you've got.

You astonish me.

Why do you think cheap storage will come along? Cheaper, perhaps, which is why I post that provocatively high sum. I'm looking for someone to say that XYZ chemistry would be cheaper than lithium, and by how much.

My figure was calculated by taking the largest lithium-based facility I could find, getting its cost and capacity, and doing some sums. Simples.

Why does the system need to include renewables?

We know nuclear works. We know it could be done much cheaper, possibly hugely cheaper.

I see Tony Blair has decided to chip in, saying we should rely on carbon capture and nuclear fusion. Tony is great at aspirational politics, not so good at pragmatic delivery. 30 years of politicians waiting for some new technology to turn up, is why we are having problems now.

Why?

Compromise between what? And balance of what?

And if it doesn’t?

That’s what we were doing for a hundred years, and it worked well.

The question left deliberately unsaid is 'how could a couple of solar starions cause that instability at all in the first place'

We all know the answer to the question that will never be asked...

A butterfly flapping its wings in a Brazilian rain forest.

A house of cards collapses *because someone blew on it*. The solutions is not to stop people blowing.

It's not to build a house out of cards in the first place...

Oh yes. Much more control than you think. Interconnectors are commercial operations. At least the ones connecting to the UK arr. What happens is that a UK company contracts for some French nucler power and then approaches a link operator to transport it.

The link operators looks at its total booked energy in BOTH directions, subtracts one from the other and sees if there is spare capacity to sell to the requester.

If there isn't any, they wont sell it and the requestor will have to go somewhere else.

What about overload - when a grid starts to draw more than the interconnector operative has contracted for? Well it simply can charge a penalty if it can carry it, but if it cant, it must disconnect.

And that adds to the problem.

Every link is potentially able to be disconnected at the discretion of the grid operators. And that serves to isolate the problem if the problem is just an overload.

The problem is different, however with renewable energy being supplied through inverters. Here the issue is not that the total power cant handle the overload, it is that the invererters will disconnect all together across the whole grid if a frequency excursions happens.

Presumably when this started to happen, power flows from France stepped up until they were on the point of overloaqding the available links, so those tripped, isolating the spanish and portugese grids and a little bit of France as well.

And they crashed in sympathy.

Yes. IIRC Eastern Europe wasn't providing enough and Germany disconnected them or something

In extremis various parts of the grid can isolate from other parts. No one wants to do that because cross border flows save money overall. Power stations can run at or near full load and export surpluses and import deficiencies and that's cheaper than a new power station that sits there idle most of the time.

What seems to have happened here is that the whole Spanish grid was saturated with renewables and there was nothing left to support the frequency even after France had disconnected them from the European grids and their ability to stabilise the frequency was zilch because they had no spinning reserves at all. And not nearly enough battery backup either

'Look mum: No fossils!' followed by CRASH.

They think we are f****ng stupid.

Just like the twin towers where people were saying 'it looks just like a controlled demolition, therefore it WAS a controlled demolition'.

In the end it doesn't matter what started it nearly as much as the fact that a minor glitch could lead to total system failure.

And why a grid was mandated to be built like that in the first place, all because some tree huggers got a bee in their bonnets in Germany.

It's the usual mixture of greed, fear, ignorance, cynical profiteering and the EU.

(i). The is no sufficient balance possible. It is entirely likely that at any given point all wind and solar will be off the grid, and equally as bad, a time when there will be nothing *but* wind and solar ON the grid.

(ii) So long as wind and solar are so heavily subsidised and insulated financially from the consequences of their deployment, there will be no incentives to build nuclear power or indeed any fossil backup at all.

(iii) Once you build nuclear power, there is no credible argument left

(iv) We already have uber cheap and safe storage. In the form of gas, coal oil and uranium.

(v) We can do the sums with batteries and realise they never are going to work, in the same way that while you can fly a toy plane made of tissue and balsa wood on twisted rubber bands for a few minutes, there is no way it's going to take an airliner across the Atlantic.

There is only one sane solution with already known technology to zero carbon generation

The real question is how long the renewable lobby can maintain the fiction that there are others.