2 ms·
No this is seemingly what happened, and yes I agree (I'm in the UK). The UK national grid has 2.5-3GW of CCGT gas always running for this reason. Spain had less
by martinald 1y ago
No this is seemingly what happened, and yes I agree (I'm in the UK). The UK national grid has 2.5-3GW of CCGT gas always running for this reason. Spain had less than 1GW before the outage, I suspect it was lower but the snapshot data wasn't granular enough.
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.
- taylodl 1y agoEven if all this were true, the problem isn't renewables per se, but rather poor grid management. I'm flabbergasted to learn their grid management is so poor. As I said, here in the States, variable power sources must be backed by confirmed power sources that are ready to ramp-up. Here in North America, we use Automated Generation Control (AGC) to control the unit to maintain the phase angle at zero. If the solar output dropped, then the confirmed units would have automatically ramped-up and maintained the proper phase angle. 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.