Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

On 30/04/2025 2:03 am, john larkin wrote:

On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:48:59 +0200, Lasse Langwadt <llc@fonz.dk>
wrote:
 

On 4/29/25 16:42, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 29/04/2025 10:24 pm, Martin Brown wrote:

Spain suffered a very spectacular near total loss of its national grid
yesterday taking parts of France and all of Portugal down with it.
This is an unprecedented failure of a supergrid system by cascade
failure.
>
It seems likely they had got the effect of widespread solar PV has on
load shedding wrong (much like happened in the UK) and so it failed
completely. Two events a second apart delivered the coup de grace.
>
They seem to have ruled out cyber attack and the electricity company
is now trying to blame "the wrong sort of temperature variations"...
>
Their 400kV lines seemed to be taking the blame with the national
power company blaming exceedingly rare atmospheric phenomena due to
"large" temperature differences in central Spain. They claimed that
the magical sounding "induced atmospheric vibration" was to blame.
>
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/28/spain-and-portugal-power-outage-cause-cyber-attack-electricity
>
Another marginally plausible explanation given was that different
impedances on cables at radically different temperatures on different
paths messed up the phasing (but the numbers don't look right to me).
>
Anyone have any idea what actually happened?
>
The only one I am aware of that can take 400kV supergrid down is
cables clashing together in older pylon configs where they are exactly
one above the other and resonance effects allowing large amplitude
standing waves to build up in the spans can occur in 70+mph winds.
>
Most UK ones now have a longer central pylon spur so that the lines
are more widely separated and up-down motion cannot allow them to touch.
>
They do sing quite impressively in a gale though. The little weights
at each end are apparently there to prevent such standing wave
resonances damaging the pylon structure. Without them some pylons did
fall down in the distant past during the most extreme of winter storms.

>
The Guardian's science and technology reporting has never been great.
>
The idea that renewable sources make the grid frequency harder to manage
sounds like total nonsense.
>

>
that depends, PV doesn't provide inertia like spinning turbines

 Nor does it provide local power on gloomy days or at night.

It provides some power on gloomy days, if nothing at night. You end up installing more peak generating capacity than you need to cover the low output periods, and enough energy storage to cope with them.
Geographical averaging helps. Your denialist web-sites prefer to ignore this - they want people to keep on buying the fossil-carbon fuel that they are set up to supply, even if anthropogenic global warming makes this a very bad idea in the long term.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney