We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – the Net Zero blackouts Renewables don’t risk blackouts, said the media. But they did and they do. The physics are simple. And now, as blackouts in Spain strand people in elevators, jam traffic, and ground flights, it’s clear that too little “inertia” due to excess solar resulted in system collapse.
– Michael Shellenberger
Also… here.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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We need more resilience and non-solar ways of getting reliable energy.
More nukes would help here.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around black starts, but people have the idea that, when the grid collapses, someone runs into a back room and clicks a breaker back on.
Not so. This restart could take days – weeks? – for parts of the affected area.
This is the sort of occurrence that could trigger huge social problems across a country. I remember the New York City blackout in ’77 – riots, looting, and chaos.
Hopefully (yeah, I know, insane expectations), other countries will take a lesson here.
Probably not, though. Buy generators, and lots of fuel.
I recall from my University course in Electrical/Electronic Engineering (1987 to 1991), one of the lecturers who had worked in the power generating industry said that the most complex technology in the UK was the electricity grid, not computers. With the various power stations inputting power and having to balance the conflicting loads/demands, the second to second adjustments were understood by literally a hand full of technicians.
Solar and wind power inputs, since they were intermittent and unpredictable, severely destabilised the system and very, very few people understood the hows and whys of this.
The grid going down is, as Bobby B said, not simply a matter of “doing a Microsoft Windoze reset” by switching it off and then back on. A complicated sequence of power station start ups and load balancing operations will be needed and that will take a while. Likely weeks to fully restore functionality.
I also note with some vast amusement that the numpties in the UK Government are pushing for solar generation and exploring the possibility of dimming the incoming sunlight to prevent glowbull warbling. Joined up thinking it most certainly ain’t.
@Phil B
I also note with some vast amusement that the numpties in the UK Government are pushing for solar generation and exploring the possibility of dimming the incoming sunlight to prevent glowbull warbling. Joined up thinking it most certainly ain’t.
Solar is obvious. But the fact that wind and wave energy as is hydroelectric power are also just a different form of solar energy is completely lost on them. As is the fact that the biggest consumer of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are various living organisms such as algae and vegetation, which convert carbon dioxide into oxygen in direct proportion to the amount of sunshine there is.
I’d say these people are stupid, but they managed to con us all out of $50 million quid, and that surely takes quite a bit of smarts. Nobody ever gave me fifty million quid.
Two electricity substations on the London area have exploded in the past few weeks. And now the Spain and Portugal shutdown.
Besides Net Zero, I think sabotage has to be considered.
Putin can see how vulnerable the West has become.
@Jonathan Pearce, on the subject of evidence of sabotage, there were also some underreported incidents here in the UK on Sunday night.
An amazing picture.
And a great name: the Net Zero Blackout. Let’s try and make it stick.
All conventional generating machinery – gas turbines, steam turbines, hydroelectric turbines, you name it – are all very-carefully designed and operated to be synchronous – to run at a very-controlled fixed speed that establishes grid frequency. And the grid has developed to be absolutely-dependent on this very-stable parameter for its own stability. If you feed megawatts of power at 49.95 Hz into a grid that’s stable at 50 Hz, there will be significant losses caused by the imbalance, which means fires, overheating and damage to your equipment.
Wind turbines are completely asynchronous – they turn at whatever speed the wind blows. Solar panels produce DC power, which has no frequency. So these sources create grid frequency power using solid-state inverters. But these are even-more susceptible to damage from frequency imbalances, which is why their operators take them offline long before a comparable conventional generator would require it.
I suspect a simple cascade. One big generator – doesn’t matter what kind – dropped offline for some reason. The frequency dipped a little as other conventional generators throttled up to take the added load, their antique copper windings able to take the imbalance for a second or two and their thousands of tons of rotating mass containing sufficient momentum to keep the drop from increasing. But the wind and solar generators all tripped off more-or-less immediately, to protect their inverters, and the conventional generators couldn’t take up the added load quickly enough, and tripped off as well, to protect their own equipment. Once you start a cascade like that, you can’t stop it, the dominoes will keep falling until you reach a gap in the grid.
Talk about substations and transmission lines is all more-or-less bunk. A huge cascade like this starts at the generation end of the grid, not in the distribution network.
llater,
llamas
Is this right?
Standard electricity – coal, gas – like riding a bike on a high gear. If you stop pedaling the bike keeps going for a while.
Wind power – very low gear, takes lots of pedaling to move forward, if you stop pedaling the bike stops moving sooner than if you were in high gears (this doesn’t sound quite right to be fair).
Solar – no bike, you are sitting on a box on the street and somebody kicks the box forward now and again. No inertia.
@Jon eds – well, yes – and no.
Wind turbines have plenty of inertia, themselves – you can see the huge spinning mass. But that mechanical inertia matters little if they have been taken off the grid to protect the inverters that are necessary to turn their unsynchronized power into grid power. As I understand, if wind turbines are taken off the grid unexpectedly, the power being generated, including the stored energy in the inertia of the turbine itself, is dumped into resistor arrays to stop the turbine running-away with the sudden removal of the grid load, and to give the operator time and load to get the turbine off the wind and slowed down or stopped.
Solar arrays, as you say, have no inertia, and you can disconnect them from their inverters at will.
llater,
llamas
@llamas I am an engineer but not a electrical engineer, so I understand the general principles but not the specifics. What I do think though is that the whole concept of an “Electrical Grid” gives off the same feeling as some massive scheme from the USSR. Massive infrastructure, gigantic central control, huge vulnerability, creaking bureaucracy. The whole thing just seems like something out of the 1950s. It just seems that it would be better decentralized and heavily privatized. I understand that the National Grid is technically a private company but only in the same way the post office is. It just seems that what is needed is decentralization, competition and the profit motive.
It is a bit more like that here in the USA, but not nearly enough. My electric supply company regularly sends me letters telling me how to reduce my power usage. What normal private company begs their customers to use less of their product? Every power bill has a little graph showing me what a bad person I am because I use so much more than the average usage by my neighbors. However, I have asked all my friends and neighbors and as far as I know nobody ever gets a bill with a little graph saying they use less than their neighbors. So, that math doesn’t add up.
I certainly understand that there is huge economies of scale in power generation but there are also huge diseconomies of scale in any massive organization, especially so when you consider the MASSIVE cost of moving power around the country on the gigantic electrical transmission lines.
Surely, there must be a better way.
Unusables don’t risk blackouts, they pretty well guarantee them!
@FraserOrr – well, I’m not an expert, so my thoughts are worth just what you paid for them.
But it seems to me that a grid-like system is much-better-able to handle the realities of electricity supply, where you need to supply, within a few tenths of a %, the exact-same amount of electricity as the second-to-second demand. The old story used to be that the UK National Grid would experience its greatest strains during the commercial break in the popular soap opera ‘Coronation Street’, when millions of viewers would step into the kitchen and turn on their 3kW electric kettles and make a cup of tea. The whole system had to assume an added load of hundreds of megawatts for about 3 minutes, then shed it all again just as quickly. You can only do that with a large, distributed system with lots of diverse generating capacity that you can move and manage. Sure, there’s a risk of bureaucratic ossification, but most grud syatems not taken over by cult politics seem to be able to resist that tendency.
But a system like that needs to have reliable and predictable inputs. If the Hoover Dam promises to put 850 MW online for the next 8 hours, the system operator needs to be able to take that to the bank. A generator who says ‘I’ll send you 450 MW, but only if the sun shines!’ is worse than useless, because now the system operator needs to plan to have other capacity available in case of clouds. A bigger system will always have more flexibility to tolerate varying inputs, but still, over-reliance on unpredictable supplies will always get you in the end, whether it’s electricity or bananas.
As to why your power company urges you to reduce or modify your consumption – two reasons. If they can persuade you to move your consumption in ways that make demand more uniform over time, or more predictable, they can optimise their overall system efficiency, which likely saves them more money than they’d earn by selling you a few more kWh. And, since their chances of getting approved to build a new power station are somewhere between slim and none, persuading customers to use less power allows them to serve more customers with the same capacity, which earns them more service revenue as well as spreading their capacity across more users, in turn giving opportunities for more optimization and efficiency.
My disjointed thoughts, surely we have an expert here?
llater,
llamas
Black start: Consider your car. To start your car, you turn a switch which delivers power from the battery to an electric motor. The electric motor cranks the gas engine and its associated systems such as the fuel pump, valves carburetors, etc., which results in the car starting.
The electric grid starts the same way, with a small generator that can start by itself, which then powers the next generating unit, and so on, until you’ve restored power to the whole grid. This makes it sound easy, but the scale of the generating units makes it very difficult. It can take many hours, or even days to get some of the larger units to start.
I’ve been in the electric industry for over two decades her in the US, I have seen a few incidents where over 1000 MW (> 1 GW) were lost from a system, which is a major incident. Losing over 11,000 MW (11 GW) in 5 minutes is mind blowing.
Far too many greens and their cohorts have a very familiar way of thought. “It didn’t work. We’ll have to do it twice as hard.”
llamas: Talk about substations and transmission lines is all more-or-less bunk
I was making a separate point about the amount of incidents that appear to have happened with them blowing up in the past few weeks, suggestive of malicious intent, not necessarily to do with the Net Zero cult.
Needless to say, coverage of all this appears to be remarkably low-key in parts of the MSM, given the ramifications.
llamas – The grid reacts almost instantaneously to added or reduced load. Adding a few hundred MW reduces the frequency, and the grid operators will ramp up the generation to keep the frequency in bounds. To do this, you need generating units that can ramp up fast enough to meet the added load (or ramp down to meet reduced load). In old systems, this was done manually, nowadays it’s done through Automatic Generation Control (AGC) but is closely monitored by people in a control room. If you don’t have enough ramping capacity, you’re screwed.
Solar and wind generation is referred to as Intermittent Renewable Resources (IRR) and doesn’t ramp at all. Nor is it useful for restarting the grid. In fact, IRRs need ramping resources to cover the fluctuations inherent in them. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas recommended ramping units equal to or greater than 40% of the installed wind capacity to cover the wind generation. That was after ERCOT lost about 1.5 GW of wind power in 5 minutes in 2009. The ERCOT operators were able to prevent any harm to the system, which was a truly remarkable achievement.
Thanks to the e-mail correspondent who told me all about the phenomenon of “TV Pickup”, which has its own Wikipedia page, because of course it does. Seems like the old story about Coronation Street was partly-founded in reality.
llater,
llamas
@llamas, Here are a few out of the box thoughts. I’m sure they are all wrong and betray my utter ignorance of the matter. But ignorance never stopped me spouting off before.
The old story used to be that the UK National Grid would experience its greatest strains during the commercial break in the popular soap opera ‘Coronation Street’, when millions of viewers would step into the kitchen and turn on their 3kW electric kettles and make a cup of tea.
I think there is an assumption there that is interesting — namely that the grid has to provide extremely high quality electricity. But the truth is that that kettle really doesn’t give a damn if the voltage is 190v and the frequency is 43Hz, as long at it isn’t way too high. This is largely true of major appliances like refrigerators, heaters, air conditioners and washing machines. Of course some applications do care a great deal about the quality of power. That TV set for example.
However, items that need a LOT of power generally are a lot less picky about the quality of the power. For a number of utilities we provide similar services with different quality levels, waste water and storm sewer water for example, so why not electricity? And why not do the final conditioning at the point of service? I could imagine a service where lower quality bulk power (say +/- 10% on its rating) is delivered to your residence and a small feed is taken off that improves the quality for a high quality circuit. (FWIW I have a device that does that in my house, though it would no doubt need some modifications — namely a big ass UPS system.) Of course that is domestic, a lot of power is consumed in industry and for sure it seems quite reasonable to take an approach like that with the biggest electricity consumers. And, I think in general industrial users are a lot less spiky in their usage and in many cases a lot less picky about quality.
All that quality and preciseness is very expensive. And in a lot of cases it is like flushing your toilet with San Pellegrino.
In most US cities they have water towers which are structures that hold very large amounts of water high off the ground. They are used to maintain local water pressure during various levels of demand. It strikes that that this is exactly analogous to the concern you mention with inconsistent demand. I haven’t done the math, but I wonder if a gravity battery of that kind is sufficient to offer the necessary buffer, but at a local level. The idea being that when demand peaks gravity feeds extra supply, and when demand is low it is used to pump back up. For sure that is more complicated than the simple water pressure maintenance system.
Would this be crazy expensive? Probably, but not as crazy expensive as 10,000 kilometers of ultra high tension wires strung all over the country.
But that is probably a fantasy. The infrastructure is what it is.
In the town where I live — for all its faults — you buy electricity from the city. (To clarify American terminology, city doesn’t necessarily mean millions of people, many cities are quite small. The city I live in has about 100,000 people, the one next door has 15,000.) The city owns the distribution lines and final substations. This means that the electricity can come from multiple suppliers and so they can apply the competitive process to get a better deal. And for sure electricity is better and cheaper in my city than in most cities.
Wikipedia has an article on microgrids which I thought was interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgrid
As to why your power company urges you to reduce or modify your consumption – two reasons.
Interesting analysis. You might be right. However, they never did this twenty years ago. I suspect that the truth is more pressure applied by governments to be green necessitated by the monopolistic nature of power companies. But perhaps I am being excessively cynical and your analysis is correct.
@ Fraser Orr – I’m.short on time so will have to be succinct.
Your comments about power quality miss the mark, I’m afraid. About the only appliances that don’t care too much about voltage or frequency are kettles and heaters. Anything containing an electric motor is sensitive to voltage, and if the voltage drops too low, will start to overheat. Funnily enough, modern solid-state TV’s are largely indifferent to voltage, since thet run on SMPSUs which will work on just-about any voltage above a low minimum.
But the real reason for maintaining the quality of the power, and specifically, the frequency, is not for the convenience of the customer but for the safety of the grid. For the reasons given above, frequency mismatches between generators in a polyphase system can produce serious damage to the generators – nothing to do with the kettle 🌝.
As to your idea about distributed water supply, there’s a perfect example to ponder. Water towers are as common as muck in the US, every one-stoplight town has one. You’ll seldom if ever see a water tower in the UK. Discuss.
@ ns – Ah, I knew we’d find an expert. Thanks for joining. I gotta go now, but I will have questions for you later.
llater,
llamas
Reading the above comments, I am reminded of the scene in Terry Pratchett’s “The Thief of Time” where the spinning “procrastinators” are running haywire and Lobsang manages to rebalance the system by shedding load here, and adding load there in order to prevent a cascade surge (IIRC). Terry’s history in the nuclear power industry obviously helped his writing in the novel.
Hello — EE for a small power company in fly-over country in the US (~2 GW of generation). We are currently building another 0.5 GW of generation over the next four years (mostly ship engines bolted to the ground). We cannot build coal plants and while the ultimate cause comes from the federal government, we are stymied by even the red states’ departments of environmental quality (lots of true believers there). Building combustion turbines is possible but challenging due to supply chains. The ship engines are novel enough so no one in the government has figured out how to strangle it (yet).
What surprises me is that we have own internal commissars in the ESG/DEI department that popped into existence over the last couple years — they all have fake jobs to protect. They continually push green energy for marketing blurbs to customers and politically-minded corporate officers have to fork over scarce dollars to support them. Even worse, the data center costumers will pay a premium for green energy so we have to throw up wind turbines to supply magic electrons. Neither the data centers nor the commissars give a fig about grid stability so the operators running the grid are driven batty by green energy. Our agreements with the data centers do stipulate that they will the first to go in case of emergency so I believe they will correct their ways eventually (and quietly).
Even if the Trump administration can affect the rot at the federal level, we have useful idiots sprinkled throughout the culture — even internal to the organizations that know best how damaging this is — that will fight forever. And like with government education, they will never connect how their benighted policies move them further away from their own stated goals (unstated goals, however …)
Sadly, I think that image was a fake that showed up on a reddit sub called “mapporncirclejerk” or some such nonsense.
Lots of red states are red only by a small margin. Plus, who goes to work in a government environmental shop? True believers looking to change the world.
As said before, we have to stop ceding important areas to true believers. It’s like handing them the keys to life.
Tragically some of the British public do NOT associate the higher energy prices, which are destroying manufacturing and driving people into poverty, with Green taxes and regulations. Instead some of the public believe that the Greens (who hold that Ed Miliband is too moderate – not too extreme, too moderate) are just “nice young people who go litter picking and are active in the community”.
Do not laugh – this is what some of the public really believe (and what the Greens work hard to get the public to believe). Indeed the council ward I am standing in is covered in Green Party posters and yard signs – and the Greens are quite likely to defeat me. Voted into office by people who have no idea what the Greens support.
“Then tell the public – warn them!” – easier said than done.
Is the stability issue solved by making inverters that can handle the fluctuations?
Related speculation.
Ah, good. Two experts. I have questions.
Can one of you describe more-fully the arrangement of (specifically) wind turbines, but I guess of solar ‘farms’ as well? Does each turbine have its own inverter(s) and/or load bank, or are they interconnected in groups to a more-central facility?
I ask because the stories now coming from Spain suggest that some sort of resonance or oscillation between various solar arrays may have triggered the cascade of shutdowns, and I can’t seem to find out how granular these installations are. For example, is each wind turbine individually connected to the grid, or are they grouped somehow?
I have been told that, in the US at least, grid operators are obliged to take however-much or -little ‘renewable’ power they are offered before any other source. Is this true? In similar vein, I have been told that they are obliged to take renewable power even if they have no demand for it, and if they have no storage (such as a pumped-storage facility) to dump it into load banks. Is this so?
Another tale I have heard is that if ‘conventional’ generators commit to a certain delivery of power to the grid operator, but fail to meet their commitment, they are penalized, but that ‘renewable’ providers are not so penalized. Again, true, or not?
Any clarification you can add much appreciated.
llater,
llamas
For clarity, to generate power?
Or to drop on the homes of the lunatics pressing for net zero insanity?
Fraser Orr –
The idea being that when demand peaks gravity feeds extra supply, and when demand is low it is used to pump back up.
In the late 60’s/early 70’s my state’s electricity company did just that. It built an enormous reservoir in my hometown on the bluffs over Lake Michigan. At night, when electricity demand is lower it pumps water from the lake into the reservoir. Then it’s released during the day to generate power as needed.
It isn’t without its problems. The area is well known for its sport fishing. The pumps suck in a large number of just those fish the fishermen want and grind them into paste. They’ve been trying to remedy that problem for decades.
On the other hand, the city was able to extract a large amount of money from the power company in return for planning permission. As a result, I attended a ridiculously well-funded school system.
Wiki has a page about thing if you’re interested.
Officials are now out of control – and not just in the United Kingdom.
In the latest survey (see One American News) 75% of Federal officials admit they would obstruct a lawful order of the President if it went against their “policy”.
Note the word “policy” – this is now often made by officials (both government and corporate) and “experts” internationally – and (for example) Net Zero is “policy”.
Democracy, the principle that decisions are made by elected people, is dying.
@ Philip Scott Thomas – small world. I stopped at Bortell’s yesterday afternoon. Turns out they’re not opening until next week.
llater,
llamas
Llamas,
Each wind turbine connects individually to the grid (and can be individually disconnected when the situation warrants). They tend to aggregate an entire wind farm’s production through a single substation which then feeds the larger grid. That one substation can be a bottleneck and is loaded with protection mechanisms to protect the transmission lines from melting. Each turbine has its own inverter to match frequency and supply power to the grid but the inverters are delicate instruments that will disconnect in case of grid instability to protect themselves. The more disconnections due to an unstable grid makes the next disconnection more likely. Solar is more densely packed together geographically and only has a smaller set of inverters to supply to the grid.
As far as the grid operators, our utility will take all the power they can get from the green sources whenever they can get it since planning for wind or solar is impossible. There are mandated purchase agreements imposed by the states to buy all green energy available along with mandated minimum prices we pay for the energy which gets passed onto the customer. Our gas turbines can ramp quickly up and down to meet the shortfall or excess provided by green energy, but like any engine, you will shorten its life by ramping up and down excessively. Imagine running your car between 5 to 90 mph in five minute increments and see what happens to your repair bill.
As far as marketing, companies (private or regulated utilities) bid in a day ahead for how much to produce and for what price. During the day in question, there are real time markets that adjust prices in 5 minute increments to incentivize more/less production as the situation warrants. While I can fire up a gas turbine in 30 minutes, a coal unit takes a full day to warm up. The ship engines can fire up to 100% within 15 minutes and are necessary given the mercurial nature of green energy. On a per kWh basis, the faster response of gas or ship engines is nice but they cost much more but still much cheaper than any green energy source.
If there is a shortfall in a “brown energy” commitment, then the utility that failed to meet that obligation will need to purchase additional power from someone (hoping that there IS a someone) at the real time market rate which is always more expensive. In the depths of summer, this can be insanely high. During those times, all our power plants are put into service, usually put near maximum, and all optional maintenance deferred until cooler weather. Typical marching orders during the summer: “Get it up an running. Don’t touch anything. Pray to whatever higher power you believe in.”
We have never gotten to the point where green energy is ever more than a small percentage of total load so the need to store excess wind/solar energy is nonexistent. We can turn off any number of our combustion turbine easily enough if energy production ever got too high.
Hope that helps.
Flyover – thank you very much for all that detail. Most informative. I’ve been on site when they install turbines but of course most of the hardware is grey steel boxes and it’s not teally clear what they are or how it all works.
What’s your opinion on the speculation about some sort of resonant coupling between solar farms in the European case?
And – if you like to speculate – how would you see your utility changing its practices if/when the proportion of ‘renewable’ energy increases to be a significant part of the mix?
And finally – ship engines? Do you mean those big 2-stroke diesels that run on heavy oil fuel? Really? That’s what you’re having to do to back up ‘renewables’? It is to laugh.
Thanks again for the insights.
llater,
llamas
In Texas the move to wind and solar cost many lives – snow covered the solar panels (they also destroyed by hail storms) and the strong winds destroyed the wind turbines.
But the international establishment were not put off by the deaths – on the contrary, they gloated. For example, a “Star Trek” actress said it was punishment for Texans voting the wrong way, the lady did not mean voting for RINOs who had pushed “renewables”, the lady meant not voting for Democrats who would have got rid of oil, gas and coal totally and condemned many more people to death.
Make no mistake – the left know that this policy will cost many lives.
Stand by for Mark Carney in Canada to ban home generators powered by oil (if they are not banned already) – so that lots of Canadians freeze to death next winter.
When many Canadians freeze to death Mr Carney will blame “Trump” and the media will support the lies of Mr Carney.
Remember, to the left – large numbers of deaths is not a bug in a policy, it is a feature.
I couldn’t speculate on the witchiest of witchcraft that is power protection engineering. Other than a handful of classes in college, I have not been involved with that portion of it other than to have respect for the EE’s who enjoy symmetrical component analysis. As far as the typical EE is removed from the general population, EE’s who specialize in power protection are that far removed from other EE’s. If Spain’s grid is anything like ours, their engineers have enough telemetry to identify the cause down to the smallest component. Whether or not that get published widely will be a policy decision.
As far as green energy becoming a bigger share of the grid, we are building large battery parks to help level load, but this is more a PR stunt than a real case. 20 acres of real estate with 150 connex boxes of batteries cannot supply the local area for long and at great expense. Our planners are looking past 2045 and green energy will only ever be a marginal source of power. If the UK continues their insanity, we will have enough case studies that even the regulators will ease off the demands (note: this is likely wishful thinking). I’ll be retired in a cabin far away from civilization by that point.
While the fuel can be different, essentially yes — ship engines. The manufacturers can have these things run on diesel or natural gas and are really quite clean all things considered. If you consider most combustion turbines are airplane engines bolted to the the ground and scaled up, there is precedent for this type of “innovation.” Still, we have magic rocks that generate infinite energy and yet we choose combustion. Laughter is appropriate only if you consider crying gauche.
Paul Marks – and we have no one on the right. Here or in Canada.
“Renewables don’t risk blackouts.”
Renewables don’t risk blackouts, they guarantee them.
@Fraser-We have pumped storage on the UK Grid, most notably at Dinorwig. To supply 1.7GW it uses 390,000kg of water a second dropping 100m. Even for hyperlocalised balancing, I don’t think your idea flies; the volumes of water needed are huge and the replication of turbines and pumps would cost a lot more than stringing the cables across the country as well as having much higher maintenance costs.
On generation, the most interesting thing I have seen in the last few years is Allam cycle plants* connecting to a grid; in theory they seem a brilliant idea, and I wish I could find news on progress of the plant that is meant to be being built on Teesside.
*The article has a pretty good description of the technology though a little buried in some not terribly helpful journalese.
Flyover – thank you. I’m not an engineer, I am a mathematician that is involved in planning, dispatching, and buying power for the grid. Buying as in buying from other generators or planning on building generating stations. Your point about battery storage is a good one. Meeting the capacity level and sustaining that over as little as 1 to 2 hours is insanely expensive.
Fraser Orr – Other commenters have talked about pumped storage, which is the gravity storage you were wondering about. It works, but it is inefficient, and is subject to environmental regulations. It is also limited geographically – it can’t be built just anywhere.
Johnathan Pearce – Sabotage – there are people who try to steal copper from transmission and distribution lines, and from transformers. Then there are people who will try to actually destroy the grid, shooting at transformers, trying to wreck utility poles, or blow up transformer yards. Lead time on replacing transformers is 1 to 2 years. Making your grid less robust just makes any damage that much worse. I would like to know the extent of the damage to the Spanish grid, but I think it will not be released to the news until months or years from now.
Even if the satellite image is fake…it might be useful! Consider it an illustration. And yes, “Net Zero Blackout” is great marketing!
Have there been any deaths attributed to this power outage? If so, let’s call them “Net Zero Blackout Deaths”. Disruption to the food supply (was power out long enough for grocery store refrigeration to fail (exceeded its backup power)? The post-mortem would be very informative but as others have said, whatever is known won’t be released for a long time. And a lot won’t be known because the powers that be don’t want to know.
Given the Kettering Town Council election result, all but one of the elected Councillors now a Green Party member, and the sole Conservative Party councilor rather sympathetic to their concerns, it would appear that the public look at the picture that Perry shows us and think…..
“Yes – that is what we want here! Long live Death!”
However, that would be to make the FALSE assumption that people vote on the basis of policy – and some (some) people have told me (quite openly – they are proud of the fact) that they oppose thought and vote on the basis of feelings.
There is nothing I can say or do to counter that.