Motordoc Reveals the True Story of Spain’s Power Crisis

Howard Penrose, President of Motordoc LLC, returns to discuss the
complexities of modern electrical grids. The conversation covers
the inaccuracies surrounding the Iberian Peninsula blackout, the
intricate functions of voltage and frequency control, and systemic
issues in grid management. Penrose explains how renewable energy
sources like wind and solar, alongside energy storage, play crucial
roles in stabilizing the grid. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News,
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show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on
Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering
tomorrow. Howard, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? It's
been a bit, a lot has happened since we last spoke. I, I wanna
speak about the Iberian Peninsula problem and the blackout that
happened in April. Because there's been a number of inaccuracies
about that situation, and you're actively involved in the groups
that look into these situations and try to understand what the root
cause was. That the, the, the Iberian situation is a little
complicated. The CNN knowledge, the Fox News knowledge is that
solar was the cause of a problem. Yeah, that is far from the truth.
You wanna explain kind of [00:01:00] what this, how it
progressed over time? It started around noontime Spain and they had
a couple of wobbles there. You want to kick it off?  Howard
Penrose: Yeah. First, first my comment is, I like how
journalists become experts in, in literally everything, um, from 30
seconds to 30 seconds, right. Basically. The problem had been going
on for a little while and, and the grided there had been operating
much like it had been for a little while. And, uh, you know, for
years actually, uh, even with the application of alternative
energy, we'll, we'll call it alternative energy for this, um, you
know, so that we don't bring in that political end of calling it
one thing or the other. Alternative energy is what we called it in
the 1990s. So, um, in any case. Uh, they had a number of issues
with voltage control, meaning large loads would suddenly drop off
and then the voltage would float up [00:02:00] and then,
uh, and then they would have to do something to bring it under
control. They're at 50 hertz, so their voltage is 400 kv. That's
their primary grid voltage. They have an alarm trip voltage,
meaning an emergency trip voltage, where they strip the line at 435
kv. So, um, what happened now, the final event happened in 27
seconds, but leading up to that, they had an event where they had
voltage float up. And they were bringing that under control. And
then down in the southern part of Spain, and we don't have anything
set up like this here in the states, luckily they had all, uh, a
whole group of, um, solar uh, plants as well as a gas turbine plant
feeding a single distribution transformer. And the, uh, auto taps
on that failed on the low voltage side on step up. So it basically
dropped out. So, uh, something like, I, I'm trying to remember off
the top of my, my head, [00:03:00] but it was either 300
or 800 megawatts just offline now. It was a lightly loaded day in
Spain 'cause it was a beautiful day outside. Uh, so that makes
matters worse. It makes it unstable and really easy for voltage to
flow up where people start to think that that, uh, alternative
energy was a fault was because we were at 40%. Of the power supply
was solar as the morning progressed, so it had climbed up to about
that there was a good percentage of wind. Um, but they had a
nuclear power power plant online and several others providing
synchronous protection for any type of inertia. They lost one of
those plants. The voltage floated up, uh, to um, about 415 to 420
kv. Yeah. Then there was a whole bunch of control issues. So the
operators started switching lines. There was a connection to
France. They, they started seeing some oscillations because they
were [00:04:00] oscillating against, uh, Europe. And, um,
so they switched lines and that caused the voltage to float up
again. And they had no, no, none of the equipment. Whether it was
solar, wind, or even the synchronous power was set to do, uh, var
control, meaning set to do voltage control to bring the voltage
back down. It was all set up for frequency control, meaning that
they wanted to control against it, not the, not the alternative
energy. Those were set so that they did a straight, what's called
power factor, so they were set to just put out. Exactly what they
were supposed to put out. They were not there, they were not set to
correct anything, even though they could have been. And, um, so,
uh, at, at about 420, uh, thousand volts, other plants started
tripping offline. And as it went up further, even the nuclear plant
tripped offline. And then France
dropped [00:05:00] offline at about the same time, all
across the 27 second period.  Allen Hall: Right. Okay. So
this is a unique problem and I think the Iberian Peninsula really
raises this issue on a number of levels for the general consumer
out in the world. The grid is actually pretty complicated, but
there's really two things you really want to control there.
Voltage, you have to control frequency, you have to control. If you
control those two. Pretty much everything else will work the way
it's intended. If either one of those gets outta whack, there's
safety protocols that go into place to protect the equipment, but
there's also other piece of equipment that are trying to bring it
into regulation. When the regulation doesn't work the way it's
supposed to, yes, you can get the voltage outta whack. You can get
the frequency to go outta spec, and then clunk, clunk, clunk.
Everything starts to disconnect. Like what happened in Spain. My
first question about that is it's a complicated system and there's
a lot of pieces [00:06:00] connected to it. Who is
checking in the US or in Europe or anywhere else who's checking
that? Those control settings are in the right place. They were
actually set per the requirements. Spain was talking about in some
of their publications that there, the settings weren't set right.
They were, we were, they were not properly set per code. Who's
checking that?  Howard Penrose: So, so grid code here is
set by FIR and nerc. And it sounds like a curse word, a set of
curse words, but FERC is the federal side. NERC is actually
private. Um, so they set, they set the rules for safety, for power,
gener, you, you name it. So, um, and they set the code. Now as an
operator, you're supposed to be, you know, the power generation
side. They still even here, have to do things to meet code. Okay.
Is there anybody checking it? No. Uh, the, it's a site
responsibility. Each area, um, goes out and
they [00:07:00] forecast expectations. Um, and then, and
then of course, within that expectation, you have a lot of
companies and cities municipal that will all bid on how much energy
they're gonna consume, right? Uh, you know, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera. So, so everybody agrees to it. And then, and then, um,
the operators have to determine the reliability. And the
availability of energy based upon certain conditions within that
grit. Like what, what plants are gonna be, uh, in maintenance and
everything else. And, and that's important because the actual
generation companies can't talk to each other. They're not allowed.
Okay. Otherwise, it could be considered collusion. So our own laws
fight against us.  Allen Hall: The Iberian situation
leads into some discussions. What happens in America, because we're
in America and there have been a number of brownouts blackouts, uh,
ERCOT has have a couple of situations where they've had sort of
regional [00:08:00] disconnects of, or larger scale, like
a cascading. Effect, uh, due to, um, control systems that are not
happy with one another. So one system knocks out another and then
it, everybody goes into safe mode and there's just this sort of
cascading, disconnected that happens. Those events are a little
scary to me, just with a, it feels like we're not talking to one
another, and what you're saying is we're intentionally not talking
to one another because we can't. It talk one power producer to
another power producer.  Howard Penrose: That's what the
operator's for. So the, the grid operator is there to take all that
information in. Most of it's run via software. What's been
interesting is, say Ercot, because of the event that happened in
2021. What, uh, happened was everybody went back and looked at it
and said, how can we fix it? It turns out that alternative energy
was the way to stiffen the power system. So, um, they've now made
adjustments to how the, [00:09:00] to, to take more
advantage of the capabilities of wind and solar that they didn't
have before, as well as all the new storage systems, uh, including,
you know, course battery, which is the, the big buzzword now.
Right? Bess? Um. So battery storage in order to stiffen up the
system. A year ago, there was a 16% possibility of a blackout
throughout Oliver Ercot. This year it was 1%, even though we have a
higher demand this year, and it had nothing to do with traditional
systems that had to do with wind, solar, and energy storage, big
discussion data centers, right? As a matter of fact. We already
decided at this meeting, we're not gonna talk about wind and wind
storage, wind, uh, solar and energy storage. Next year, PPES, now
it's gonna be power Engineering Society, by the way, the ones who
actually do that stuff, right? Uh,