First blackout of the wind power heavy system

GreatApe

So it seems a power station tripped and some wind turbines went offline

This is not abnormal, However what was abnormal is that we had only a few CCGTs in the system yesterday due to high wind output

If you have 5GW CCGT in the system that's not a lot of inertia so if 1GW goes offline you lose 20%+. If it was low wind and there was 20GW CCGT in the system that same 1GW would be only 5% and wouldn't have caused the frequency to dip so much

So anyone want to cost yesterday's blackout in �� and misery thanks to a wind heavy system which is not forced to have backup battery and hence weaken security of supply?

Wind farms and PV farms should be forced to have big batteries else they are freeloading

Also right now the grid really doesn't like going below 5GW so installing more wind just results in less clean imports rather than displacing CCGTs further. So to integrate more renewables is going to need large batteries perhaps as much as 4GW+ of batteries to support frequency control.

Another hidden cost

https://theenergyst.com/national-grid-two-generators-cause-big-frequency-drop/

mmmmikey

Identifying this as a wind problem is complete tosh!

If one of your beloved nuclear power stations failed then we'd lose an even higher proportion of our energy, so the same logic would lead to insisting that nuclear power stations are also equipped with batteries.

You do make a very good argument in favour of investing in battery technology, though.

worried_jim

Boris was practising for Brexit. Next weekend food queues.

mmmmikey

worried_jim wrote: »

Boris was practising for Brexit. Next weekend food queues.

Thanks Jim - I'm now asking myself how I could have missed such an obvious conclusion


Your comments make much more sense to me than the original post

michaels

I don't know if the op is correct or not.

I assume that it is not unprecedented for capacity to suddenly go offline but yesterdays outages were unprecedented so presumably there is an explanation that may relate to a change in generation mix - or some other factor that has changed.

The ops hypothesis does not sound impossible and we know that the big Tesla battery in Aus has already helped a lot with frequency response. Regardless of the causes of the outage of would appear that the current system is not robust enough to cope with the sort of outages that it should be able to handle.

GreatApe

mmmmikey wrote: »

Identifying this as a wind problem is complete tosh!

If one of your beloved nuclear power stations failed then we'd lose an even higher proportion of our energy, so the same logic would lead to insisting that nuclear power stations are also equipped with batteries.

You do make a very good argument in favour of investing in battery technology, though.

Conventional systems don't need batteries as per the fact they worked more or less fine without batteries for the best part of a century

Wind Solar heavy systems need batteries a cost which should be paid by the wind/PV farms not socialised into the grid. You could have a requirement for each GW of wind or PV capacity to have a certain amount of batteries. Something like 500MW 2GWh per 1GW of wind & 1GW of solar.

Solarchaser

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Thanks, I needed some amusement.

I have expected boris to clame it was the Taliban done it.

Great argument for batteries, and we should store them in the decommissioned nuke sites!

GreatApe

michaels wrote: »

I don't know if the op is correct or not.

I assume that it is not unprecedented for capacity to suddenly go offline but yesterdays outages were unprecedented so presumably there is an explanation that may relate to a change in generation mix - or some other factor that has changed.

The ops hypothesis does not sound impossible and we know that the big Tesla battery in Aus has already helped a lot with frequency response. Regardless of the causes of the outage of would appear that the current system is not robust enough to cope with the sort of outages that it should be able to handle.

More importantly why drop London off the grid rather than Stoke on Trent?

The current grid can't go to zero !!!!!! there needs to be significant battery capacity or significant demanding shedding ability (with things that don't matter too much like immersion heaters)

You can see this is already a problem because in the weekends we could already be close to zero fossil fuels when the wind blows hard but instead of turning off the last of the CCGTs we dial back the imports.

GreatApe

Solarchaser wrote: »

������

Thanks, I needed some amusement.

I have expected boris to clame it was the Taliban done it.

Great argument for batteries, and we should store them in the decommissioned nuke sites!

Costs don't matter because we have found a cave of leprechauns and their pots of gold can be used to trade for these battery systems. We've also discovered the tooth fairy has a blueprint for clean mining and manufacturing of trillions of cells all she wants is a few million teeth in return for her magic blue prints

so there you go a clear pathway zero cost fully clean batteries

If only big oil wasn't lobbying borris for this to not be done I mean their lobbying is so successful that only you me and a couple of other people know about this lack of investment into teeth and leprechaun caves!!! Get the word out comrade we will soon free ourselves from these corporations and their evil profits

mmmmikey

GreatApe wrote: »

Conventional systems don't need batteries as per the fact they worked more or less fine without batteries for the best part of a century

A confident statement, but as they say on Wikipedia, needs citation!

On the news last night they pointed out that we had a similar blackout round about 2009 (I can't remember the exact year), at which time wind couldn't have been to blame.

I think you have fallen into the trap of confusing the variable nature of wind energy (which weather forecasting has made predictable a few days in advance) with the sudden, catastrophic failure of some piece of equipment (which could happen to any power station - such as the gas power station that triggered the problem).

GreatApe

mmmmikey wrote: »

A confident statement, but as they say on Wikipedia, needs citation!

On the news last night they pointed out that we had a similar blackout round about 2009 (I can't remember the exact year), at which time wind couldn't have been to blame.

I think you have fallen into the trap of confusing the variable nature of wind energy (which weather forecasting has made predictable a few days in advance) with the sudden, catastrophic failure of some piece of equipment (which could happen to any power station - such as the gas power station that triggered the problem).

Once again

Say you have 30GW of conventional in the system and 600MW trips that is 2%
Say you have 3GW of conventional in the system and 600MW trips that is 20%

Friday was a high wind low CCGT day
Thursday was a low wind higher CCGT day
Which day was the power cut?


As you go higher and higher intermittent supply you have to start installing significant batteries not for storage but for stability. This is one of the many hidden costs of intermittent supply.

Another is you need significant transmission upgrades to bring this low density far away source of power to where it is needed. Like the two huge HVDC lines from Scotland to England/Wales recnelty