Re: The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout

On 2025-06-11 08:07, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 11/06/2025 4:21 am, Joe Gwinn wrote:

On Tue, 10 Jun 2025 02:17:45 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>

On 2025-06-10 01:03, Joe Gwinn wrote:

On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 22:14:54 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:

...

It will be many years and billions for anything of the kind to be
implemented at sufficient scale, and to mature enough to depend on.
>
>

    Blaming anything for the blackout is
reckless, when done before the detailed analysis is completed.

>
I quite agree, but holding off for a year or two is a form of
unilateral political disarmament.  Politicians are rarely saints.
Neither are news reporters.

>
You can not put a solution to a problem that nobody knows what it is.
What are you going to do? You do something so that the public is happy,
and when a year passes, we find out that the problem is totally
different, and the effort and money was wasted on a useless mistaken
solution!

>
Yes, all true, but the politicians and news reporters don't care in
the slightest.
>
The only solution is to create better politicians and news reporters?
It is often proposed, by those same politicians and reporters.
Sometimes replacement does happen.  And nothing changes.  Hmm.

 Reporters and politicians frequently don't know enough. English language "science" reporters - at least for the main-stream press - never seem to have studied any kind of science. This wasn't true in the Netherlands and the mainstream press science reporting there was a whole lot more reliable than it had been in England and is now in Australia.
 The Spanish problem is probably the same one that the world's first grid scale battery solved back in 2017.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve

I would like some of that to be installed here, it sure would help.

People have posted stuff here claiming that if couldn't possibly work, but it is still working fine and has been copied in other Australian states and even in California (where the completed installation works fine, though a bit of it went up in flames during installation).

Unrelated, but there was yesterday a three hour outage at the Canary Island of La Palma.
        According to initial data, the outage was caused by a
        ‘generation turbine trip’ due to some kind of fault or
        anomaly at the Los Guinchos power station, which has
        brought the island to zero power.
        At the time of the incident, the real-time energy
        demand graph of the company Red Eléctrica shows a
        drop to 1.2 megawatts, compared to the 29 megawatts
        expected, before falling to zero a few minutes later.
<https://www.eldiario.es/canariasahora/lapalmaahora/isla-palma-sufre-nuevo-apagon-tercero-mes_1_12373194.html>
The island is, well, an island.
--
Cheers, Carlos.