Spain's North Korea Envy

The telos of Net-Zero?

First of all, Spain apparently has North Korea envy—you know, the North Korea where it’s Net-Zero Earth Day every day:

Spain & Portugal Monday night:

What’s the word the day after? It seems everyone is trying their best to avoid blaming renewable energy sources—especially solar power—from the blame. But reading between the lines it is pretty clear that over-reliance on renewables is likely the trigger for a cascading grid failure. This, from Twitter:

From a deep groupchat, last night, translated from Spanish, written by an expert in transmission and distribution of power. Not my words.

"What has happened on April 28 has a well-located origin: the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, which is one of the most important electric highways in Spain. There is not only the electricity produced by our solar and wind farms in the northeast, but also the electricity that we import from France. This international interconnection, although weak (it can only contribute 3% of our demand, well below the minimum of 10% that marks the EU), in times of stress is essential to balance the network.

At 12:32 p.m., in that Aragón-Catalonia corridor there was an electric shock. What exactly does "shake" mean? It means that suddenly and abnormally, the power that flowed through those lines began to vary violently, rising and falling in a very short time. Such abrupt variability can be due to three main causes:

1. That a relay or transformer on that electric highway detects an abnormal flow of current or voltage (higher or lower than expected) and automatically disconnected to avoid burning or destroyed. This is called that "opens" a relay or switch: it jumps and cuts the passage of electricity to protect itself.

2. That the enormous concentration of renewable energy in that area (mainly solar and wind) has created an electrical resonance: electronic inverters, which synchronize current, can sometimes be amplified between them if a small voltage alteration (for example, due to clouds, strong wind or a slight failure) extends like an echo to all devices, causing widespread oscillations.

3. That a wrong control order has been sent (by mistake or attack) from the SCADA systems, disconnecting or reducing the generation of multiple hit plants. There is no confirmation of this possibility yet, but it is being investigated. What is known is that as a consequence of that shake, the interconnection with France jumped: we were isolated just at the worst time, when the peninsula needed external support to stabilize. Without that French help, the frequency of the peninsular network (which should always be 50 Hz exact) began to drop quickly.

The frequency is like the heartbeat of the network: if it falls too much, the systems understand that the patient (the network) is collapsing and automatically disconnected so as not to self-destruct. Thus, in just five seconds, the solar and wind farms were turned off —very sensitive to frequency variations—, 15 GW of power was lost suddenly (60% of all the electricity generated at that time), and the network could not take it anymore: it was It collapsed completely, showing the Redeia Platform (REE) a "0 MW" nationwide.

That does not mean that all the turbines were physically turned off, but there was no generator synchronized at the common frequency of 50 Hz. It was, for practical purposes, a country off. To ignite a completely dead network again, one essential thing is needed: plants that can start in black, that is, without receiving energy from anywhere else. Spain has identified five large hydroelectric jumps capable of doing this.

However, and here is one of the great negligences that are coming to light, three of those five groups were stopped in scheduled maintenance, by business decision supervised by the administration. Only two were operational. That made the recovery much slower and weaker than it should be in a normal contingency plan.

The result is that, after almost 10 hours, only 35% to 40% of the national supply has been recovered, and there are still large areas in the dark or under scheduled cuts.

The situation reveals a very serious underlying problem: Spain is still an energy island: it only has 3% foreign exchange capacity compared to its total demand."...

"The network depends a lot on variable renewables, which are disconnected quickly in the face of any instability. The lack of physical inertia reserves (i.e. large rotating masses such as thermal power plants or classic hydraulics) prevents the disturbances from damping. And poor maintenance planning left without enough hydraulic muscle to respond to a crisis.

The most likely causes, with current data, are:

A combination of technical failure in protection or in synchronization, added to a serious lack of operational forecast and maintenance (probability ≈ 40%).

The possibility of an intentional cyber-physical attack remains in analysis (≈ 25% estimated probability).

Other factors such as human error, punctual atmospheric phenomenon or mixed causes complete the rest.

In short: an initial shake at the most sensitive point of the Spanish network —the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, door to Europe— left the peninsula isolated and vulnerable. The network could not sustain its own demand because it did not have sufficient assistance, nor stable physical reserve, nor enough bootable plants in black. Three of five hydroelectric jumps were out of service when they were most needed.

For this reason, Spain went out in five seconds, and that is why it still continues to light little by little, fragile, slow and exposed."

Javier Blas of Bloomberg took these notes from a conference call Tuesday with the grid operator:

Another account: