What America Can Learn from the Iberian Blackout
America can learn from the Iberian Blackout the reality that green energy and one hundred percent renewable power are still subject to the laws of physics.
Not even a week after media reports hailed the fact that “Spain hit the first weekday of one hundred percent renewable power on the national grid” the Spanish government declared a national emergency following a complete collapse of that same grid. The unprecedented outage left tens of millions of its citizens, and those in neighboring Portugal, without power. And the blackout quickly cascaded into a shutdown of mass transit transportation, internet, cellular communications, and water/wastewater services.
Those two events occurring together are not a coincidence – and should serve as a cautionary tale for citizens and leaders in Europe and the Americas who have convinced themselves that “renewables equal resilience” when it comes to the electric grid.
They have convinced themselves that they must attach massive amounts of wind and solar systems to their existing bulk power grids in an effort to stave off “climate change” and to “go green.” Setting aside the arguments about climate change, a main concern should be whether the widespread adoption of grid-scale wind and solar systems makes the grid more resilient.
Unfortunately – it doesn’t – and Spain just proved it.
The Cause of Spain’s Blackout:
People have wondered whether Spain’s blackout could have been induced by or assisted by a malicious cyberattack. Such risks are very real and exacerbated when grids are heavily dependent on wind and solar power generation, which must rely on equipment sourced from a nation hostile to the West: Communist China. But most experts are laying the blame for Spain’s outage on a natural byproduct of an electric grid overly penetrated by wind and solar power generation systems – sub-synchronous oscillations (SSO).
The electric grids in America and Europe run on alternating current (A/C) electricity, which operates on synchronous frequency (fifty Hz in Europe and sixty Hz in America). Before the widespread introduction of wind and solar systems, the grid was powered by large power plants (such as coal, natural gas, or nuclear) which use big, heavy turbines that spin at a steady rate (again, at either fifty or sixty Hz.) These turbines build up inertia – momentum that resists sudden changes – and they all act a lot like shock absorbers, keeping the grid stable.
In contrast, wind turbines and solar panels connect to the grid through electronic devices called inverters, which don’t spin, don’t provide the same inertia and also inject energy into the grid in an intermittent fashion (such as when the wind is blowing and when the sun is shining). An overall increase in this intermittency and an overall decrease in inertia can cause the grid’s synchronous frequency to drop, causing sub-synchronous oscillation (SSO).
Compare the grid to a child swinging on a swing set in the schoolyard. When the child starts swinging at a steady rate and starts experiencing inertia, he or she moves rather effortlessly through the air in a synchronous fashion. Now imagine someone grabs and pulls and pushes one of the chains on that swing, distorting the child’s momentum. At that point, in order to prevent injury, the child is going to immediately stop swinging and get off the swing.
Similarly, when SSO happens on the grid, its operators, electronic management and protective safety systems will shut the grid down to try to prevent damage. SSO causes vibrations which can ruin equipment, such as turbines, if they shake too much. SSO also causes harmonics, which result in heat that can also destroy grid equipment. The more SSO happens to an electric grid, the faster its components wear out.
The Limits of Green Energy:
To reduce the chance of SSO, many grid operators try to preserve at least half or more of their generation sources from “baseload power” generators such as coal, gas, or nuclear to maintain that synchronous inertia. While some argue that expanding battery energy storage systems (BESS) – Spain maintains only sixty megawatts of battery storage compared to Texas’s 11,000 megawatts – could have helped stave off Spain’s grid collapse, other utility engineers who have reviewed data from Spain’s national electric utility aren’t so sure that it would have made a difference. Ultimately, any amount of grid-scale wind and solar generation complicates grid operations significantly.
Wind and solar have limited dispatchability, which means, unlike fossil fuel or nuclear plants, they cannot ramp up or down to match real-time grid needs, complicating load-balancing during peak demand or sudden disruptions. This means that grid operators must rely on advanced grid management systems and forecasting tools. In general, more complexity usually means less resilience.
Wind and solar power generation systems can play a role in enhancing resilience if they are domestically produced and employed properly – at the local level and focused on the types of electrical loads they can handle. Such micro-grid systems can operate either independently or as an augment to the larger electric grid, and can greatly improve resilience for individual households, facilities or even communities if the larger grid fails. For this reason, resilience-minded emergency managers have applied these systems to their facilities to make them “off-grid capable.”
Ultimately, American leaders who are interested in enhancing energy resilience are best served by focusing their efforts on relegating wind, solar, and battery systems to smaller localized microgrids while changing course on how they treat the bulk power system, as the Trump Administration has already begun through a series of executive orders. Re-embracing base-load power generators, declaring nuclear a renewable energy source by recycling spent nuclear fuel, and securing our electric grid from known hazards, will help keep the lights on in America.