A reliance on Net Zero energy left Spain and Portugal vulnerable to the mass blackouts engulfing the region, experts have said. The Telegraph has the story.
In what is believed to be Europe’s largest power cut, tens of millions of people were left without electricity, while flights were grounded, trains halted and whole cities were left without power, internet access or other vital services.
The cause of the initial fault in the region’s electricity grid is still being investigated, and the EU has insisted that there were no indications that it was a cyberattack.
However, energy experts have blamed a heavy reliance on solar and wind farms in Spain for leaving the region’s power grid vulnerable to such a crisis.
A state of emergency was declared in Spain, while in Portugal, water company EPAL said supplies could also be disrupted.
Queues formed at shops of people seeking to purchase emergency supplies like gaslights, generators and batteries.
Energy operators are fighting to restore power in Spain, Portugal and parts of France, and residents are being urged to avoid travel and use mobile phones sparingly.
Tens of thousands of British travellers could potentially be affected by airport disruption in the region.
Spain has seen a massive increase in renewable and low carbon electricity generation in recent years. Two decades ago more than 80% of its power came from burning fossil fuels such as coal and gas, as well as nuclear. Solar and wind provided less than 5%.
By 2023 renewable energy provided 50.3% of power. On Monday the proportion of renewables was far higher. Around noon, just before the crash, solar was providing about 53% of Spain’s electricity with another 1% from wind, according to Red Eléctrica’s own data. Gas was providing only about 6%.
On Monday Spain was forced to activate emergency measures to restore electricity across parts of northern and southern Spain, including switching hydroelectric plants across the country back on and importing power through giant cables with France and Morocco.
Traditional energy systems have mechanisms which allow them to keep running even if there is a shock, such as a surge or loss of power.
However, solar and wind do not have the same ability.
Electricity grids need what is known as inertia to help balance the network and maintain electricity supplies at a stable frequency. Inertia is created by generators with spinning parts – such as turbines running on gas, coal or hydropower – which wind and solar do not have.
Britain’s National Energy Systems Operator (Neso) compares it to “the shock absorbers in your car’s suspension, which dampen the effect of a sudden bump in the road and keep your car stable and moving forward.”
Kathryn Porter, an independent energy analyst, said: “In a low-inertia environment the frequency can change much faster. If you have had a significant grid fault in one area, or a cyber attack, or whatever it may be, the grid operators therefore have less time to react.
“That can lead to cascading failures if you cannot get it under control quickly.”
Duncan Burt, a former British grid operator and strategy chief at Reactive Technologies, said: “If you have got a very high solar day then your grid is less stable, unless you’ve taken actions to mitigate that. So you would expect things to be less stable than normal.”
Richard Tice, the Reform party’s deputy leader and energy spokesman, said the events in Spain should be a warning to Britain and showed the risks of net zero.
He said: “We need to know the exact causes but this should be seen as a wake-up call to the eco-zealots.
“Power grids need to operate within tight parameters to remain stable. Wind and solar outputs by contrast, vary hugely over long and short periods so they add risk to the system. The UK’s grid operators and our Government should take heed.”
Worth reading in full.
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As plausibly proven by unplanned experiment in Spain and Portugal yesterday, “Why you can’t run Britain on breezes and sunbeams…”
https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-net-zero
“…The world of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries is limited by physics. Those limits are hard, and they are non-negotiable.”
And all after proclamations a couple of weeks earlier of how Spain’s grid had been exclusively powered by solar and wind for the first time.
Power grids throughout Europe carefully designed by engineers on sound physical principles over preceding decades, over the last 20 years ruinously un-designed by state-sponsored panderers to climate fiction, fallacy and folly.
Thank you, Nemesis.
On a positive note, they did achieve Net Zero.
In UK first national grid build between 1926 and 1928 – so over a century of experience.
The feeble excuse of this being caused by “unusual atmospheric conditions” might wash with very busy members of the public who really don’t understand how energy works, but it does not wash with anyone who does understand. Coal Gas and Nuclear are full time means of producing electricity and are able to provide base load. Wind and sun are part time and cannot do that. An increasing dependency on renewables that cannot be relied upon is going to cause blackouts all over Europe and the UK just as has happened in other places where they plumped for ideological energy and got rid of reliable affordable energy. (California and Australia). As you use more and more wind and sun the less reliable the grid becomes, and the more you eat into the Reserve Margin. ——Here in the UK as we use more and more unreliable wind and sun we should prepare for rolling blackouts and then watch as the likes of Miliband squirm their way out of reality by spinning fairy tales to keep their phoney planet-saving agenda going.
On the other side of the coin, some power stations actually need to have the base load as a stable one, as they can’t react quickly either way. E.g. nuclear ones. Many of the later coal ones had sets of 4, with maximum 500 MW per alternator, with an element of planning ahead to operate each one.
That’s why nuclear, apart from prohibitive cost – is not the fossil fuel free solution to back-up part-time wind and solar.
The problem arises if reactor output has to be constantly varied – cooled, reheated – which cause degradation of the fuel rod containers – they buckle apparently, which would make a reactor uncontrollable if they got stuck in or out of the core.
But nevertheless Mad Ed Zero is throwing £250million taxpayer monies at Rolls Royce to “research” Small Modular Reactors as if a number of small uncontrollable reactors us better than big ones.
Gas is the ideal back up as it can tick over in the background. But then I would never be using wind or sun at all as it is being done purely for ideological reasons, and for the purposes of removing affordable energy (coal and gas) because the U/WEF says we in the wealthy west have used up more than our fair share of this finite resource. —-Eco Socialism
I’ve prepared. And I was rather disappointed that the very close shave the Eco Nutters had in January didn’t close the country down for 24 hours.
Yes sometimes the public needs to see the consequences of pretending to save the planet but ofcourse Miliband etc would spin their way out of it with more feeble eco socialist excuses to gaslight the people.
I remember reading, perhaps here, the complexity involved with cold-starting an electric grid.
When everything is already off, it’s not a case of simply flicking a switch. You have to coax it back into being over the course of several days.
Yes. A cold start. It’s not something they can practice often.
I do hope there are lots of people observing and taking notes about how it’s done.
I wonder if it’s going to be a bit like teaching and learning surgery? See one. Do one. Teach one.
Very well put. I will quote you, if you don’t object.
The correct term is black start. The general approach is to try and build out small islands of power, extending from major power stations, like hydro first, as these are usually most self sufficient. These will then try and power enough grid to restart other major stations, like nuclear, coal, gas. Once a few islands are established, they can try and sync them together onto the same frequency. Once this is established, you keep extending the grid, taking same steps each time. Note, this is a very, very complex exercise, and comms will be a challenge, so the last thing you want are thousands of uncontrolled power sources chipping in and buggering it all up… like say… PV or wind turbines… You need stability, not capacity
I’m sure they’ll spin the outage as some climate change crap, however enough people I hope now have real experience of what a major grid failure looks like…
Thank you. Yes. Black start.
I was involved in a cold start of a data centre which suffered a major power outage. They lost a lot of customers over that. That was fun (for various values of ‘fun’) but not life-threatening like a grid failure – and of course it’s not so easy for customers to vote with their feet and change grid supplier. Let’s hope their customers have long enough memories to reach the next election.
That’s always a strange experience – being in a silent data centre, when they are usually never silent, is an odd experience I’ve had as well… as you say though, no danger to life. What happened – did a UPS let the smoke out / short the power distribution?
What? The magic smoke that makes the magic machines work… and if it escapes they stop working? There were a few of those as they re-applied power.
The data centre had a planned outage on one grid bearer and an unplanned JCB adjustment on another. Then the fuel ran out for the generators before they could get a grid connection up again. Piss poor. My involvement on site was as a customer (soon to be a former customer).
Man that does sound piss poor… running out of diesel for you generators is pretty 101 stuff. I like your term ‘unplanned JCB adjustment’ term – seen a few of those in my time as well, somehow they are drawn to large bundles of fibre optics…
DR planning 101 – if it can go wrong, it will go wrong…
And practically impossible with intermittent supply.
Thus is why gas power stations were used to bring back the Spanish grid.
A well-explained article. This is what could have happened to UK in January this year as our grid is similarly overdependent on wind & solar.
” …..inertia to help balance the network and maintain electricity supplies at a stable frequency. Inertia is created by generators with spinning parts – such as turbines running on gas, coal or hydropower – which wind and solar do not have. “
It has been asserted to me by some, that the many huge wind turbines spinning at 1 rev per 2 or 3 sec with step-up gears to drive much faster generators also posess rotational inertia. They do not. The generators produce Direct Current electricity which is ‘chopped’ by inverters, which are large semiconductor switches, to feed the grid one-way only with Alternating Current.
Nuclear reactor stations generate heat to power steam turbines and are great for base load, but if they cannot feed a stable grid, they have to shut down the nuclear reaction quickly to avoid unsafe temperatures. They take a long time to start up and have to connect to a restabilised grid. Local power for non-heavy loads can be restored quite quickly in some areas but, it will be interesting to see how long it takes for power to be restored everywhere in these countries. I have an 8 kVA diesel generator and wonder when I might find I need it.
Spain is warm at this time of the year. A UK blackout in January would cause cases of hypothermia.
You are right s-o-r. Increasing dependence on heat pumps will assure deaths in a country wide winter grid blackout. But in warm times critical infrastructure e.g. Hospitals are at risk especially in Europe. Hospital back-up generators in US are covered under NFPA ( National Fire Protection Assocn ) regulations which require 4 day/96 hour capability for critical services with legal obligations. Less so in UK/Europe where https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Health_tech_memo_0601.pdf assumes that supply will be restored without a long outage.
Well, personally I’ll wait for the inevitable BBC “Verify” article to reassure me that it definitely wasn’t caused by total reliance on intermittent technologies. No Sirree.
It’ll be anything but that! Perhaps we should all write the bbc verify article for them now?!
Disgusting misinformation. It was the international gas markets that caused the blackout.
Not funny. Too near the mark.
And Trump – don’t forget Trump in collusion with Putin.
Extreme weather, my arse
Welcome to the future.
Or the past, depending on how you are looking at it. One chap stuck amongst it did say the night sky looked beautiful without all the light pollutions, so there’s at least one benefit
I had a quick look at the BBC coverage. Despite the Spanish saying they don’t know what caused it and ruling out a cyber attack, they manage to speculate it was the Russians, and to quote the Portuguese who blame it on rare weather (it got cloudy?).
I thought the ‘weather’ issue was that it got hot and people wanted to use their air-con (aka heat pumps).
It does seem odd to me that many people are very much against other (greedy, rich) people wasting power on air-conditioning yet think that heat pumps for heating are a brilliant idea.
Yeah absolutely boiling hot at 70f and colder than southern England.
Ah. So probably not greedy, rich people running air-con. Just ‘effing’ unstable grid then?
Well somebody had to do it although Germany was my favourite as they allow anyone to add rooftop solar to the grid with no control. Still, plenty of time for Germany to join the clown show.
And we have no cause to be complacent as our grid has a leeway of 0.5Hz before it shuts down but all it took in Spain was a drop of 0.15Hz. So keep more cash; jerry cans of fuel; tinned and dried food; and a generator to run your freezer.
As far as I know the EU does not (yet) run member state electricity systems or cyber protection. So how would it know what caused the blackout.
Grandstanding? Surely not.
Slightly off topic, forthcoming Energy Performance Certificate requirements will shut down countless buildings in the next few years. Estate Agents are already recommending demolition and reconstruction to comply. No suggestions as to who should pay for that bright idea.
The cause was a 0.15Hz frequency drop. The European and UK grids operate at 50Hz with a very narrow tolerance of less than +/- 1Hz which means that a frequency blip of more than 0.5Hz for even a few seconds can cause safety equipment to shut down a grid sector. Since sectors are connected, this blip can cause synchronicity problems and have a cascade effect causing other sectors to shut down too.
What is surprising here, is that a blip of much less than 0.5Hz caused a widespread shutdown, which suggests a total lack of resilience in the grid supplied by over 70% wind and solar.
Grids are stable when dominated by power generation with dispatchable mechanical rotation – turbines and steam power, ie coal, gas, nuclear – which introduce inertia into the system.
Any fluctuation in frequency is dampened and/or can quickly be corrected by grid operators getting power stations to increase rotation. Some gas power stations have mechanical batteries (big flywheels) to assist grid stabilisation.
Wind and solar cannot provide this inertia.
At the time of the power failure, solar was peaking at 60% of supply with wind at 12%. Only 3% was from dispatchable spinning generation… gas.
Solar is quickly affected by atmospheric conditions, eg passing clouds, and wind conditions can suddenly vary. When solar and wind are providing such a high content, sudden drop off of even a small number of contributing generators can have a big effect on frequency and when there is little grid inertia (from spinning generators) to dampen and compensate, the grid sector will shut down.
Apart from weather, other things can happen equipment faults, power line problems which might cause frequency fluctuations, and a grid mostly or totally fed by wind & solar is very vulnerable to such incidents which are not uncommon.
It is reported that Spain was linked to the French grid via interconnecter and there was a wild fire in the Pyrenees near Narbonne which took out some HT power lines. This could have caused a frequency anomaly causing a synchronicity problems with the Spanish grid.
It was gas power stations brought on line which enabled the Spanish grid to be brought back up and power restored. Solar/wind could not do this.
In summary: renewables-supplied grids are not stable.
Batteries or condensers proposed to provide frequency stability, are not proactive, but reactive which may not be fast enough, and of course no good once discharged.
Believe me, I’d love it if this were true and brought about the downfall of the fascistic net zero lunacy, but there are very good reasons to believe this was caused by activity related to the oncoming pole shift that we are not supposed to know about or talk about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYuPQ2NbkwA
Any more info on that?
I heard the globe is about to upend itself. The end.
Nothing to worry about then!
Call me a cynic, but I think this article is right in its assessment of Tony Blair’s criticism of NetZero.
https://open.substack.com/pub/dfleming/p/the-long-game-of-tony-blair-from?r=ylgqf&utm_medium=ios
“The UK’s grid operators and our Government should take heed.”
Hands up all those who think they will.
Thought so.