Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

On 30/04/2025 01:38, john larkin wrote:

On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:07:10 -0700, Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:
 

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)

 Some people have air conditioners and electric tea kettles.

Almost no-one in the UK has aircon.
That is changing in big cities as the climate gets hotter.

 I think some people have "electric fires", namely resistive space
heating. Maybe horribly inefficient electric water heaters.

In summer heating is unnecessary and immersion heaters are used by owners of solar PV arrays because it pays them to do so (crazy).
But by late morning the hot water will be at maximum get and most of the 4kW PV will be exported. I just checked my own domestic usage on the realtime display and it is 270W with my main machine running hard.

Most of our heat comes from natural gas, which is very reliable.

Same in the UK although not for me since there is no gas supply here.
However, British Gas sells *electricity* to our Village Hall!

But yes, one rooftop solar powering 30 houses is not reasonable.

It is in the UK. I might even have erred on the side of caution.
We don't have aircon, domestic walk in fridges or 2m TVs.
--
Martin Brown