Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

On 1/05/2025 4:47 am, john larkin wrote:

On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:41:24 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
 

On 2025-04-30 11:59, Liz Tuddenham wrote:

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
>

... pumped hydro storage has the spinning
turbines, but grid scale batteries have invereters, which can reacta lot
faster than any spinning turbine,

>
I thought the stabilising effect of a spinning turbine was because it
*didn't* react quickly.
>
The grid frequency begins to fall so energy from the moving parts is
converted to electrical power which is fed into the grid to increase.
the frequency.  This results in a loss of stored mechanical energy which
causes the turbine to begin slowing down - which is detected by the
control system and used to feed more water/gas/steam into the turbine so
its speed is returned to normal.

>
I understand that the turbine doesn't actually slow down, because the
generator starts working as a synchronous motor drawing energy from the
network instead; this is detected by the control system and feeds more
water/gas/steam, etc.
>
As long as the network keeps the frequency.
>
>

>
The interface between the stored mechanical energy and the electrical
energy demand has an almost instant response and is inherently stable
without needing elaborate control algorithms.
>

 Certainly a power network has to handle millisecond disturbances, but
the bigger problem with green energy is the issue of having not enough
power for hours or days. That requires nearly 100% fossil-fueled hot
standby, or impractical masses of batteries.

Or that's what the fossil-fuel industry funded denialist web-sites will tell you. John Larkin ignores pumped hydro storage, and vanadium flow battery storage, which can cope with rather longer low=power periods than lithium-ion battery storage, because his denialist web-sites ignore this inconvenient point.

Really, nukes and natural gas power plants are clean and just work.
That's why greenies hate them.

Natural gas power plants dump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. If John Larkin knew more science, he'd know that this means that they aren't "clean". You can modify them to burn hydrogen, which does make them clean, but using electricity generate that green hydrogen wastes a lot of energy. It's probably worth doing to sustain a decent back-up capacity, but it isn't cheap.
Nuclear power stations are inflexible - you have to run them pretty close to constant output. And they aren't clean - the radioactive waste that they produce has to be managed for hundreds of thousands of years, and while there are schemes for doing that, nobody has yet set up any kind of long term repository despite the fact that we've needed them for some seventy-odd years now.
Greenies don't actually hate them - this is just denialist web-site propaganda, uncritically recycled by John Larkin.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney