And worrisome it if happens here…
Since the Iberian Peninsula lost power in a massive blackout, grid operators are in the process of trying to restore power to millions of customers and businesses. As you might imagine, the process—termed a “black start”—is quite a bit more challenging than flicking on a switch. However, the challenge is made considerably more difficult because nearly everything about the system—from the management hardware that remotely controls the performance of the grid to the power plants themselves—needs power to operate.
Restarting the grid
You might think that a power plant could easily start generating power, but in reality, only a limited number of facilities have everything they need to handle a black start. That’s because it takes power to make power. Facilities that boil water have lots of powered pumps and valves, coal plants need to pulverize the fuel and move it to where it’s burned, etc. In most cases, black-start-rated plants have a diesel generator present to supply enough power to get the plant operating. These tend to be smaller plants, since they require proportionally smaller diesel generators.
Full article, HERE from Arstechnica.com
Other than nuke plants, I’m not sure how many black start rated plants the US has, nor how much ability to shed enough load to actually perform a black start.
Most of the nuke plants have a capability to ‘dump’ their load without scramming the plant. And from conversations with folks, they do have generators to maintain ‘local’ power to the control room and plant.
Of course, the elephant in the room is ‘what’ caused this blackout in Spain and the entire Iberian peninsula. I have not heard anything, and I doubt we will, as this is obviously a security issue, in addition to other problems…
What happens if it happens here?
I know Texas is ‘not’ on the national grid, even though there is a lot of pressure on Texas to ‘voluntarily’ participate… voluntarily…yeah, right…
I’m betting there are lot of folks in the US power industry looking at their hole cards, emergency procedures are being reviewed, and a lot of discussions are ongoing right now.
In point of fact, our infrastructure security is weak, and that has been proven a couple of times over. I can’t help but wonder if the administration is also looking into this and what the response(s) will be.
Sorry folks… it’s not a matter of “if” but “when”. And you are quite right — except for a few nuclear plants, almost nowhere has the capability for a black start, and no renewable facility of any size does. On the other hand, a few really good Navy nukes can usually figure out how to power a city or two — or facilitate a dark grey start of the grid — with extension cords (large economy size) from an aircraft carrier or a boomer…
For anyone looking to learn more about the difficulties of keeping the electricity grids online and properly balanced between generation and loads, here’s a 30 minute video by “Practical Engineering” on YouTube taking a look at the Northeast Blackout of 2003:
https://tinyurl.com/2cmjaa66
(Goes to YouTube)
He has another one on the February 2021 blackout in Texas as well.
I’m also a fan of Practical Engineering. Grady does a great job of presenting complex issues.
It was 2003 when the Northeast lost power for 4-5 days.
In the Iberian Peninsula system, they became overly dependent on solar and wind. It works for them. Until it doesn’t.
They bank their unused energy by pumping water uphill to reservoirs that act as accumulators, restoring the energy by releasing the water back through hydro-electric plants.
They ran out of reservoirs capacity.
Good explanation Ed. Thanks!
Dark starts are even harder when your primary source of generation is Wind and Solar. They have issues with extremely highs momentary loads that Dark Starts cause.
Plus, as you point out, many smaller plants “need juice to make juice”
The more renewables you have (and they were bragging about being 100% Wind and Solar) the less resilient your grid is
The big Spanish blackout happened because of too much ‘renewable’ power feeding their grid and not enough ‘surge’ available, making it unstable. To explain: solar and wind are variable sources, their output changes with little warning. With an off-grid household, this is dealt with via a battery pack and backup generator, absorbing the highs and feeding power in the dips. The batteries cost as much as the solar panels did in my setup. Spain and Portugal have invested in a lot of solar and wind generation, but have not bothered with the expensive infrastructure that should go along with that.
What they have been doing instead is relying on France for that surge capacity, using the inter-country transmission lines. Well, that got overloaded and the French cut power rather than lose those power lines and drop their entire grid as well. Now it’s a process of inspecting lines and substations, testing one bit at a time, and cautiously getting plants back up. The French are helping, but are justifiably on guard against a recurrence.
In the ’90’s, the rule was that solar and wind would make the grid unstable if they were more than 20% of the total. Computerized controls and natural gas power plants (very quick response time) have made it possible to use more, but the best that I have seen is 40% renewable grid power before getting into dangerous territory.
When the blackout occurred, Spain and Portugal were over 60% renewable power feeding their grid.
THey were at , or very near, 100 Renewables. That is, essentially what cause thee start of the problem.
My understanding (please comment if I’m wrong) is that natural gas turbine plants can do a black start. Of course the eco-nazis hate natural gas plants almost as much as nukes.
Even without all the power-hungry switchgear, etc. there is still the “Cold Start” problem: Generally all but the smallest generators (the ones you start to get everything else started) require EXTERNAL excitation to get going. Yeah, you can make ’em spin, but they need that magnetic (B) field. Once going, they self-supply/excite… but to GET going.. they need a little help from their friends.
Recent experience has shown that grids get unstable with more than 12% intermittent power… My understanding is that they were running near 100%.
I know from my tour of Hoover Dam that it can do Black Start – they have a small dedicated turbine for independent power. Of course, when it was built we didn’t have larger grids…
My late father was a control room operator at the Hayden, CO power plant. In fact, he helped build the place. This is from old memories but I think a cold start at that plant took three days.
I do remember he said some power had to be maintained to keep the generators turning; that they could be warped from sagging if not kept spinning. If some system wasn’t in place at those plants they may have much bigger problems.
All- Thanks for your comments! Very educational, especially the video Ag.
I think thus far everything I’ve read agrees that 1) something about solar and wind caused the cascade of failures, and 2)power fluctuations tipped everything over the edge. Now, where those came from, if they are part of the nature of solar and wind, and if the system had outside help tipping over? Those are still all over the place, according to all the cussin’ and discussin’ I’ve read.
YMMV, IANAEngineer, nor did I stay at Holiday Inn Express™.
Detailed explanation of Spain – with notes that this is NOT the first time this sort of thing has happened – in these two substacks:
https://meredithangwin.substack.com/p/the-switches-in-spain
https://willbates.substack.com/p/sleuthing-spanish-solar
Few people realize, and even fewer want to know, just how fragile and precarious our power grid is. How easy it is to take down and how difficult to restore. It’s the giant unspoken Achilles heel of Western civilization.
TXRed- That matches what I’ve heard.
Francis- Thanks, I ‘knew’ they had issues before, but didn’t connect it.
Dan- Point!
Yeah, I was raving about this all over the place, I would have guessed I had said something about it here.
As said above, the probable cause is known. Whether it will ever be politically acceptable to talk about how much ‘renewables’ they are running is different.
More precise failure analysis will wait a bit. The power lines are a system of equations and are solvable, but for this failure you would definitely need some phase related data, so that makes it a nonlinear system of equations. (Solvers for these power line equations seem to be very mature(1), so they probably just need to collect the data. But, they would want to grab every bit that is preserved.)
Engineering investigation, so the engineers involved want forever to think about it before they say anything. This without the motivations that the security and the political folks will also have.
US grid is in four chunks, and I am not sure if the isolation between them would or would not prevent this sort of thing propagating.
I’d actually collected a bunch of literature (which I have not read yet), on cascade failures in power systems. According to BGE (who I got the leads from), market failures are basically the same thing, and preference cascades are related.
I thought it was cool to almost understnad this phenomena. Obviously, there is a bunch more that I don’t know, and I think I would need to do simulations to really put it all together in my own mind. I have doubts that modern simulation tech lets us explore all possible power grid design failures, but it could certainly be educational to try to see if it can cover known failure modes. I think Carrington events might be an interesting challenge of a example, but validating any work might be tricky.
(1) I’ve been looking into some similar ideas with a different application. Today I just kinda hate myself and my own incompetence. Last week or whenever, when the news was fresh, I freaking hated the method.