Spain suffered several power glitches and industry officials sounded repeated warnings about the instability of its power grid in the build up to its catastrophic blackout on Monday.
The government has ordered several investigations into the blackout. Industry experts say that whatever the cause, the mass outage and earlier smaller incidents indicate the Spanish power grid faces challenges amid the boom of renewables.
A surplus of energy supply can disrupt power grids in the same way as a deficit, and grid operators must maintain balance.
Btw this means spain needs to upgrade its grid, not that they should use less renerable or continue with nuclear.
What does “upgrade the grid” mean to you?
Digging tons of rock and salts to store energy with batteries?
In Europe there are very few remaining sites to build hydro power, and those have serious ecological consequences too… I don’t see to many alternatives. Biogas options are nearly tapped out. There is potential with geothermal using new digging techniques, but they’re mostly in the testing stage still.
How is using batteries better than using said rocks to power nuclear reactors?
There is a limit to how much one can add uncontrollable energy sources to a grid…
You listed storage and sources of energy. I’m not saying there can’t be improvements there, but the Grid is the transmission network used to carry the electricity.
More power lines, more/better interconnections with other countries (France). Better load management. That sort of thing.
Yes, I only listed means to store or produce energy because upgrading powerlines won’t fix power fluctuations : that is due to imbalances between production and consumption, no amount of upgraded to transmission capacity is likely to help.
Load management might help, however. But it’s typically hard to get people to consume more when needed and power shedding is expensive on the electrical operator… Especially since those oscillations were unexpected. Also those things already exist in many European countries.
upgrading powerlines won’t fix power fluctuations :
It can certainly help
that is due to imbalances between production and consumption,
Those imbalances are usually localised (and so are power cuts, usually). Having multiple paths for power to get from generation to load will increase stability.
no amount of upgraded to transmission capacity is likely to help.
Better connections between Spain and France is certain to help. But EDF don’t want cheap Iberian electricity flooding their export markets.
Solar is generated as a DC current which has to be converted to AC and the grid voltage (so, 220V in Spain) in order to supply it to the energy grid, so all that it takes to control the flow of energy from solar generation into the grid is to be able to remotely tell the DC-AC converters of the solar farms to stop sending power to the AC side. When the converters are in that state, energy is not flowing down to the energy grid and all that happens on the other side is that the solar cells get a bit more warm.
Of course that means it has to mandatory for any solar supplier to the mains network to have a converter which can be switched off remotely by the grid management company.
Similarly, wind generation can be reduced and even stopped by changing the pitch of the blades and similarly it must be possible for the grid management company to do so remotely.
Switching on and off power sources (for example, switching on or off power turbines in dams or gas power stations) has long been how the grid management company balances production with consumption in order to avoid blackouts.
The problem is not an inherent inability of the new forms of renewable generation to be reduced or stopped when needed, it’s that if not forced the businesses generating that energy won’t pay the extra money to have systems in placed to do so which can be remotely activated by the electric grid management company: the flow of renewable energy is not controllable because the power supply operators won’t spend the money into making it controllable unless forced and at least until now there was no political will to force them to do so.
It’s a political (and Capitalism) problem, not a technical problem.
“Shutting down the nuclear plants may put electricity supply at risk,” REE’s former chair Jordi Sevilla told Spanish news website Voxpopuli in January. Spain plans to shut down all seven nuclear reactors by 2035.
The planned closure of two nuclear reactors at southwestern Spain’s Almaraz plant, starting in 2027, will increase the risks of blackouts, European power lobby ENTSO-E said in April.
REE responded to ENTSO-E by saying there was no risk of a blackout and it could guarantee stable energy supply.Less than a week later, Almaraz temporarily shut down the two units citing abundant wind energy supply as making operations uneconomic. One unit was still offline on Monday.
Operators of nuclear plants say nuclear plants are important. Next up: Carmakers telling us why cars should be the center of all mobility.
While that is indeed not the most objective source, they are actually correct. Even if their stability argument didn’t hold water (it does), they should keep the nuclear plants active and upgrade transmission lines to export to Germany through France and displace coal plants in Germany’s electricity market… And literally save on radioactive waste which coal plants produce tons of.
Both Portugal and Spain want to have power lines connecting the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of Europe.
The problem is that France refuses to allow the construction of lines to export energy from Portugal and Spain to the rest of Europe because that would threaten France’s very own business of exporting the power generated by its nuclear power plants to the rest of Europe.
In this latest power outage it would’ve been especially beneficiary to Portugal to be connected to nations other than just Spain, since Spain’s problems dragged down the Portuguese grid, and if there was a different place from where Portugal could have sourced enough power to make up for the sudden crash of the power coming from Spain, the country might have avoided the total collapse of power.
France already has bidirectional power lines to trade electricity with Spain.
They were used to rapidly restore power in northern Spain after the outage and that interconnection actually caused a very short blackout in southwestern France.
The infrastructure France thankfully refused to allow is fossil gas lines, saving Europe decades of gas usage to justify the investment.
From what I’ve heard on TV around here (Portugal), France still refuses to allow electrical lines passing through French territory from Spain and Portugal to sell power directly to the rest of the EU.
France is fine with buying themselves power from Portugal and Spain on the cheap to resell for more money to the rest of the EU or with selling power themselves to Spain and Portugal. Spain and Portugal have very good conditions for renewables, especially solar (for example, Portugal has twice the amount of peak sun exposure hours per year than Germany), so it makes sense to produce that kind of renewables here (on the other hand, things like hydro - which is still most of Portugal’s renewable energy generation - make a lot less sense since both countries are predicted to become much drier with global warming)
There are some crazy ideas to bypass France with a submarine cable in the Mediterranean Sea, but those are quite complex and costly.
I’ve also heard about the gas thing and the plan was to import gas from Northern Africa via Spain and sell it to the rest of Europe, as neither Spain nor Portugal produce gas. This would serve to reduce the dependency of, earlier, Russia gas and nowadays LPG from places like the US. That said I agree that we (Europe) need to wean ourselves of fossil fuels.
It doesnt really make sense for Portugal to be connected in any way but through Spain. It would require to build an underwater cable arbitrarily around Spain. if the Iberian peninsula would be better connected to the rest of the EU grid, maybe add an underwater cable to Italy in the mix, it could have made the difference to keep the grid afloat.
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