Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

E.g., our "average" (24/7) load is about 1KW.  Of course, that
neglects the peaks that we see OFTEN throughout the daylight
hours (night load is relatively small -- a few LED lights
plus my computers)

 Different environment. The temporal average base electricity load of a UK home in summer is somewhere around 200W mostly less unless the kettle (2 mins) or immersion heater (1 hr) is on 3kW. By late afternoon the immersion heater will not be in use as hot water will be fully hot.

We tend to have a lot more -- and a lot larger -- "static" loads.
I suspect I have 100W in "Energy Star" appliances (< 1W while idle).
Dishwasher, refrigerator (with compressor OFF), stove, washing machine,
clothes dryer, 3 TVs, cordless phones, furnace, thermostats, freezer
(compressor off), microwave oven, garage door opener, etc.
Add to that the equipment I have that "sleep" (instead of a galvanic
power switch):  three scanners, two digitizers, a dozen monitors,
a dozen UPSs (that likely consume considerably more than 1W even with
no load), several OTS NASs, six eight spindle servers acting as
NAS/SAN/ESXi servers, six workstations, 17 monitors, three media
computers (one for each TV), two dedicated ESXi servers, etc.
Damn near nothing has a HARD power switch, anymore -- if it's plugged
in, it's drawing SOME power (my office looks like christmas when
the lights are off -- all these little red/yellow/blue pilot lights
scattered around the place.
And, the equipment that is actually running (presently):  this computer
is on 24/7/365 (it never gets a chance to "sleep"), there's a headless SFF
box hiding under one of my dressers that does my NTP/DNS/TFTP/xfs/etc
services, a microwave modem on the roof, five switches, one of those
workstations (with three monitors active), another SFF box sitting in
the living room (with attached monitor) downloading the most recent
"distfiles" (once complete, it will be powered down), one of those media
computers (I'm presently watching a movie, in bits and pieces),  etc.
During the day, SWMBO would typically have yet another TV on with a
media computer (to watch the classes that she had downloaded without
being captive to THIS computer).

Domestic aircon is virtually unknown here. Fridges and freezers come in at about 4-500W but are very intermittent so a working average power consumption for a home is somewhere between 200-300W.

Most homes have at least one refrigerator-freezer and a second refrigerator
OR freezer out in the garage or some other utility room.  I think our kitchen
frig/freezer is 23 cubic feet and the freezer adds another 16.  We tend to
keep things on hand instead of frequent trips to a store to "be fresh"

As a calibration point my base load is 100W with no computers on and twice that with my main box on and idle. I have a lot of electronic gadgets running 24/7 too so most homes base load ought to be less!

Note my "vampire load" is likely comparable to your base load.  I will
admit to having more "toys" than many.  But, I also don't have kids with their
own TVs and computers in their bedrooms, etc.
I think the monitors for one workstation easily exceed that.  And, the
workstations definitely so (dual GPUs, 4 spindles, additional PCI
cards, etc.)

It crosses my mind now you come to mention it that UK NESO might be using US figures for domestic electricity consumption which would explain why their load shedding sums went so horribly wrong.
 

They drop say 100MW of load or approx 500k houses @ 200W but with 2% of them generating 4kW then they also drop off 40MW of local generation.

>
The 200W figure is mystifying.

 Why? We don't have any aircon and in the daytime so the only serious loads are the fridge and the freezer for a few minutes per hour.

A frig is typically opened dozens of times in a day.  Each time runs
the risk of calling for cooling (we have three evaporators in our
frig so any compartment can call on the compressor).  Kettle (tea)
is 1000W, ditto (bread) toaster, hair dryers, microwave oven, etc.
Oven/stovetop vary -- based on usage (e.g., when I'm baking, its
on for several hours with frequent door openings -- to swap out
cookie sheets)
A *small* "whole home" generator is about 14KW.  OK if you are
careful with your sequencing loads.  A normal home service is 24KW.

So the net load shedding is only 60MW which isn't enough to restore the balance and then the cycle repeats until it hits the low frequency total panic limiter. UK stopped it spreading by manual override dropping more than the algorithm wanted but leaving a big area without power.

>
Hence my comment about dropping individual loads (cogenerators).
>

It didn't help that by the time they did that the low frequency had put a lot of electric trains into a disabled state requiring a hard reset by a qualified service engineer visit and at random positions on the intercity train lines. The guys who could do that were in short supply.

>
"Unforeseen consequences".  A reason simpletons can't deal with
complex systems.

 Key assumption was that there are never power cuts in first world countries - but when there are all hell breaks loose. Why they decided it needed an engineer to visit I really don't know.

We have yet to experience "cuts" -- though local equipment failures
have occurred.
Our worse "utility" issue was a natural gas pipeline that was unable
to meet the city;s demand in an unusual cold spell (15F days).  The
solution was to just shed load so the rest of the system could
deliver gas at proper pressure (we had gas but not at sufficient
pressure/flow to satisfy the safeties in most appliances)