Power cut in Spain and Portugal

[Siwastaja]

You seem to want to ignore the report

Nope - but I take the reports seriously, without need to twist them.

Oscillation Episodes Created the Preconditions. While the oscillations did not directly cause the blackout, they shaped the system state in which it occurred. The measures taken to dampen them—reducing exports and reconnecting lines—changed power flows and raised voltages. The 0.63-Hz forced oscillation was traced to converter-driven instability in a specific area of southern Spain. The absence of power system stabilizers on some large generating units and insufficient damping from existing ones weakened the system’s resilience to the inter-area 0.2-Hz oscillation.

Sure - this is same as saying plane taking off caused preconditions for the plane crash, as such it is dangerous to fly, and the solution is to tie a large mass to a plane so that it can't take off.

No report named frequency control as the cause. For a good reason: nothing very special happened frequency-side, just normal control. Power grids have two important control loops: frequency (real power) and voltage (reactive power); both affect the other, and both are important. As the reports show, voltage control failed due to non-technical reasons (management failures), and as such was not able to take its share of the job it's designed to do.

The importance of voltage control is easy to miss because it's not discussed as much; it seems trivial, because reactive power injection/absorbtion is cheap and simple to do. This is equivalent to forgetting the importance of good old lubrication of parts in an airplane, while concentrating on high tech.

Accidents happen because people make mistakes - that is natural. The technical side is to increase automated monitoring, and possibly to increase number of units participating in this voltage control.

One part of the solution might be mandating a small adjustment to the default PF of PV inverters, reducing a systematic bias grid-connected voltage control needs to deal with; that could be cost-effective, that would be simple. We also could use distributed inverters to do grid-level voltage control, but that cannot be done on distributed local control like frequency control can; local voltage is too much decoupled from the grid voltage to be a reliable signal. I have been wondering why this isn't a market like frequency containment is; we could participate with our 1000 distributed battery inverter assets, for example; but probably the reason is that voltage control is so cheap and simple to arrange by just owning the equipment, and on the other hand arranging local markets is much more complex than arranging grid-level markets for something like FCR.

[tatel]

I just stumbled over this YT video; to me, it seems to coincide with the point of view stated by some contributors in this thread. Anyway, I would like to see comments about it, in case you have any:

[Siwastaja]

I just stumbled over this YT video; to me, it seems to coincide with the point of view stated by some contributors in this thread. Anyway, I would like to see comments about it, in case you have any:

Looks correct. TLDR, political and regulatory failure to manage the grid voltage control loop, which manifested itself in two significant ways
(1) existing voltage control mechanisms (rotating mass based and shunt reactors) not working when instructed to activate (so failure of monitoring/oversight/regulation)
(2) existing, low hanging fruit additional voltage control devices, the inverters at big PV/wind plants, not being used like they are used elsewhere (video mentions Portugal as an example), which just is absurdly stupid waste of resources; these would have easily covered for the mismanaged rotating generator / shunt reactor plants

In a funny way, it turned out the polar opposite story of the initial speculation: inertia never had anything to do with it, grid frequency was never the key parameter, voltage was; maybe most funnily, exactly the non-renewable voltage regulation services that are supposed to be simple and obvious failed to work; renewables (PV and wind inverters) would have been able to cover for them but were not allowed for purely administrative reasons - it is up to debate if anti-renewable political movement is partially to blame, or is it corruption, or just generic administrative friction with no ill intents, my take is heavy on the last one because things usually are unsexier than some full blown conspiracy.

But funnily enough, the story confirms exactly what sensible people like Someone or myself have been saying for years on this forum in various threads.

[tatel]

- it is up to debate if anti-renewable political movement is partially to blame, or is it corruption, or just generic administrative friction with no ill intents, my take is heavy on the last one because things usually are unsexier than some full blown conspiracy.

Well I don't know if that was a conspiracy, but the big money companies that signed contracts to do the safeguarding, and are still getting that big money for a safeguard they didn't provide, should at least be partially blamed for breaching these contracts. There were an unholy amount of money losses because of that. If they are compelled to pay for that -at least partially- I will be with you thinking there was no ill intent. If not, I will be thinking that, nevertheless, there is a conspiracy to get these big money companies getting away with anything. Not holding my breath about they paying even a dime.

Additionally, these contracts could be cancelled since they were breached, and because we have the equivalent of some 400 nuclear reactors as low-hanging renewable fruit able to do the safeguarding, which could probably be safer and cheaper.

But funnily enough, the story confirms exactly what sensible people like Someone or myself have been saying for years on this forum in various threads.

Yep. So much for all those documents from the 1970s about how good would nuclear power be, that our fellow forum members tried to use to make "good points" in this argument.