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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
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Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:58:41 +1000
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On 19/06/2025 10:42 pm, Martin Brown wrote:
> On 19/06/2025 09:04, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>> On 2025-06-19 06:29, Bill Sloman wrote:
>>> On 19/06/2025 1:28 am, Martin Brown wrote:

<snip>

>> While the groundwork is being prepared to determine who is responsible 
>> for the blackout, with a view to the millions in compensation that 
>> will have to be paid to those affected in the future, Iberdrola has 
>> been pointing the finger at REE, as the electricity system operator, 
>> as being responsible for the incident for weeks.
> 
> They have had enough warnings that something like this would happen if 
> they cut their spinning reserves right to the bone.

"Spinning reserve" is just stored energy. As the South Australian 
Hornsdale Reserve has been demonstrating since 2017, a grid scale 
battery stores quite enough energy to do the same job, if connected to 
the grid by properly programmed inverters.

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

Since 2022 they've been calling it "grid inertia", probably because it 
make it easier to explain to politicians.
> It must also surely be the responsibility of *all* the generating 
> systems not to continue to push full power into an already over voltage 
> and over frequency grid.

It looks as if some of the generating systems discharged their 
responsibilities by simply turning themselves off.

<snip>

>> But the vice-president and minister for Ecological Transition, Sara 
>> Aagesen, pointed on Tuesday to ‘poor planning’ on the eve of the 
>> blackout by REE in the reserve power (gas and nuclear) in the 
>> so-called technical restrictions market, which the company denies: the 
>> planned power was at annual minimums, and also a plant was declared 
>> unavailable and was not replaced.
> 
> That is the influence of bean counters. Spinning reserves cost money.

And providing "grid inertia" with a grid scale battery does seem to be a 
cheap alternative to rotating lumps of metal in turbines and generators.

>> The government has also pointed out (this analysis is shared by REE) 
>> that this reserve market did not work as it should: the three nuclear 
>> reactors and the six combined cycle gas plants that were supposed to 
>> operate under technical restrictions (a mechanism with which 
>> electricity companies pocket billions every year) ‘were not regulating 
>> voltage’ as they should when these surges began. One gas plant in 
>> southern Spain stands out as doing the opposite of what it should have 
>> done: it injected reactive power instead of absorbing it.
> 
> If that is true then they should be prosecuted for it. They helped to 
> bring down the grid. It doesn't bode well when the investigators have 
> their hands tied by government and the energy companies to anonymise who 
> was guilty of what! Better to pretend it was multifactorial and 
> completely unforeseeable than try to find and fix the actual root cause.
> 
>> According to REE's Director of Operations, if these plants had done 
>> their job by controlling the voltage, ‘we would not have had a 
>> blackout’. ‘The incident would have been avoided,’ said the 
>> non-executive president of REE, Beatriz Corredor. The former socialist 
>> minister insists on denying any responsibility for the company and 
>> rules out resigning.
> 
> Why am I not surprised?
>>
>> The third cause of the blackout, according to the government's report, 
>> is an ‘undue’ disconnection of installations: a ‘cascading tripping of 
>> renewable generation plants’, says REE, which does not identify which 
>> ones because the companies in the sector have asked to anonymise all 
>> the information that affects them. REE has agreed to publish the 
>> information that affects it.
> 
> It wasn't undue if they were left holding the baby and the grid was in 
> catastrophic collapse. Serious damage can result to their output stages.
> 
>> It is likely that this information will emerge with the report being 
>> prepared by the sector regulator, the National Markets and Competition 
>> Commission (CNMC).
> 
> The sector regulator seems to have totally failed to regulate.
> 
>> In the background of the blackout is also the lack of mechanisms to 
>> allow renewables to regulate voltage. This possibility is included in 
>> an operating procedure that is already 25 years old. Its update, as 
>> the REE report reminds us, ‘has been pending approval since 2021’ by 
>> the CNMC.
> 
> Perhaps now they might pull their finger out and do it.
> Don't hold your breath.

The Australian example might get drawn to their attention, but I doubt it.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney