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We will probably never know the proximate cause of Monday’s power cut across Spain, Portugal, and southern France. All kinds of hypotheses have been put forward from the whacky – small solar flares limited to a single country, strange atmospherics caused by the climate change that will not arrive before 2070, and inevitably those devious Russian hackers – to the more plausible – a sudden surge in solar generation or (more likely) a fire in France taking out the 2.6GW interconnector. Nevertheless, the authorities will likely attempt a cover-up like the British handled a similar event in August 2019. Fortunately, there was enough Grid data in the public domain for citizen journalists to piece together what actually happened. We can only hope the same is true for Spanish data.
In the end though, the proximate cause is not really important because there are plenty of known risks (and likely a plethora of unknown ones too) which can not only take down a national electricity grid, but which have already done so many times. In 1965, northwest America (Canada and the USA) lost power due to a faulty relay which created a power surge that caused a cascading blackout. A similar blackout affected the same area in 2003, when an overloaded power line earthed onto a tree (because maintenance had been considered too costly). These, of course, were Grids that were almost entirely run on nuclear and fossil fuels. So, it would be a mistake to claim that the widespread use of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) create a unique risk.
This said, there is much in common with the UK outage in 2019 and the Spanish outage on Monday. In the UK case, the proximate cause was a lightning strike on the Hornsea windfarm in the North Sea. Safety equipment at the windfarm responded by taking the whole 1.2GW offline instantly. This created a big drop in Grid frequency which risked damaging Grid infrastructure and, unchecked, would fry domestic appliances and industrial equipment too. What should have happened was that a neighbouring gas generator would have ramped up its output to mitigate the loss of power. But that power station had been down for maintenance, and it failed to respond. The result was that safety systems across eastern England began to disconnect vulnerable equipment – including power stations themselves – from the Grid, causing the biggest UK power cut since the Great Storm in 1987.
Although hundreds of stranded train passengers might dispute it, England was lucky. The power cut occurred on a balmy August evening, when there was no need for home heating, and when the sun would not go down until 8.30pm. A similar outage in winter – particularly if the UK sits under still, high-pressure air – would have left people struggling to get home in the dark, and returning to houses which could not be heated (because gas heating systems depend upon electricity to operate and because wood burners are banned in cities) or easily lit (few people keep candles or torches these days). Which is why the over-penetration of NRREHTs in the UK and European Grids makes the potential for disaster so much greater.
The UK outage occurred on a Friday as people were leaving work for the weekend. And this may have obscured the potential for a cascading collapse of a kind more easily seen in Spain on Monday. Because most critical infrastructure is interconnected, a failure of one component – such as the electricity grid – automatically impacts the other systems too. Supermarkets lose the ability to accept card payments (with some electronic tills preventing cash payments too). But cash cannot be obtained because ATMs need electricity and because banks have closed most of the physical branches (which didn’t hold much cash anyway). Mobile phones may still work (so long as people remembered to charge them) but the phone network may be down due to the loss of power. Same goes for any internet site using an affected datacentre. Analogue phones may still work, but these are being phased out across Europe. Less obviously, perhaps, water and sewage systems (other than in a handful of places where water is gravity fed) depend upon electric pumps, so thousands of homes will have only the water in a tank (if they still have one) and – if the outage goes on for too long – will face sewage backing up. Burglar and fire alarms automatically start when there is a loss of power, with the result that emergency services are directed to multiple false alarms (assuming they can navigate the traffic chaos resulting from traffic signals failing). Unless buildings are fitted with back-up generation, anyone unfortunate enough to have been in an elevator will have to wait until the power is restored. Getting fuel for a vehicle will be impossible because filling stations use electric pumps – this may also be a problem for emergency services and public transport unless they have gravity storage tanks… you get the idea – look around you, and everything that depends upon a steady electrical current is going to stop working until the Grid is brought back online… and nobody is coming to help you!
This is where the over-penetration of NRREHTs adds additional risks both to the cause of power cuts and to the restoration of normal functioning. The broad reason why NRREHTs add to the risk of power cuts is to do with the massive – as much as 800 ton – spinning steel turbines that national power grids were constructed around in the second half of the last century. Back then, the only way of generating electricity was to spin copper coils around a magnet – the fluctuating magnetic field creating the current. Depending upon the number of coils and the speed of spin, a Grid frequency will be created. In Europe (and the UK) the Grid runs at 50Hz, with a tolerance of roughly 0.5 Hz in either direction before safety systems are triggered to prevent damage to the infrastructure. Those fluctuations are less rare in fossil fuel and nuclear generation, but they do happen – particularly, as we have seen, when some external event disrupts the system. But internal fluctuations – such as those caused by slight changes in steam pressure – are ironed out by the inertia of those giant turbines, which will continue spinning at the correct speed for the few seconds required for the frequency to be restored.
NRREHTs come with a long-understood lack of inertia. Wind turbines still operate by spinning copper coils around a magnet. But the weight is too small to generate inertia. Meanwhile, photovoltaic solar panels are the only form of generation which doesn’t use copper coils and magnets and so do not produce inertia at all. So, one way or another, the deployment of NRREHTs must be accompanied by something that generates the required inertia. If not – as we witnessed in Spain on Monday where wind and solar accounted for 78% of generation, with gas accounting for less than 3% – any shock to the system will inevitably create a cascading outage as the remaining generators isolate (“island”) themselves from the Grid to prevent damage.
An added issue here concerns the speed at which inertia-producing generation can be ramped-up to mitigate the loss of frequency. Nuclear – which was providing around 11% of Spain’s electricity – is far too slow to ramp up, and, indeed, was quickly (automatically) lost on Monday because you really don’t want to damage nuclear plants during a cascading outage. Coal is slightly faster, but still too slow, and in any case has been removed from most of Europe’s grids. Waste burning incinerators – which were also providing around 3% of Spain’s electricity are faster to ramp-up, but not quite fast enough. Gas would have been if the system was more balanced – that is, if multiple gas power stations were already running – but at 3% of total generation, there was no way for gas to come to the rescue.
Gas, I would remind you, is a geopolitical hot potato in Europe just now. In response to the invasion of Ukraine, the EU and the UK voluntarily disconnected themselves from the cheap Russian gas that their grids depend upon. And while more expensive liquid natural gas can be imported from Qatar and the USA, the cost has been eye-wateringly high. So much so, that European reserves are now dangerously low. And, perhaps not well understood, gas power stations are one of the first industrial users to be disconnected in the face of a gas shortage – mostly because the risk from cutting domestic supply is too great (multiple houses exploding when the gas is turned back on). In effect, Europe is becoming dangerously short of inertia-creating generation.
In a world that only exists inside the heads of the EU technocracy and the IQ-deficient politicians who do their bidding, there are several “solutions” to the inertia problem. Pumped hydro – such as from the Dinorwig plant in North Wales, which can provide 1,728 MW of hydroelectric power (the equivalent of a large gas power station) within 12 seconds could quickly respond to a loss of frequency. And so, hollowing out mountains and flooding valleys across Europe could allow for greater NRREHTs penetration – although the public may be opposed. So too could a massive deployment of Grid-scale batteries. More ambitiously, governments could require NRREHTs generators to install massive flywheels between their plants and the Grid itself… so, problem solved?
Not quite. The dirty secret of the “green energy” multinationals is that they cannot survive without cash subsidies. These come in two forms. The direct subsidies provided by governments via price fixing, and the indirect subsidy of being the generators of first resort. That is, so long as the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, the Grid operator is mandated to shut down other forms of generation to allow the NRREHTs electricity to be sold first… and price fixing allows wind and solar to be sold at the highest margin cost within the system (usually gas) despite having no marginal cost of their own (wind and sunlight is free).
Despite this, in 2024 the UK government, faced with political fallout from years of high energy prices, attempted – and failed – to find a Goldilocks price agreeable to both consumers and generators. The result was an auction with no bidders and the government having to raise the offer price by 50% to attract the necessary bidders. Which is really just another way of pointing out that, even within a system where NRREHTs generators can take the money and let someone else deal with the inertia problem, profits are so tight that alternatives to spinning turbines are too expensive for anyone to seriously consider them… companies that can barely profit from installing wind turbines are not about to spend billions installing batteries or building giant flywheels.
What then, was the “solution” to the – widely understood – inertia problem? In a word, interconnectors. Across an area the size of Europe, even if the sun wasn’t shining or the wind not blowing in one country, there would likely be an excess somewhere else. And so, across Europe (not just the EU) countries began to connect their various national grids to each other… what could possibly go wrong?
Martien Visser, a Lecturer in Energy Transition and Grid Integration at Hanzehogeschool Groningen predicted what happened in Spain on Monday:
“Friday afternoon, January 8, 2021. A substation in the power grid in the Balkans breaks down. Almost immediately, the problem scales up to European dimensions. A blackout is prevented thanks to the quick intervention of European grid operators. Industries in France and Italy are switched off. It could have all ended very differently. An investigation produced no less than 20 recommendations for improving the situation. But on Saturday, July 24, it was an absolute disaster. In Spain, more than 600,000 households were left without power because an airplane flew into a high-voltage cable in France. According to experts, it was a stroke of luck that it happened over the weekend. The lesson: Failures in one country can have major consequences in others…
“The collective energy interdependency of European countries is increasing even more. Which makes it fairly strange that energy policy is largely a national affair. Needless to say, analyses of the reliability of the energy system are carried out regularly in Brussels. These conclude that the system is in order. But what scenarios are they basing this on? And which political decisions? Was the recent Dutch decision to limit coal use to 25% factored in? What about Belgium, which is threatening to close its nuclear power plants without any adequate replacements? And the new German government, which is likely to accelerate the Kohleausstieg, i.e. the fossil-fuel phase-out. And how about the discussion in the Netherlands concerning the permanent closure of the Groningen system as an emergency reserve for the northwest European gas market?
“Economic theory teaches us that in a free market, supply security is automatically guaranteed. Well, almost always that is, see Texas, among others. The question is whether this economic theory still holds true given the many politically driven decisions. Of course, asking that question effectively answers it. Meanwhile, our society is becoming increasingly dependent on an undisrupted energy supply. While scarcity not only leads to risks to supply security, but also to a sharp increase in energy prices. This is something that we are also seeing right now… continuing on the current path will almost certainly lead to accidents. The question then is not if there will be a European blackout (electricity and/or gas) over the coming years, but when…”
Okay, the event in Spain wasn’t pan-European – Portugal is to Spain what Ireland is to the UK when it comes to electricity; when the main generator fails, the junior partner fails with it. Nevertheless, that outage in southern France should be a particular concern, especially if the interconnector failure turns out to have been the proximate cause of the wider cascade. The technocracy has bet the house on the idea that a problem shared is a problem halved, and that building something akin to a continental grid will remove the inertia issue, so that they can proceed with the complete decarbonisation of electricity. But in the real world, the problem shared is turning out to be a problem squared… particularly as public pressure results in electricity-rich states like Norway and Sweden refusing to supply excess electricity because of the increase in domestic prices that results.
Spain may face political pressure for similar reasons. While Norway and Sweden are rich in hydroelectric power, Spain – particularly its inland arid regions – has long been viewed as a potential solar electricity powerhouse, with the potential to supply excess solar power to much of western Europe. Absent though – as we saw on Monday – is any means by which western Europe can repay the favour by providing its (fast declining) inertia in return. And so, Spain (rather than the UK, which is also well into an energy death spiral) may be the first to face up to the realities of life with an intermittent, unstable and unreliable electricity grid… although the recent appearance of the Dark Lord with a report (which must have been written prior to the event in Spain) that concludes that Net Zero is “doomed to fail,” opens the possibility that the UK may be the first European country to come to its senses.
There is one last sting in the tail of the frequency/inertia problem which we have thus far avoided. Because European states still have high gas and nuclear (and in Germany lignite – because fuck you!) capacity – even if it is forced to shut down when the wind is blowing – the electricity grids can be restarted. But this shouldn’t be assumed. A widespread outage over a long enough timeframe would result in the Grid operator having to “black start” the system. In effect, re-energising the entire system from scratch. A process which first requires energy generators to re-energise themselves and to generate sufficient excess electricity to power up the wider Grid. Nuclear, coal and gas power stations have the ability to do this… wind and solar farms do not. So, this is becoming a major risk as the penetration of NRREHTs in European grids along with the shutting down of fossil fuel and nuclear generators makes the possibility of a dead Grid ever more likely.
Given the extent to which we have electrified and digitised our way of life in the last few decades, this should terrify almost everyone, and especially those within the technocracy whose power and status depends upon a firm electricity supply. But the technocracy – and the politicians who genuflect before it suffer an inertia problem of their own… not the inertia of physics and engineering, but the blind inertia of previous investment. Across Europe, they are now far too invested in the doomed to fail Net Zero project that even an event as difficult as that in Spain on Monday will be rationalised out of existence rather than face the reality that we would be plunged into a new dark age in the event that we faced the kind of black start crisis which will be inevitable if Europe continues on its current path. Sadly – and all too predictably – however, nobody with the power of decision is going to change course before the crisis hits… by which time it will be far too late.
As you made it to the end…
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