Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

Or, just solar "farms"?

 They can drop out entire blocks of switchgear to take a given region or zone offline (as would happen if a fault condition trips a breaker).
 The big problem on a really sunny day is that an individual house roof 4kW PV installation in late afternoon in the UK will be potentially exporting all of it to the grid. That is about 20-30 houses worth of electricity for each solar roof.

Huh?  A single residential PV is enough to *power* 20 homes?
A 4-5KW installation would barely cover the home on which
it was sited.
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)

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.

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.