Solar Power to Blame for Spain’s Disastrous Blackout, Official Investigation Finds
Spain’s disastrous national blackout in April was triggered by solar farms switching off in response to plummeting power prices, an official investigation has found. The Telegraph has more.
A Government report into Europe’s biggest power cut found that Spain’s solar farms were generating so much power on April 28th, a particularly sunny day, that prices became “negative” – meaning there were no profits to be made in operating them.
Plunging prices triggered a mass switch-off, which sent voltage and frequency fluctuations cascading across the national grids of both Spain and Portugal. Back-up systems meant to guard against such fluctuations were not in effect.
This caused blackouts that left more than 60 million people across the Iberian peninsula without power, the Spanish Government report concluded.
The power cut caused massive gridlock in cities and left thousands stranded on trains and in elevators across the Iberian peninsula. Several deaths were also linked to the incident.
Experts said in the immediate aftermath of the power cut that a reliance on Net Zero energy had left Spain and Portugal vulnerable to the blackouts because of the way renewable power is generated. However, Spain’s Left-wing Government has repeatedly insisted that green energy was not to blame.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the opposition People’s Party (PP), said ministers were “so intent on being the greenest in the world that you have led Spaniards into the dark”, the BBC reported.
The investigation’s findings will fuel concerns about Britain’s race to Net Zero, led by Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary. Mr Miliband wants to make Britain’s energy system carbon free by 2030, a shift that will see the country rely almost entirely on renewable energy, such as wind, solar and nuclear to keep the lights on.
Worth reading in full.
Meanwhile, Britain’s National Energy System Operator (Neso) has set an ambition to run the power grid without gas by the end of the year, for a trial period to begin with. Are lessons being learned? It doesn’t look like it.
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We’ve come to an extraordinary point in our history where our political ‘leaders’ are telling us that we must pay for the destruction of the economy and society in pursuit of an unachievable, disastrous and pointless policy. For how long are people going to put up with this madness?
That destruction started in 1945 when the newly elected Labour Government launched the cradle-to-grave welfare State, an open-ended commitment, uncontrollable demand paid for from an open chequebook writing increasingly bigger cheques drawn on an open-ended line of credit whose debt service and repayment costs shifted more and more of the wealth being created from the economy into the pockets of the money-lenders.
Current aggregate cost £2.8 trillion – for which we have “bought” a dysfunctional NHS, failed public services, a welfare system supporting millions imported from the World’s shiteholes, paid for by an economy without a functioning industrial base.
Best get that experiment done before Hartlepool and Heysham 1 close down in 2027 and Heysham 2 and Torness in 2030. That’ll leave just Sizewell B running…
And Drax burning its way across the forests of the US and Canada.
The idea – such as it is – to replace gas and nuclear input with power from the inter-connectors with Norway and France and European inter-connector.
This assumes those Countries and others in Europe, will have sufficient dispatchable power when the UK needs it, despite an increasing reliance of intermittent wind and solar on the Continent. Therefore the reliance on France (nuclear) and Norway (hydro) the Countries with spinning generation and dispatchable power can meet their own requirements and other demands from around Europe when wind and solar are taking a break, is risky.
And. Those inter-connectors are DC which cannot provide inertia for the UK grid, without gas spinning generation will have too little – like Spain – to prevent frequency variability outside the limit and thus grid shutdown.
And they will do this in Winter.
Surprised they have contracts allowing them to switch off en-masse just because the price is low / negative – I get why they’d want to, to save wear and tear etc, but surprised they don’t get paid a healthy subsidy just to ‘be there and contribute’, above and beyond any commercial energy selling…
Obviously they will in future.
The investments In ahem, green power, I use the term advisedly, are supposed to be one way bets of the heads I win tails you like variety.
Somebody cocked up spectacularly there.
Yes, but without reading the whole article in the Tgraph I’m sceptical about it being the main cause of it all. After all, by it’s nature the output of solar power is pretty volatile, depending on the weather. I’m familiar with it at a local level (on my house). No doubt there is a degree of betting on the weather in the likes of NESO, and it might be related to the accuracy (sic) of met forecasts in particular areas.
‘Negative’ is the key word – ie paying others to take your excess electricity. Germany was my favourite to do what Spain has done and will likely be the next to try a blackout as their grid is swamped with solar, especially from unrestricted and uncontrollable rooftop and balcony generation.
Who could possibly have predicted this?
Every electrical engineer in the world
So we’ll be importing even electricity from the continent, that has been possibly generated by hydrocarbons, at inflated prices!
Sshh! They don’t want us to realise this.
As far as the politicians are concerned, the netzero pixies, who live at the end of the interconnector, cleaned any nasty co2 from the power before it all got to us, therefore it’s all good…
TBH we need a similar blackout in the UK. Many people in the cities won’t shrug and have a day lying in the sun and wait for the power to return: they’ll riot.
That’s probably the only thing which will make the Eco Nutters in the Establishment who are pushing the dangerous nonsense that is Net Zero change tack.
Absolutely, the heads of the woke wet wipes need a damn good wobble.
A Sri Lanka moment. aka, Ideological Government pushes dangerous (population immiserating) nonsense to it’s inevitable conclusion.
Grids can only be stable if supply can be matched to demand, planned in advance or quickly reacting to change.
AC power grids can only be stable with a high level of inertia provided by lots of spinning generation from fossil fuel and nuclear, as these set grid frequency of 50Hz (which must be kept within +/- 1Hz) from spinning turbines at 3 000rpm and which resist power fluctuation in the grid which try to make them spin faster or slower. They are therefore pro-active not reactive to maintain frequency.
Wind, solar or the famous batteries cannot do any of the above.
We have known this for more than a century.
Spain did not have enough spinning generation, so when power across the grid varied, so did the frequency outside strict operating limits. Everything then disconnected from the grid to prevent equipment damage.