Excellent article. Doomberg had a similar take for Alaska yesterday. I’m currently in the mind set that a devastating grid outage is the only solution to stopping the renewable/unreliable madness. As you so perfectly outlined, many people DO NOT UNDERSTAND, what a true power outage will bring. It will also bring massive civil unrest in large urban areas. Love your work!
Same here in the US. Many people in rural areas have whole home backup generators. The large cities will be in complete chaos. That will lead to the 2020 riots looking like childs play. It will be ugly, it’s also probably the only thing that will trigger a much needed change of direction on energy policy. Prayers it doesn’t come to that🙏
Society is of the naive belief that power is generated spontaneously when a light switch is flipped and that clean water originates magically when the faucet tap is opened.
Nailed it, brother. I was visiting NYC last weekend with the misses and I thought, "what would happen to this place if the power went out for two or three days (or to your point, the food did not arrive for a week)?"
While the future is always uncertain, I'm willing to wager they will not fix anything until having suffered several major blackouts. after the 3rd, there will be no hiding
Really well done. I don’t fully understand how grid forming inverters will be able to replace rotational mass. My understanding is that it is “close” but not equal to turbine inertia. It feels that there is a significant risk that policy makers are going to treat “close” and “equal” as interchangeable under the guise of sustainability
Thank you! It seems that no one who’s unbiased and close to the tech believes grid-forming inverters are sufficient. The problem is that politicians insist on unrealistic goals, which executive regulators like the Federal Network Agency are then left scrambling to turn into reality.
Inverters have near zero inertia. They take direct current from a battery and convert it into alternating current, the frequency / phase of the alternating current is automatically adjusted to match that of the grid at the inverters connection point and the AC voltage produced by the inverter is set to allow the energy available to the inverter to flow into the grid. If these parameters go out of bounds the inverter switches off line, this happens nearly instantly, zero inertia. And this changes the load presented to other inverters feeding into the grid, possibly causing them to trip off line. The result is the near instantaneous loss of renewable energy feeding into the grid - like Spain experienced.
Nonlinear systems are incredibly difficult to manage and even monitor. Mark Buchanan's book, "Ubiquity" is a great read, very concise, and does a wonderful job of highlighting just how things can go wrong when the underlying system is nonlinear.
Something that hasn’t seen much discussion is negative resistance. With most classical electrical loads, lowering the voltage causes current in the load to decline. Modern electronics have replaced linear power supplies with high efficiency switch mode power supplies. One characteristic of these supplies is lowering the input voltage to the supply causes the current consumed to increase - negative resistance. And we now have billions of these devices connected to the grid, how does this impact the stability of a struggling grid when its voltage starts to droop?
Brawl, thanks for the morning read. Possible catastrophe pairs well with my coffee. Question - synthetic inertia is generated by spinning systems independent of gas, coal, or nuclear generation plants. Is the idea that these redundant inertia generators will be powered by “green” energy sources, fossil/nuclear sources, or a mix of all energy generation on the grid? To follow up, how much energy would need to be consumed by these synthetic inertia systems?
The energy these systems use comes from the existing electricity on the grid at that moment, so yes, it’ll be a mix of all energy generation. How much energy they require isn’t a number the regulators seem to provide. But the grid’s non-linearity makes that estimation difficult.
Of course von Crazy Lying has the solution already at hand. When Germany has blackout, it obviously is da Putin's fault. Blame it on Russian hacking and perfidy. Borrow more money to build more arms factories to counter Russian threat. Never mind that there will be no energy to power up the factories. Details details details!
"But why the failures jumped around the way they did remains a mystery" That statement is incorrect. I lived both the 1996 system breakups., there were no blackout in 1997. The reasons were well understood, The system separated across weak high power angle seams.
Another banger. Crazy to think that experts would spend so much on unproven tech.
Thank you! German bureaucrats display a remarkable obedience to their political masters.
I was told that replacing fossil fuels would be quick easy and cheap.
Excellent article. Doomberg had a similar take for Alaska yesterday. I’m currently in the mind set that a devastating grid outage is the only solution to stopping the renewable/unreliable madness. As you so perfectly outlined, many people DO NOT UNDERSTAND, what a true power outage will bring. It will also bring massive civil unrest in large urban areas. Love your work!
Thank you! Most European households, especially in urban areas, are completely unprepared for a blackout.
Same here in the US. Many people in rural areas have whole home backup generators. The large cities will be in complete chaos. That will lead to the 2020 riots looking like childs play. It will be ugly, it’s also probably the only thing that will trigger a much needed change of direction on energy policy. Prayers it doesn’t come to that🙏
It’s hard to predict which is the lesser evil in the long run.
🙋 I have one!
Society is of the naive belief that power is generated spontaneously when a light switch is flipped and that clean water originates magically when the faucet tap is opened.
And food magically appears in the grocery store
Nailed it, brother. I was visiting NYC last weekend with the misses and I thought, "what would happen to this place if the power went out for two or three days (or to your point, the food did not arrive for a week)?"
I liked the argument against hunting “I get my meat at the store where no animals were harmed in its production”
Great article. Let's hope that Europe will fix its energy system before it needs to learn it the hard way.
Thank you! 🙏
While the future is always uncertain, I'm willing to wager they will not fix anything until having suffered several major blackouts. after the 3rd, there will be no hiding
Really well done. I don’t fully understand how grid forming inverters will be able to replace rotational mass. My understanding is that it is “close” but not equal to turbine inertia. It feels that there is a significant risk that policy makers are going to treat “close” and “equal” as interchangeable under the guise of sustainability
Thank you! It seems that no one who’s unbiased and close to the tech believes grid-forming inverters are sufficient. The problem is that politicians insist on unrealistic goals, which executive regulators like the Federal Network Agency are then left scrambling to turn into reality.
Inverters have near zero inertia. They take direct current from a battery and convert it into alternating current, the frequency / phase of the alternating current is automatically adjusted to match that of the grid at the inverters connection point and the AC voltage produced by the inverter is set to allow the energy available to the inverter to flow into the grid. If these parameters go out of bounds the inverter switches off line, this happens nearly instantly, zero inertia. And this changes the load presented to other inverters feeding into the grid, possibly causing them to trip off line. The result is the near instantaneous loss of renewable energy feeding into the grid - like Spain experienced.
Check out this recent frequency trend in GB as a thermal unit ramps off. That's not good! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jason-doering-p-eng-62340a2a_%F0%9D%97%A6%F0%9D%97%B6%F0%9D%97%B4%F0%9D%97%BB%F0%9D%97%B6%F0%9D%97%B3%F0%9D%97%B6%F0%9D%97%B0%F0%9D%97%AE%F0%9D%97%BB%F0%9D%98%81-%F0%9D%97%99%F0%9D%97%BF%F0%9D%97%B2%F0%9D%97%BE%F0%9D%98%82%F0%9D%97%B2%F0%9D%97%BB%F0%9D%97%B0%F0%9D%98%86-ugcPost-7338587941453144064-cp3g?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&rcm=ACoAAAdIewQB619Bv6avZdQ2k2PXCzOT7eIFNoo
A ticking time bomb. Thanks for sharing!
Here in New England a 2020 report on inertia said that the grid will be ok until at least 2025. Thankfully that’s far in the future (not).
Good luck…
Nonlinear systems are incredibly difficult to manage and even monitor. Mark Buchanan's book, "Ubiquity" is a great read, very concise, and does a wonderful job of highlighting just how things can go wrong when the underlying system is nonlinear.
I put it on my reading list!
The book has been added to my Amazon list. Thanks!
Something that hasn’t seen much discussion is negative resistance. With most classical electrical loads, lowering the voltage causes current in the load to decline. Modern electronics have replaced linear power supplies with high efficiency switch mode power supplies. One characteristic of these supplies is lowering the input voltage to the supply causes the current consumed to increase - negative resistance. And we now have billions of these devices connected to the grid, how does this impact the stability of a struggling grid when its voltage starts to droop?
That's in interesting detail that might warrant another article. Thanks for pointing this out!
Brawl, thanks for the morning read. Possible catastrophe pairs well with my coffee. Question - synthetic inertia is generated by spinning systems independent of gas, coal, or nuclear generation plants. Is the idea that these redundant inertia generators will be powered by “green” energy sources, fossil/nuclear sources, or a mix of all energy generation on the grid? To follow up, how much energy would need to be consumed by these synthetic inertia systems?
Cheers!
The energy these systems use comes from the existing electricity on the grid at that moment, so yes, it’ll be a mix of all energy generation. How much energy they require isn’t a number the regulators seem to provide. But the grid’s non-linearity makes that estimation difficult.
Thanks!
Energy supply at its core is an engineering & economics problem. We let ideologues and politicians drive the train. What could possibly go wrong?
Of course von Crazy Lying has the solution already at hand. When Germany has blackout, it obviously is da Putin's fault. Blame it on Russian hacking and perfidy. Borrow more money to build more arms factories to counter Russian threat. Never mind that there will be no energy to power up the factories. Details details details!
Or, they decide to bring back nuclear power, and they all live happily ever after
"But why the failures jumped around the way they did remains a mystery" That statement is incorrect. I lived both the 1996 system breakups., there were no blackout in 1997. The reasons were well understood, The system separated across weak high power angle seams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Western_North_America_blackouts
Prediction 3 then 2.
Spain RFO (reason for outage)
“Induced atmospheric vibration”
Aka wind. 🤣