The cause of the blackout that afflicted Spain, Portugal and part of France has not yet been determined. But cyberattack seems to have been ruled out, and some are sayingd that Spain’s reliance on solar energy is to blame:
REE [the Spanish grid operator] said it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in Spain’s southwest that caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France.
Spain is one of Europe’s biggest producers of renewable energy, and the blackout sparked debate about whether the volatility of supply from solar or wind made its power systems more vulnerable.
Redeia, which owns Red Electrica, warned in February in its annual report that it faced a risk of “disconnections due to the high penetration of renewables without the technical capacities necessary for an adequate response in the face of disturbances”.
Robert Bryce explains why reliance on intermittent power sources like wind and solar can cause blackouts. You should read it all, but here are a few excerpts:
Understanding how solar and wind energy weakens the grid requires understanding the physics of electricity, grid inertia, and what a University of Queensland professor has dubbed the “pressure cooker” effect of renewables.
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Since the days of Edison, the grid has relied on large generators with a lot of mass. The weight of the spinning parts inside the generators has a lot of inertia that keeps the flow of electricity — think of it as pressure — on the grid at steady levels. The mass of those large generators acts as shock absorbers that allow the grid to absorb sudden changes in load or generation.
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The challenge that wind and solar bring to the grid is that they do not provide the same type of spinning mass (read: inertia) that the electric grid has relied upon for decades.…[A]n electrical engineer who has worked all over the world selling hardware that detects problems on the electric grid and helps improve grid reliability…said it is “highly likely” that Spain’s heavy reliance on solar and wind contributed to the blackout. “What we are seeing across all power systems is that they are more brittle. They don’t have enough inertia. They have far less spinning reserve and margin for error. Earlier in my career, it was common to have a 15% minimum spinning reserve.”
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The best explanation of grid inertia and its importance was published in 2016 by University of Queensland professor Simon Bartlett. In a paper written for the Energy Policy Institute of Australia, “The ‘Pressure Cooker’ Effect of Intermittent Renewable Generation on Power Systems,” Bartlett declared that the “practical upper limit for renewables is around 40% of total electricity generated.” …Here’s the critical section, in which he explains that in a conventional electricity system:
Rotating kinetic energy in heavy turbines and generators is immediately available and is automatically converted into electricity the instant the power system starts to slow down following an unexpected generator breakdown anywhere in the power system. Electrical and magnetic energy from electrical generators is instantaneously released following a fault on the network, playing a critical role, along with rotating inertia, in power system stability and high speed power system protection. Both wind-power and solar PV are technically incapable of storing, controlling, and releasing energy in any of these ways, and simply convert the available wind or sunshine into electricity depending on the prevailing weather conditions.
As misguided governments continue to pursue “renewable” energy, watch for more disasters like the one that befell Spain and Portugal, and worse ones, too.
