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

On 11/05/2025 12:22 pm, Chris Jones wrote:

On 11/05/2025 5:04 am, john larkin wrote:
 

As solar and wind get to be dominant, micromanagement of power sources
and loads will be necessary to ensure uptime.

 This is largely unnecessary - if the control signal that was being sent out by the central controller to micromanage each power source was derived from a function of the frequency, phase, voltage etc., then rather than trying to distribute the result of this calculation to millions of devices with low latency, it is better to distribute just the formula (once every few years or as necessary), and run it on a microcontroller in the inverters several times every mains cycle. They already have more than enough processing power.
 I believe that there are some new regulations in at least one Australian state, driven by the (fossil-fuel-stoked) fear of "too much solar destabilising the grid", which require new home solar inverters to stop exporting power, unless they receive continuous "permission to export" signals from our overlords, the network operators.

It is cruder than that. They've just stopped paying any realistic kind of feed-in tariff to people with roof-top solar, and as a result 40% of new roof-top solar in Australia is now being installed with Tesla Powerwall or similar battery. It more than doubles the cost of the installation, but reduces the pay-back time for the whole installation to about seven years, and save you negotiating with your power supplier about their derisory feed-in tariffs.

In other words, rather than exporting power in the case of communications failure, it goes into the state of "export no power" in case of communications failure, because otherwise people might unplug their internet to export more scary solar power if exporting power was allowed when the internet connection fails. This is a fairly new requirement, so not many compliant devices are installed now, but once a few gigawatts of these inverters are running, it will be interesting to see what happens when there is a major internet outage on a hot summer day, and all of those gigawatts suddenly go away. Hopefully they thought of that but I doubt it.

It's more that they haven't yet got enough poles and wires in the right places to move the roof-top power to where it could be used.
The fundamental problem is that the network got privatised about twenty years ago, and the ownership structure that got set up was designed to make it easy to sell shares in the old hardware - it is totally unsuitable for any kind of distributed system.

The rapid control algorithms should be distributed, and the only low-latency communication signals they should rely upon are frequency and voltage.

Sounds sensible, but the current ownership structure wasn't designed with that in mind.
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Bill Sloman, Sydney