Thank you EBBs. A matter of days ago I would have lamented that the UK remains on a similar course towards the rocks earmarked for Germany and Spain. Then the former (and electorally successful) Labour prime minister Tony Blair branded the current plans "doomed to fail". A couple of days ago the new Reform Party, set against net zero, has (narrowly) gained another member of parliament and made sweeping gains in the local government elections. I see changes ahead, but whether creative means will be found to keep steering clear of prosperity remains to be seen.
Thomas Sowell on the politicians and bureaucrats who push "net-zero" policies:
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
Another of many excellent quotes from Sowell: “It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.”
The issue gets solved when the investment bankers and state and federal governments understand that the grid in the lower 48 of the continental USA cannot operate on wind, solar and batteries without Investment Tax Credits (ITC’s) and Production Tax Credits (PTC’s) and let us not forget the State Street Bank types who make so much money in a year that they need Tax Equity losses all of which contribute to the financing parfait of the debt structure on the wind and solar farms chiefly. It is a sham. In 2008 then Senator Barrack Obama visited the York, Pennsylvania factory of Voith hydro division, (Formerly Allis Chalmers) He was stunned to learn after promising the 100 factory workers that his green initiatives would help Voith grow its hydro business, (most of which was not new business rather rebuilds and repairs) when a young employee reminded the Senator that the US Federal government did not consider hydro renewable. Senator Obama promised to change that situation. Well he did change it. But hydro is still the black sheep at the party. Hydro, it also happens that if set up properly, to have “black start” capability. Which will be needed in spades when (not IF) we blow up a good portion of our North American grid. Ah yes, there is nothing like cascading catastrophe ! It is like Naplam in Apocalypse Now. Smells like victory! Wind and solar send energy prices into negative real time levels with some frequency, but we don’t need negative prices to discourage thermal and hydro generation, just unsustainable real time and day ahead prices, for all intents and purposes $30.00 to $40.00 a MWh is bad enough to make it more profitable to shut down than to run. So want to make a change, take the energy production that works and make it unprofitable, and take the “renewable” production which is a “nice” adjunct and support it with massive government subsidies and greedy private equity anxious to virtue signal and makes tons of money before selling down to the next greater fool PE firm, and you get the job done. The frogs having sat comfortably in the warm water, never realize that they are slowly being steamed to death as the water goes from warm to boiling. One would think URI was a wake up call, but obviously ERCOT didn’t kill enough old and young people so we have to wait for a Spain like melt down and have it last a good 2 weeks in winter with a polar vortex offering a helping hand. “How many more Mr. Speaker must die before we build more wind and solaaarrrrhh!!” Well just keep going and we will find out. (FAAFO) Blackouts are coming to a region near you. Right, Minnesota and Michigan!? One day you will wake up to the dark and cold and Uncle PJM will not have come to your rescue. Nothing to see here folks, move along.
Not much ERCOT can do with the politicians driving subsidies and favorable terms for wind/solar builders. The Texas Legislature needs to start telling the subsidy suckers, "No".
Texas has never been big on saying no to corruption.
A fairly simple fix for the core problem of unreliable power is to introduce a capacity market to counter the problem of negative wholesale prices. Nuclear, coal and CCGT sources would be paid for both capacity and energy. Solar and wind would be paid for energy only. If you want reliable power supply pay for it.
Thanks for this excellent article. Would battery storage mitigate this kind of failure? I had some idea that battery storage acted a little like intertia or flywheel.
I read that Spain has a relatively small amount of battery storage compared with the UK. Apparently it does have quite a lot of thermal and hydro storage but perhaps those doesn't provide the same kind of inertia as batteries. So perhaps the UK is not quite as vulnerable as Spain to these kind of blackouts. On the other hand all that battery storage has to be paid for and no doubt puts our bills up. I'm not at all an expert but I take an interest in this.
Thanks to Roger Pielke for including the chart and reference in his substack article on the Iberian outage.
Incidentally, Politico Europe reported this 'Freak disappearance of electricity triggered power cut, says Spain PM Sánchez'. For a politician, Sanchez appears able to grasp difficult concepts :)
Batteries help, but they are expensive, raising the cost of electricity even more, and I hate the fact that they require so much lithium mining. Plus don't forget the risk of fire and explosion.
We deregulate the grid, then the politicians come in & distort the market forces; given that we would be better going back to a regulated utility model…
Good article. My degree is in Engineering, but it’s been a long time since I did any real engineering. I still try to make a simple armchair kind of basic thoughts on things. I’ve been reading your stuff on energy and green and so forth and find it very interesting. There are a couple of aspects of things that this latest blackout brings to the front of mind that I had not thought about. I think a posting that kind of laid some of this out from first principles would be useful (the kind of thing that general interest newspapers and magazines should do, but we know how likely that is).
1) The sun don’t shine problem - It’s super easy to see that there has to be “backup” power generation available for the times when the sun is down and/or the wind doesn’t blow. I’ve seen bunches of articles that talk about paying gas plants to exist to be able to come online in those cases. I’ve even seen articles pointing out that a gas plant uses just in time fuel delivery while a coal plant has a huge pile of fuel onsite. There are arguments about how this need gets built (or not) into “levelized” cost of power. Good stuff, but as complicated as that is not enough because:
2) The inertia problem - Apparently, the grid gets frequency stability from huge rotating things. Not huge things that COULD be rotating - things that ARE rotating. Inherent in the nature of these is the basic physical fact that as the frequency falls the rotating mass slows down to match - that takes energy out of the rotation of the mass and puts it into the grid - pushing against the fall. Same thing happens if the frequency rises - the mass speeds up to stay in sync and that takes power off the grid counteracting the rise. This is basic physics - no fancy computers, programming, control systems, nothing, just heavy things spinning. Thomas Edison could design those. Yet another thing that the “old” way was just doing that the “new” renewables just take for granted will be there - for free. A gas plant being paid to stand by to be turned on at sunset DOES ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the inertia problem, it needs to be spinning at the grid frequency. Clearly the need for inertia has to be built into the levelized cost of power too. I didn’t know anything about this, but it’s clear from a few minutes thought.
3) Volt-Ampere Reactives (VARs) - I got this from “Shorting the grid” and I’ll confess that I’m not an electrical engineer so I didn’t really follow it, but it sure sounds like yet another complication to operating the grid and keeping it balanced that also has to be figured out and built into the cost of changing the root technology the grid is based on. As Kevin Williamson says “Anything you don’t really understand looks very simple.” There’s clearly a lot we (the general educated public) don’t understand about this. Some sort of basic primer of it would be helpful. And finally:
4) The cushion problem - Actually operating pretty much everything in life requires keeping a cushion, an inventory, a balance in your checking account, a buffer. The more sophisticated and trustworthy your control system, the more risk you are willing to run, the thinner your cushion can be. If you don’t keep more than $10 in your checking account you’d better pay very, very close attention to the money flows. A thicker cushion means you can pay less attention. If you are running a national power grid that the whole society depends on you need a decently thick cushion of ALL the stuff needed for the grid (power, inertia, VARs and doubtless other stuff I’ve never heard of). Cushions cost money. Everybody, including the owners of the renewables, need to pay their share of all the buffers. A primer on what those things are would be worth having.
I wish I thought that any policy making officials in our country understood all this. Sure seems like one of those “the engineers are handling it” situations. As usual, we have that, plus “those engineers are making some noise, but it’s always been fine and I’m sure it’ll continue to be fine.” Hopefully this blackout will at least wake some folks up. We can at least hope - even though hope is not a strategy :-)
Sorry, much longer than I thought - Keep Em coming! Useful and interesting stuff you are creating.
All good points. Californians for Green Nuclear Power has been writing about these important topics for some time. There about 40 articles available at no cost. See: https://greennuke.substack.com/
Like Britain, Germany and other European countries committing acts of national economic suicide in the name of Net Zero, Spain's industry and household electricity prices are on average north of 32 cents per kWh which is more than double average rates in the United States. Yes, you can add "synthetic inertia" to the grid using batteries and synchronous condensers but that will add even more costs. Just more lipstick on a pig.
All excess bs aside the circular argument about the cause not being the wind and solar but ‘the grid’ just point to the grid operators, and their inability to have reacted with a planned process to preserve operation of the grid and not a full collapse. Yeah, yeah, they operate with the same procedures as everyone else - that means we need replacement of all greenie thought process oriented grid operators and all of their staff. But no accountability is part of their core values, strengthening the argument for removal. ERCOT should be clearly targeted.
Some are claiming synchronous condensers are another solution, I posted this on a BlueSky pro-renewables thread "Here's an article, I'd be curious to know how much they cost and how much we'll need to deploy to stabilize grids with high percentages of wind and solar all over the world" https://bsky.app/profile/tder2012.bsky.social/post/3lobbvhz5ek2m
“A synchronous condenser is a Direct Current (DC)-excited synchronous machine (large rotating generators) whose shaft is not attached to any driving equipment.”😆😆😆😆
Thanks for the comment, "the synchronous condenser alone" what else with it? What was the result of the UK deployment, did they deploy enough? I appreciate the responses and I am asking because I see pro renewablists now promoting synchronous condensers and I had not heard of them, and therefore know nothing about them, until this Spain and Portugal blackout.
Enough is always an open question, but they are certainly better off than Spain. This article mentions costs and one of the UK projects https://substack.com/@jackdevanney/note/p-162561403?r=23kggy . One of the articles I wrote a while back talks about inertia, but that was before this flywheel business came to light. Still it helps explain why it's important.
Thank you for this important article, EBB! Californians for Green Nuclear Power (CGNP) identified the need for synchronous grid inertia (SGI) more than a year ago in this March 4, 2024 article, "Why is Grid Inertia Important? Without sufficient synchronous grid inertia, the grid becomes unstable and a blackout occurs," GreenNUKE Substack. https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important Since the article was published, the 72 comments provide additional detail, including a link to the 2018 ERCOT paper regarding the importance of SGI to Texas, which by political choice is isolated from the geographically adjacent power grids.
We can only hope that, in our world where major energy infrastructure decisions are made by political insiders who claim that they’re working off popular opinion, it becomes increasingly obvious that these “solutions” are not popular.
I think this comment I left on "Public" is relevant to the concept of "fixing" Spain's grid by adding another gadget(s) to stabilize it. Plus the Jack Devanney article Kilovar referenced suggests that adding synchronous condensers with flywheel would add 50% to the capital costs of solar. Not clear what Op Ex would be.
===================================
Hey, let's replace our traditional generation with these cheap solar panels and wind turbines.
Okay, but what about the reliability the grid provided?
No problem. We'll just add a bunch of batteries.
Okay, but won't that cost more?
Don't worry, it'll be okay.
I guess, but what about frequency maintenance?
No problem, we'll just add a bunch of synthetic inertia.
More cost? What about the distance between generation and demand?
No problem. We'll just expand the transmission capacity of the grid by 400%.
Hmmm. Wouldn't it have been better to just keep the thing that works without all these patches? Plus, how in the world could you ever claim it would be cheaper, when it needs all these after market accessories just to work worse than what we already had?
Instead of the above collection of "Rube Goldberg" contraptions, nuclear power already solves all these problems. See: "CCST Report on Nuclear Power in California’s 2050 Energy Mix," Burton Richter, Ph.D. (Nobel Laureate), July 15, 2011,
Thank you EBBs. A matter of days ago I would have lamented that the UK remains on a similar course towards the rocks earmarked for Germany and Spain. Then the former (and electorally successful) Labour prime minister Tony Blair branded the current plans "doomed to fail". A couple of days ago the new Reform Party, set against net zero, has (narrowly) gained another member of parliament and made sweeping gains in the local government elections. I see changes ahead, but whether creative means will be found to keep steering clear of prosperity remains to be seen.
Thomas Sowell on the politicians and bureaucrats who push "net-zero" policies:
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
Another of many excellent quotes from Sowell: “It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.”
Good one!
The issue gets solved when the investment bankers and state and federal governments understand that the grid in the lower 48 of the continental USA cannot operate on wind, solar and batteries without Investment Tax Credits (ITC’s) and Production Tax Credits (PTC’s) and let us not forget the State Street Bank types who make so much money in a year that they need Tax Equity losses all of which contribute to the financing parfait of the debt structure on the wind and solar farms chiefly. It is a sham. In 2008 then Senator Barrack Obama visited the York, Pennsylvania factory of Voith hydro division, (Formerly Allis Chalmers) He was stunned to learn after promising the 100 factory workers that his green initiatives would help Voith grow its hydro business, (most of which was not new business rather rebuilds and repairs) when a young employee reminded the Senator that the US Federal government did not consider hydro renewable. Senator Obama promised to change that situation. Well he did change it. But hydro is still the black sheep at the party. Hydro, it also happens that if set up properly, to have “black start” capability. Which will be needed in spades when (not IF) we blow up a good portion of our North American grid. Ah yes, there is nothing like cascading catastrophe ! It is like Naplam in Apocalypse Now. Smells like victory! Wind and solar send energy prices into negative real time levels with some frequency, but we don’t need negative prices to discourage thermal and hydro generation, just unsustainable real time and day ahead prices, for all intents and purposes $30.00 to $40.00 a MWh is bad enough to make it more profitable to shut down than to run. So want to make a change, take the energy production that works and make it unprofitable, and take the “renewable” production which is a “nice” adjunct and support it with massive government subsidies and greedy private equity anxious to virtue signal and makes tons of money before selling down to the next greater fool PE firm, and you get the job done. The frogs having sat comfortably in the warm water, never realize that they are slowly being steamed to death as the water goes from warm to boiling. One would think URI was a wake up call, but obviously ERCOT didn’t kill enough old and young people so we have to wait for a Spain like melt down and have it last a good 2 weeks in winter with a polar vortex offering a helping hand. “How many more Mr. Speaker must die before we build more wind and solaaarrrrhh!!” Well just keep going and we will find out. (FAAFO) Blackouts are coming to a region near you. Right, Minnesota and Michigan!? One day you will wake up to the dark and cold and Uncle PJM will not have come to your rescue. Nothing to see here folks, move along.
ERCOT, be forewarned and get your ax ct together!
Not much ERCOT can do with the politicians driving subsidies and favorable terms for wind/solar builders. The Texas Legislature needs to start telling the subsidy suckers, "No".
Texas has never been big on saying no to corruption.
A fairly simple fix for the core problem of unreliable power is to introduce a capacity market to counter the problem of negative wholesale prices. Nuclear, coal and CCGT sources would be paid for both capacity and energy. Solar and wind would be paid for energy only. If you want reliable power supply pay for it.
Yes - negative wholesale prices were a big factor Monday in Spain.
Thanks for this excellent article. Would battery storage mitigate this kind of failure? I had some idea that battery storage acted a little like intertia or flywheel.
Yes it would have helped because batteries can provide fast frequency regulation.
I read that Spain has a relatively small amount of battery storage compared with the UK. Apparently it does have quite a lot of thermal and hydro storage but perhaps those doesn't provide the same kind of inertia as batteries. So perhaps the UK is not quite as vulnerable as Spain to these kind of blackouts. On the other hand all that battery storage has to be paid for and no doubt puts our bills up. I'm not at all an expert but I take an interest in this.
Remember, batteries have life times of less than ten years.
Even if you spring for the cost now, you'll be paying it again and again and again.
Renewables with or without batteries are the Red Queen's Race of energy production.
Figure 2 on page 5 of this document has a chart of inertia for different energy sources, with nuclear (gigawatt plant) at the top: https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Insight-135-Meeting-the-Challenge-of-Reliability-on-Todays-Electricity-Grids.pdf
Thanks to Roger Pielke for including the chart and reference in his substack article on the Iberian outage.
Incidentally, Politico Europe reported this 'Freak disappearance of electricity triggered power cut, says Spain PM Sánchez'. For a politician, Sanchez appears able to grasp difficult concepts :)
Really? How much battery storage is needed to offset a cascade failure of 15 GW?
Batteries help, but they are expensive, raising the cost of electricity even more, and I hate the fact that they require so much lithium mining. Plus don't forget the risk of fire and explosion.
We deregulate the grid, then the politicians come in & distort the market forces; given that we would be better going back to a regulated utility model…
Good article. My degree is in Engineering, but it’s been a long time since I did any real engineering. I still try to make a simple armchair kind of basic thoughts on things. I’ve been reading your stuff on energy and green and so forth and find it very interesting. There are a couple of aspects of things that this latest blackout brings to the front of mind that I had not thought about. I think a posting that kind of laid some of this out from first principles would be useful (the kind of thing that general interest newspapers and magazines should do, but we know how likely that is).
1) The sun don’t shine problem - It’s super easy to see that there has to be “backup” power generation available for the times when the sun is down and/or the wind doesn’t blow. I’ve seen bunches of articles that talk about paying gas plants to exist to be able to come online in those cases. I’ve even seen articles pointing out that a gas plant uses just in time fuel delivery while a coal plant has a huge pile of fuel onsite. There are arguments about how this need gets built (or not) into “levelized” cost of power. Good stuff, but as complicated as that is not enough because:
2) The inertia problem - Apparently, the grid gets frequency stability from huge rotating things. Not huge things that COULD be rotating - things that ARE rotating. Inherent in the nature of these is the basic physical fact that as the frequency falls the rotating mass slows down to match - that takes energy out of the rotation of the mass and puts it into the grid - pushing against the fall. Same thing happens if the frequency rises - the mass speeds up to stay in sync and that takes power off the grid counteracting the rise. This is basic physics - no fancy computers, programming, control systems, nothing, just heavy things spinning. Thomas Edison could design those. Yet another thing that the “old” way was just doing that the “new” renewables just take for granted will be there - for free. A gas plant being paid to stand by to be turned on at sunset DOES ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the inertia problem, it needs to be spinning at the grid frequency. Clearly the need for inertia has to be built into the levelized cost of power too. I didn’t know anything about this, but it’s clear from a few minutes thought.
3) Volt-Ampere Reactives (VARs) - I got this from “Shorting the grid” and I’ll confess that I’m not an electrical engineer so I didn’t really follow it, but it sure sounds like yet another complication to operating the grid and keeping it balanced that also has to be figured out and built into the cost of changing the root technology the grid is based on. As Kevin Williamson says “Anything you don’t really understand looks very simple.” There’s clearly a lot we (the general educated public) don’t understand about this. Some sort of basic primer of it would be helpful. And finally:
4) The cushion problem - Actually operating pretty much everything in life requires keeping a cushion, an inventory, a balance in your checking account, a buffer. The more sophisticated and trustworthy your control system, the more risk you are willing to run, the thinner your cushion can be. If you don’t keep more than $10 in your checking account you’d better pay very, very close attention to the money flows. A thicker cushion means you can pay less attention. If you are running a national power grid that the whole society depends on you need a decently thick cushion of ALL the stuff needed for the grid (power, inertia, VARs and doubtless other stuff I’ve never heard of). Cushions cost money. Everybody, including the owners of the renewables, need to pay their share of all the buffers. A primer on what those things are would be worth having.
I wish I thought that any policy making officials in our country understood all this. Sure seems like one of those “the engineers are handling it” situations. As usual, we have that, plus “those engineers are making some noise, but it’s always been fine and I’m sure it’ll continue to be fine.” Hopefully this blackout will at least wake some folks up. We can at least hope - even though hope is not a strategy :-)
Sorry, much longer than I thought - Keep Em coming! Useful and interesting stuff you are creating.
All good points. Californians for Green Nuclear Power has been writing about these important topics for some time. There about 40 articles available at no cost. See: https://greennuke.substack.com/
Like Britain, Germany and other European countries committing acts of national economic suicide in the name of Net Zero, Spain's industry and household electricity prices are on average north of 32 cents per kWh which is more than double average rates in the United States. Yes, you can add "synthetic inertia" to the grid using batteries and synchronous condensers but that will add even more costs. Just more lipstick on a pig.
All excess bs aside the circular argument about the cause not being the wind and solar but ‘the grid’ just point to the grid operators, and their inability to have reacted with a planned process to preserve operation of the grid and not a full collapse. Yeah, yeah, they operate with the same procedures as everyone else - that means we need replacement of all greenie thought process oriented grid operators and all of their staff. But no accountability is part of their core values, strengthening the argument for removal. ERCOT should be clearly targeted.
Some are claiming synchronous condensers are another solution, I posted this on a BlueSky pro-renewables thread "Here's an article, I'd be curious to know how much they cost and how much we'll need to deploy to stabilize grids with high percentages of wind and solar all over the world" https://bsky.app/profile/tder2012.bsky.social/post/3lobbvhz5ek2m
https://www.entsoe.eu/technopedia/techsheets/synchronous-condenser/
First sentence of the 2nd paragraph:
“A synchronous condenser is a Direct Current (DC)-excited synchronous machine (large rotating generators) whose shaft is not attached to any driving equipment.”😆😆😆😆
Dan Schwartz
About 1½ miles from the SOCO control room,
Atlanta.
The sychronous condenser alone doesn't help because it has low rotational mass. UK deployed SCs with massive flywheels to boost inertia.
Thanks for the comment, "the synchronous condenser alone" what else with it? What was the result of the UK deployment, did they deploy enough? I appreciate the responses and I am asking because I see pro renewablists now promoting synchronous condensers and I had not heard of them, and therefore know nothing about them, until this Spain and Portugal blackout.
Enough is always an open question, but they are certainly better off than Spain. This article mentions costs and one of the UK projects https://substack.com/@jackdevanney/note/p-162561403?r=23kggy . One of the articles I wrote a while back talks about inertia, but that was before this flywheel business came to light. Still it helps explain why it's important.
Excellent article!
Thank you for this important article, EBB! Californians for Green Nuclear Power (CGNP) identified the need for synchronous grid inertia (SGI) more than a year ago in this March 4, 2024 article, "Why is Grid Inertia Important? Without sufficient synchronous grid inertia, the grid becomes unstable and a blackout occurs," GreenNUKE Substack. https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important Since the article was published, the 72 comments provide additional detail, including a link to the 2018 ERCOT paper regarding the importance of SGI to Texas, which by political choice is isolated from the geographically adjacent power grids.
Outstanding article - great job. - Need to have you back on the podcast when you have time.
Sounds great, Stu! Looking forward to it.
We can only hope that, in our world where major energy infrastructure decisions are made by political insiders who claim that they’re working off popular opinion, it becomes increasingly obvious that these “solutions” are not popular.
a few more major blackouts and the populace will make it clear they are not popular decisions :)
I think this comment I left on "Public" is relevant to the concept of "fixing" Spain's grid by adding another gadget(s) to stabilize it. Plus the Jack Devanney article Kilovar referenced suggests that adding synchronous condensers with flywheel would add 50% to the capital costs of solar. Not clear what Op Ex would be.
===================================
Hey, let's replace our traditional generation with these cheap solar panels and wind turbines.
Okay, but what about the reliability the grid provided?
No problem. We'll just add a bunch of batteries.
Okay, but won't that cost more?
Don't worry, it'll be okay.
I guess, but what about frequency maintenance?
No problem, we'll just add a bunch of synthetic inertia.
More cost? What about the distance between generation and demand?
No problem. We'll just expand the transmission capacity of the grid by 400%.
Hmmm. Wouldn't it have been better to just keep the thing that works without all these patches? Plus, how in the world could you ever claim it would be cheaper, when it needs all these after market accessories just to work worse than what we already had?
Instead of the above collection of "Rube Goldberg" contraptions, nuclear power already solves all these problems. See: "CCST Report on Nuclear Power in California’s 2050 Energy Mix," Burton Richter, Ph.D. (Nobel Laureate), July 15, 2011,
https://ccst.us/wp-content/uploads/071511richter.pdf