First blackout of the wind power heavy system

ABrass

You mean Dinorwig power station? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

1.7GW max. 11GWhr total storage (max).

It would probably have already been in use, at least partially, as it 'charges' over night and draws down during the day. Let's not forget that compared to solid state systems even Dinorwig needs time to spin up, 12 seconds isn't long but it's thousands of times slower than solid state systems which can do milliseconds.
Edit: A bit more reading implies that it was Dinorwig that made up the majority of the additional supply. It doesn't really add much 'inertia' to the system, it's much closer to a big sluggish battery in terms of operation.

The plants that failed were Little Barford, 740MW, and Hornsea which is somewhere less than 1.2GW. By the looks of things it was supplying about 1GW at the time. https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/08/10/worst-uk-power-cut-for-decades-as-wind-output-surges/

Fun fact, it looks like Little Barford didn't 'fail', it just turned off because they operate as a peaker plant.

All in all, it looks like the grid wasn't being well managed in this instance.

Exiled_Tyke

This shines some useful light on the subject. It appears that the problem was with Hornsea was not a problem with a wind generation itself. It also speculates that it could be related to the fact that the wind farm is still under construction.

http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/news/what-happened-electricity-system-fri-aug-9-2019.html

zeupater

Exiled_Tyke wrote: »

This shines some useful light on the subject. It appears that the problem was with Hornsea was not a problem with a wind generation itself. It also speculates that it could be related to the fact that the wind farm is still under construction.

http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/news/what-happened-electricity-system-fri-aug-9-2019.html

Hi

Looking at the event timeline in the interim report is far more informative & really interesting .... you can actually see the effect of the root cause on the wind farm as well as the subsequent events .... note that the wind farm drop was relatively small until other generation assets started to trip out ... note in particular the entry related to embedded generation & the role that played in the timeline ...

HTH
Z

Exiled_Tyke

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

Looking at the event timeline in the interim report is far more informative & really interesting .... you can actually see the effect of the root cause on the wind farm as well as the subsequent events .... note that the wind farm drop was relatively small until other generation assets started to trip out ... note in particular the entry related to embedded generation & the role that played in the timeline ...

HTH
Z

I also downloaded the data from Gridwatch which makes for interesting reading. It appears that the Frequency drop was a good time before Hornsea dropped out which I don't quite understand. I'd provide a link if I could - but I can't.

mmmmikey

The report Z links to is well worth reading, a bit heavy going though. Worth noting this is the National Grid report so perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that this was just a freak incident, everything worked exactly as it should and, well just one of those things. Be interesting to see if Ofgem take the same view.

Having said that, if you take the report at face value, it does seem that ervything worked properly and the agreed contingency was in place. At the end of the day, if that's what we're paying for and that's what we got we can't really complain, but worth reviewing of course.

The comments on inertia are interesting but somewhat limited. They make it clear that lack of inertia is a challenge but then seem to dismiss this as something they are use to managing so not a big deal.

Again, perhaps we should wait to hear what the train operators have to say, but on the face of it they do have a case to answer. It seems that they are set to trip out before the grid does and the reset procedure is far from satisfactory. I'm picturing engineers frantically pumping up and down on the handles of a track car in order to get to the stranded trains....