Re: The Spanish Grid Drop-out - recently released information.

On 11/05/2025 2:58 am, John Robertson wrote:

On 2025-05-10 9:46 a.m., Bill Sloman wrote:

One of my LinkedIn contacts - an IEEE contact in this case - posted some new data on LinkedIn, from a "Simon Gallagher, Managing Director at UK Networks Services | CEng | FIET | FEI | MBA "
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"We have had an update from ENTSO-E on the Spanish complete power failure. It is limited, but it helps to build the picture. I have updated our charts with the new information.
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Updated timeline:
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1. Large generators in the South of Spain started to trip at 12:32:57 CET. Over a period of 20 seconds a total of 2.2GW was lost – this is well beyond largest infeed so not secured against
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2. The frequency looks to have been contained by system reserves until what looks like a large trip at 12:33:16
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3. At this stage, the frequency falls at about 0.5 Hz/s for 4 seconds, until a rapid collapse starts

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"While I think a lack of inertia had an impact here, that does not mean that the level of solar and wind was to blame - rather it is how it has been integrated - more grid forming inverters, more rotating mass is needed, I suspect."

 Perhaps for systems that have large solar or wind arrays they could use a number of large rotating masses to smooth over these burps? Vacuum and magnetic bearings...

Why bother? If you've got a grid scale battery to supply the right levels of current, just feed in the same current as rotating mass would.

I imagine a series of rotating masses so if any single or several fail (earthquake, etc.) the system wouldn't collapse.

Batteries are less disturbed by earthquakes than rotating masses.

As you say, there is little inertia in these solar systems unlike water or fuel generated power.

But - given enough a big enough reservoir of energy - you can simulate any rotating mass you like.
About the first thing the South Australia grid did after they'd installed the world's first grid scale battery in 2017, was to reserve half it capacity for short term frequency management.
https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/
The web site talks about "Tesla inertia services" which isn't all that informative.
It the Spanish didn't bother - or more likely made a hash of the regulation algorithms they installed - that's just incompetence. Probably incompetent administration, in partitioning the job in a way that made it difficult to get the component parts to work together properly, but still incompetence.
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Bill Sloman, Sydney