Sokes wrote:L410Turbolet wrote:Europe was very close to a major blackout on January 8, avoided only thanks to ideologically defective nuclear and fossil-fuel fired power plants.
https://www.thegwpf.com/8-january-2021- ... -disaster/tommy1808 wrote:so.. which " ideologically defective nuclear and fossil-fuel fired power plants" powered up to safe the grid in the 15 seconds the critical occurrence lasted, caused by an overloaded Substation in Croatia, that has nothing to do whatsoever with the method of power generation?
best regards
Thomas
To quote:
"The cause was apparently a power failure in Romania.
the article is a month old, and the apparent reason wasn´t the real reason.The root cause was an overloaded busbar coupling in a substation in Ernestinovo, Croatia.The load redistribution tripped other protections in Serbia, Bosnia and Romania (hence the apparent reason was there).
According to Wien Energie, the electricity grids are exposed to ever greater fluctuations. The number of emergency operations has increased from around 15 to up to 240 per year in recent years.
yes, they are. And they are because the energy market in the EU is so darn liberalized that power companies can not afford more reserves then they can legally just get away with, instead of a few percent extra buffer on top to be safe. That needs updating. Much improved control and faster acting protections also allow riding the grid closer to minima, so much of the more interventions is simply because they can risk going closer to the limit because of those improvements.
says VIK managing director Christian Seyfert.
As a result of the “phasing out of nuclear energy and coal power”, a considerable amount of secured output will be shut down “without replacement” in Germany in the coming years, according to Seyfert. "
VIK is a lobby organisation and their arguments have about as much to do with reality as Star Trek. Dirty little secret: The energy companies want to get rid of more power plants, but they are not allowed to for exactly these stability reasons ... and of course both coal and nuclear plants being amazingly ill suited for this kind of event, only hot stand-by gas turbine plants have any chance whatsoever to ramp up fast enough.
I believe coal plants always have a steam reserve to be able to react to frequency fluctuations..
No one has a steam reserve to cover 6.3 GW This is what load shedding is for, and customers available for disconnect get quite a discount for it. So no reason to complain if they actually get their power turned off from time to time. Load shedding was only 1.7GW, so there was some 4GW instant reserve available, which is ample. This kind of event is usually covered by kinetic energy in rotating masses, which makes wind amazing for this kind of event, since the rotating mass is enormous compared to power output.
In essence, this was operators on the Balkans driving their grid on a knife edge, again, leading to problems in the whole euro grid, again, protections worked as intended, only a fraction of load available to discard was actually shed.
Texas is out of power due to an amazingly short sighted policy regarding grid reliability, which seems to be the guiding principle for US power grids in general and the reason why their power is about as reliable as in plenty of 3rd world nations.
best regards
Thomas