Spain and Portugal power grid collapse | Report Released

[SSCon]

Original Thread: https://www.eng-tips.com/threads/spain-and-portugal-power-grid-collapse.528839/

Report (Spanish): https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/consej...me-no-confidencial-Comite-de-analisis-28A.pdf

TLDR: The grid operator had inadequate spinning mass on the grid to keep it stable.

 

[Garbage1]

A quote from the minister:

"The minister said the voltage surge itself was caused by oscillations in the frequency at which the electrical current changes direction. Some oscillations were natural, she said, but one was “atypical”. The unusual change originated from a solar power plant in south-west Spain near the city of Badajoz, the government report said."

 

[Tomfh]

Jittery renewables, like we didn’t know.

 

[TugboatEng]

Someone is going to say we need more battery backup to stabilize the grid. I'm putting this out here early so we'll be ready for them when they do.

 

[davidbeach]

Probably all going to turn out that all the resources should have been in Volt var control rather than in power factor control.

 

[GregLocock]

Fingers being pointed all over the place from what I've read. Hopefully someone who actually understands the issue is responsible for fixing it, but (a) this Spain and (b) the government is involved and (c) it is affected by the quasi religious beliefs of the elite. I wonder where the real report is hidden?

The fix for the South Australia system black in 2016 seems to be more interconnectors back to coal fuelled power stations, a bunch of fossil fuelled emergency generators, synchronous condensers, and revised settings on the inverters at the wind farms. It hasn't happened again so that /may/ have worked.

 

[TugboatEng]

There is a HVDC transmission line near me. It's a substantial inverter source, probably the majority of power to the region. It has been successful. Is lack of inertia really the problem or is it a lack of coordination when there are too many inverters on a grid?

 

[GregLocock]

machine translation of the report with all sorts of things blacked out https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lion...-translated-ugcPost-7340988014904389635-jQHq/

If you go into full screen you can download it.

 

[Txoleski]

What do you think about the information Telegraph posted on may?

The experiment that plunged Spain into darkness, the cause of the power outage is revealed, how the government in Madrid hid it​

https://a2news.com/english/rajoni-b...rr-spanjen-zbulohet-shkaku-i-shkeput-i1148782

"Brussels have told that the authorities were conducting an experiment before the system collapsed. "


The fact is that nobody of the Spanish goverment had made any comment about this experiment.

 

[Garbage1]

From the linked IEEE Article talking about reactive power and Spain's outdated grid rules are a problem.

"So, the fact that more renewable energy is often more distributed than conventional sources may have contributed to a different reactive power profile on the Iberian grid. Yet “other operators, such as in the U.S., require or reward grid participants for helping balance this reactive power,” Lara says. Spain could do that, too, given its commitment to expanding the role of renewable, and therefore distributed, power. Yet its reactive power rules predate the flood of solar and wind energy that has reshaped the country’s grid (the main rules are from 2000, with a 2014 partial update). Today’s rules also exempt renewable plants from helping to lower voltage peaks, Gómez says, which is a mistake: “Today’s grids, with their high renewable penetration, can’t be managed like grids of the 20th century when everything was fossil fuels and hydroelectric plants.”

And article even mentions increasing grid storage capacity as expected.

"The recommendations include updating the 25-year-old Operational Procedure 7.4, a draft of which has been in the hands of the national competition regulator for the past five years, and which would enable better voltage control. The council also recommended improving the electrical grid’s demand response, storage capacity, technical regulations, and interconnections with neighboring countries. —IEEE Spectrum"

The article also gets into the reactive power issues with distributed solar power generation that is only grid-following, not grid-forming.

Thus confirms the way politics and governance runs things, going against sound system engineering analysis, design, and implementation, and nothing the sound engineering did not already know...

How Did Renewables Impact Spain's Blackout?

Could reactive power be the missing link in understanding the Iberian blackout?

spectrum.ieee.org

 

[GregLocock]

In other news the rent seekers don't want to pay for synchronous condensers.

 

[Tomfh]

It’s only fair, Greg. The synchronous condensers replace the inertia of those “dirty” fossil fuels and it’s those dirty fossil fuels that should pay!