Rendered at 09:28:49 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
bruce511 4 hours ago [-]
The takeaway, as mentioned in the article, is that the system worked, there was no blackout.
A collection of things happened at the same time, including the weather, a lot of generating capacity offline for various reasons, lines to Ireland unavailable and so on. And yet despite all that, local blackouts (not a national system collapse) was averted.
But yes, anti-EV proponents will likely to to make hay from this.
Yes the incident occurred in the evening as demand increased, partly because demand increases in the evening snow partly because solar production (some part of which is invisible to the grid) goes offline in the evening.
Certainly there are lessons to be learned here. Better planning, more contingencies and so on. Removing solar isn't helpful (that would just move the problem to earlier in the day.)
Incidentally east-west transmission is a key factor in solving this problem. The extra power came from France where possibly evening demand had started to drop etc. Connections to the West would bring in solar still generating excess. Those countries with good east-west coverage will be least impacted but the evening demand issue.
ggm 4 hours ago [-]
I suspect this will be "weaponised" by anti renewable politics to imply RE is the problem. That's the experience here in Australia; Murdoch press in particular headlines any grid instability as "renewable fault" automatically.
A collection of things happened at the same time, including the weather, a lot of generating capacity offline for various reasons, lines to Ireland unavailable and so on. And yet despite all that, local blackouts (not a national system collapse) was averted.
But yes, anti-EV proponents will likely to to make hay from this.
Yes the incident occurred in the evening as demand increased, partly because demand increases in the evening snow partly because solar production (some part of which is invisible to the grid) goes offline in the evening.
Certainly there are lessons to be learned here. Better planning, more contingencies and so on. Removing solar isn't helpful (that would just move the problem to earlier in the day.)
Incidentally east-west transmission is a key factor in solving this problem. The extra power came from France where possibly evening demand had started to drop etc. Connections to the West would bring in solar still generating excess. Those countries with good east-west coverage will be least impacted but the evening demand issue.