Re: Causes of the Gran Apagón (Spain), first oficial report

On 19/06/2025 10:42 pm, Martin Brown wrote:

On 19/06/2025 09:04, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-06-19 06:29, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 19/06/2025 1:28 am, Martin Brown wrote:

<snip>

While the groundwork is being prepared to determine who is responsible for the blackout, with a view to the millions in compensation that will have to be paid to those affected in the future, Iberdrola has been pointing the finger at REE, as the electricity system operator, as being responsible for the incident for weeks.

 They have had enough warnings that something like this would happen if they cut their spinning reserves right to the bone.

"Spinning reserve" is just stored energy. As the South Australian Hornsdale Reserve has been demonstrating since 2017, a grid scale battery stores quite enough energy to do the same job, if connected to the grid by properly programmed inverters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
Since 2022 they've been calling it "grid inertia", probably because it make it easier to explain to politicians.

It must also surely be the responsibility of *all* the generating systems not to continue to push full power into an already over voltage and over frequency grid.

It looks as if some of the generating systems discharged their responsibilities by simply turning themselves off.
<snip>

But the vice-president and minister for Ecological Transition, Sara Aagesen, pointed on Tuesday to ‘poor planning’ on the eve of the blackout by REE in the reserve power (gas and nuclear) in the so-called technical restrictions market, which the company denies: the planned power was at annual minimums, and also a plant was declared unavailable and was not replaced.

 That is the influence of bean counters. Spinning reserves cost money.

And providing "grid inertia" with a grid scale battery does seem to be a cheap alternative to rotating lumps of metal in turbines and generators.

The government has also pointed out (this analysis is shared by REE) that this reserve market did not work as it should: the three nuclear reactors and the six combined cycle gas plants that were supposed to operate under technical restrictions (a mechanism with which electricity companies pocket billions every year) ‘were not regulating voltage’ as they should when these surges began. One gas plant in southern Spain stands out as doing the opposite of what it should have done: it injected reactive power instead of absorbing it.

 If that is true then they should be prosecuted for it. They helped to bring down the grid. It doesn't bode well when the investigators have their hands tied by government and the energy companies to anonymise who was guilty of what! Better to pretend it was multifactorial and completely unforeseeable than try to find and fix the actual root cause.
 

According to REE's Director of Operations, if these plants had done their job by controlling the voltage, ‘we would not have had a blackout’. ‘The incident would have been avoided,’ said the non-executive president of REE, Beatriz Corredor. The former socialist minister insists on denying any responsibility for the company and rules out resigning.

 Why am I not surprised?

>
The third cause of the blackout, according to the government's report, is an ‘undue’ disconnection of installations: a ‘cascading tripping of renewable generation plants’, says REE, which does not identify which ones because the companies in the sector have asked to anonymise all the information that affects them. REE has agreed to publish the information that affects it.

 It wasn't undue if they were left holding the baby and the grid was in catastrophic collapse. Serious damage can result to their output stages.
 

It is likely that this information will emerge with the report being prepared by the sector regulator, the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC).

 The sector regulator seems to have totally failed to regulate.
 

In the background of the blackout is also the lack of mechanisms to allow renewables to regulate voltage. This possibility is included in an operating procedure that is already 25 years old. Its update, as the REE report reminds us, ‘has been pending approval since 2021’ by the CNMC.

 Perhaps now they might pull their finger out and do it.
Don't hold your breath.

The Australian example might get drawn to their attention, but I doubt it.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney