Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2025 16:07:37 +1000
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On 11/06/2025 4:21 am, Joe Gwinn wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Jun 2025 02:17:45 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> On 2025-06-10 01:03, Joe Gwinn wrote:
>>> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 22:14:54 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
>>> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2025-06-09 01:15, Joe Gwinn wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout, Bjorn Lomborg, Wall Street
>>>>> Journal, 3 June 2025 issue, page A13.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Here is a gift link.  No paywall, but they will insist on trying to
>>>>> persuade you to subscribe.
>>>>>
>>>>> .<https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-physics-behind-the-spanish-blackout-solar-and-wind-power-unstable-grid-8be54b2a?st=VUVUMR&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink>
>>>>
>>>> Politically biased opinion.
>>>
>>> Maybe, maybe not, but no matter - inertia and conservation of energy
>>> are not.  And the finance world doesn't want to bet on the wrong
>>> horse.
>>>
>>> It's true that there are many possible technical remedies, but none of
>>> them are in place.  If they were, we would not be having this
>>> discussion.
>>
>> Remedies, for what exactly? We still do not know what was the problem.
>> And will not know for several months.
> 
> Weeks?  Unlikely in the extreme.  Whatever the pending report says, it
> will get the full wire-brush scrub by everybody, a process that will
> yield many causalities.  So we also need time for the political
> funerals.
> 
> Also see below.
> 
> 
>>> It will be many years and billions for anything of the kind to be
>>> implemented at sufficient scale, and to mature enough to depend on.
>>>
>>>
>>>>     Blaming anything for the blackout is
>>>> reckless, when done before the detailed analysis is completed.
>>>
>>> I quite agree, but holding off for a year or two is a form of
>>> unilateral political disarmament.  Politicians are rarely saints.
>>> Neither are news reporters.
>>
>> You can not put a solution to a problem that nobody knows what it is.
>> What are you going to do? You do something so that the public is happy,
>> and when a year passes, we find out that the problem is totally
>> different, and the effort and money was wasted on a useless mistaken
>> solution!
> 
> Yes, all true, but the politicians and news reporters don't care in
> the slightest.
> 
> The only solution is to create better politicians and news reporters?
> It is often proposed, by those same politicians and reporters.
> Sometimes replacement does happen.  And nothing changes.  Hmm.

Reporters and politicians frequently don't know enough. English language 
"science" reporters - at least for the main-stream press - never seem to 
have studied any kind of science. This wasn't true in the Netherlands 
and the mainstream press science reporting there was a whole lot more 
reliable than it had been in England and is now in Australia.

The Spanish problem is probably the same one that the world's first grid 
scale battery solved back in 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve

People have posted stuff here claiming that if couldn't possibly work, 
but it is still working fine and has been copied in other Australian 
states and even in California (where the completed installation works 
fine, though a bit of it went up in flames during installation).

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney