Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

On 5/4/2025 1:49 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

But you do have to have serious stored energy available at the drop of a hat if the inverter is to effectively resist frequency being pulled down by the load. It can be done but the engineering will be interesting.

But that storage doesn't have to be in one "lump".  The energy that you
deliver (brake) to the grid can be sourced from each cogenerator.  And, one
mains cycle later, there is more energy available (from incident light rays).
It's a different problem from "overnight storage".
The problem I see is the same one all distributed systems face -- communication
and cooperation (assuming designed AS a distributed system).
Imagine thousands of little 4KW turbines scattered on streams around
the country.  Certainly not the same issue as a single large-scale
hydroproject.

I suspect from the time of day when this happened it was over supply of solar PV leading to too high a frequency and/or over voltage events that led to the cascade failure. Unclear why it didn't pass through a stable state where supply matched demand though if that really was the case.
 I suspect poor network stability analysis played a large part and the network was still relying on the intrinsic stability of the old turbine generators that were no longer present. Have to wait for the report.
 ISTR the electricity supplier in Spain has been warning about this for a while but the politicians were not listening. I wonder if the Spanish government *will* actually publish the results of the investigation.

Details always leak; its what keeps the conspiracy kooks in business!