- They had too much power being generated ( largely solar ).
- Their system handles too much power by turning off fossil fuel generators.
- There weren't enough of those connected to reduce the power enough.
- The system broke down.
So it is INCORRECT to blame "solar power dependency". What is to blame is a system that cannot handle too much power properly.
- They had too much power being generated ( largely solar ).
- Their system handles too much power by turning off fossil fuel generators.
- Cloud coverage/HV line failure/something else happens, causing a drop in output from those solar plants
- Because you have turned off the fossil fuel generators, you cannot compensate for this quickly enough. There is not enough inertia in the system and no ability to ramp up power to compensate quickly enough
So it's not a system that cannot handle too much power, it is a fragile system that struggles when there is 'too much power' to recover from outages of that.
What should have happened solar was disconnected by the grid before CCGT when there is 'too much power'. Instead they ramped down CCGT and kept the solar, leading to a very fragile state.
If you have coal fired generation units, then those would typically be used for your spinning reserve since you can't (shouldn't) spin down those units since that dramatically decreases their operational lifetime. Otherwise, use your fast fire "peaker" units to guarantee the power.
If what you're saying is true, then they don't have secure grid management in place which is shocking because North America has had these policies and practices in place for decades.
Spain was saying they were running on 100% renewables just a few days ago, which means zero CCGT if you take that at face value.
Furthermore I read they had 60% of their large hydro plants offline for maintenance at the time of the outage, further reducing inertia.
I was also absolutely shocked when I saw the grid dashboard and saw it was ~500MW of CCGT against 15GW+ of Solar PV.
In "fairness" this is possible though still. I suspect that there was a sub 5/15 min drop in solar output because of cloud coverage, which arguably isn't taken account in forecasting.
After minimal research, I found that Spain, and most of Europe, also uses AGC. The system should have "just worked" and prevented this sort of problem. It may be several days before they identify a root cause.
"Sanz said: “There was an imbalance of supply. [The grid operator] needed to reduce electricity supply, but when it resorts to firm facilities to reduce load, it can barely do so because they were barely connected.”
So it's not a system that cannot handle too much power, it is a fragile system that struggles when there is 'too much power' to recover from outages of that." Didn't you just confirm that it actually was the system?
martinald•9mo ago