European Energy Crisis 4

[SSCon]

The energy crisis looks like it's going to develop into a full-blown catastrophe, yet there is very little media attention. For those not aware, natural gas & electricity prices are at record levels and we're only one week into the "heating season".

UK gas prices reached £4/Therm, equivalent to $54/MMBtu (no I didn't misconvert that, but I'll understand if you feel the need to double check).

Electricity prices are at astonishing levels right across Europe.

Ireland seems likely to be the first to fail as they're at the end of the gas supply chain and currently have the highest electricity prices.

This winter Europe will be at the mercy of the weather, mild & windy and it may be ok. But if it's cold, the level of disaster coming is hard to conceive.

 

[RedSnake]

So the real problem is excess power. Interesting.

In some places in Europe sometimes mostly during the summer I would think.

Since we have most of our power in the north of Sweden stored in water magazines for the waterpower they preserve the water and "even out" the sun and wind power by not opening the crane as much during summer when the magazines do not fill up so much, we do not have a lot of sun power here in the north yet though.
But we have also got problems exporting our excess power since the powerlines going south do not cut it.

But for some countries with a lot of coal or nuclear as base power it is harder to do that at an excess power input since you cant turn them on and off fast enough and the output flexibility is to low, so the only way to manage the grid when it is to much sun and wind and a lot of heat and no consumption is to turn of peoples inverters so the grid want go berserk.


“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

It's not just Europe the same thing happens in Australia.

The power lines having dental floss properties for power transmission is also a factor.

They were never put in with planning for oppersite direction flow. So most are only scaled for what's at the end of them to consume.

I have a 8.5 kW feed in limit due to the power line limit and there is 2 commercial solar farms connected to the same substation that deals with the HV trunk. So I got the first inverter with no issues. The second one took some negotiations. Luckily I had ignored the installers and put the energy meter in. So it's no issue for me controlling my feed in.

The next level up is them going ripple receiver onto the inverters which can limit the output. But not all inverters have the capability to do that easily.

 

[1503-44]

As for what the gas problem is, what the charts tell me is simply that buyers were banking on the demand staying low. They didn't fill the storage tanks to usual levels, then got caught with their pants down when demand unexpectedly picked up. It seems Asian players did the same thing, so now there is some heavy competition to purchase what they can to get through the winter at higher demands. If the price stays high in the meantime, there may be some demand reduction. All in all, good practice for what's coming, sooner or later.

The selfmade "crisis" should expedite the final EU approvals of Nord Stream II.

 

[LittleInch]

That's a bit more like it.

I agree that all this small micro generation, be it solar or wind has occurred in many places without any good plan on how to use it and control it.

To a certain extent it has probably been overtaken by advances in invertor control and battery systems that now allows better remote control than before.

I'm pretty sure an unintended consequence of the recent UK part power black out was that once the frequency dropped below some critical level, it wasn't helped by all those mini home solar systems dropping off the network and dropping I think about 1 GW of supply in total.

What was relatively easy even up to 10 years ago in terms of grid balancing has got a lot harder and all electricity networks are struggling to adapt to the change I understand.

And then it's not helped by China taking more LNG....

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

There was a compulsory change of the grid variables a few years ago. They had it +- 0.2 Hz on the frequency but they changed it to 49.2 Hz or something like that.

 

[GregLocock]

LittleInch, that's the fundamental cause of the blackout of the entire state of South Australia going black a few years back. The windmill operators had left some defaults on so when the supply in general went wonky and the frequency dropped all the windmills shutdown and caused a cascading failure.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[hokie66]

Not that I know much about electrons, but I think they seek the path of least resistance. Like water, they prefer to go downhill, and if you want them to reverse, you have to pump.

 

[RedSnake]

Well about the frekvens for Nord Pool this is what applies and since all of North Europe is connected they must have the same.

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

It was after the AUS event that they mandated that the inverter grid parameters get changed.

I thought it was mandatory that all grid tie were adjusted by a couple of years ago. They can be adjusted locally on mine but you need a password which I don't have

 

[RedSnake]

The only time a solar inverter needs to be stopped is when the frekvens gets to high on the grid, and you can't pull down on any other power source.

At a rolling blackout they could be allowed to be on since if you disconnect a branch they could still provide power to others on that branch that hasn't got any solarpanels if the ones who have, have batteri backups, and if the owners want's to share, that is.
In that case the owner at least will have power as long as there is power in the batteries and still could generate power to load his batteries and power to the cut of branch if there is sun.

But then again rolling blackouts are usually made when the frekvens goes down and then there is no need to turn them of at all.

A inverter can not deliver anything else then 50 Hz, I made the assumption that inverters need to keep that quality to be allowed on the grid.

I think the problem might be that when they want to connect a branch again they need to know how much power is delivered from that branch otherwise the frekvens can sky rocket again when they connect it.

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

There is various parameters that will kick it out.

High voltage low voltage high freq low and a couple of other things if I remember I will post what mine are next time I am there.

I suspect I was incorrect earlier saying that they let the frequency go high. It was more likely it was high voltage as they are sync to the Russian grid. It was more likely high voltage. They killed a load of consumer equipment when they tried it. Must people did realise why thier router died that day. I didn't have anything go but the sister in law did and got it replaced after I spotted what happened in the inverter error logs.

I need to get my dynamic reactive power turned on. But need the installers password for that.

 

[RedSnake]

I am not sure about that if the grid frequency goes high a suspect that your inverter will turn of because they do not want more power on the grid.
What happens then is that you can't provide power and you are also forced to consume power from the grid lowering the power overload on the grid, making the frequency go down.

If they would only turn of the output from your inverter to the grid and allow you to consume your own generated power and backup batteri power they will only get half the "effect" of there action so they will need to lower some other power source to get back to normal.
I think that they made it easy on themselves or haven't had time to fix this problem.
The minimum that would be acceptable in this situations is that the inverter would be allowed to load the batteries even if all power consumption is made from the grid.

Now we throw away good power because we can't store it somewhere when we have to much. :-(

That things break when there is a blackout is not uncommon mainly because when the power comes back there can be big voltage fluctuations on the grid with many consumers reconnecting at the same time.

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

It shuts down there is a load of legal requirements to what call island you installation. It highly expensive. It's to protect the linesmen.

Some inverters have an emergency supply socket which is good for running freezers etc off which will remain live on battery power. But the kostal had enough advantages that I didn't bother with that

 

[SSCon]

https://www.newsweek.com/gripped-energy-crisis-europe-breaking-climate-promises-coal-gas-1637291