[alecco]

> Damian Cortinas, chair of ENTSO-E’s board, told the Financial Times that “the issue is not about renewables” but about the grid’s ability to manage “fast voltage variations” that can destabilise the system. Unusual oscillations triggered a cascade of plant disconnections, and grid managers lost control. The real lesson is not that Spain has gone too far on wind and solar,

YES THEY DID, they went as far as making nuclear power plants shut down due to negative prices so their reliable stable power wasn't a pacemaker anymore and it blew up in their faces. And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.

Sure, there are new technologies to stabilize solar and wind's fluctuating outputs but they are no just plug and play. Those are very, very complex systems that take years to set up properly. While there are nuclear power plants are just there collecting dust because the EU pressured Spain to make them unprofitable to maintain so they would be shut down.

Luckily, the US-Israel-Iran war made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear. I hope it's not too late.

[aftbit]

I agree with you on a few points:

1. Stable power grids are much easier with a mix of generation sources that includes substantial rotating mass and baseload generators.

2. Nuclear is awesome from a climate change and energy security point of view, and it would be amazing if it were cheaper or more valued.

When power was primarily generated by thermal plants with big rotating masses, we got frequency control implicitly from the inertia of those generators. When there was a demand spike, the generators handled the millisecond to few seconds regime just by their inertia, while the seconds to minutes regime was handled by plant control systems increasing throttles or starting more peaker plants.

I disagree that renewables themselves are the problem. Cheap solar energy does not have to mean that we shut down all the uneconomical generation sources, nor does it mean that we cannot do FCAS with modern technology.

Battery electric storage systems have actually eaten much of the FCAS market in the USA, where they can respond way more effectively and efficiently than other systems in the 1 to 10 second regime. By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.

I would love to see more nuclear, and more advanced nuclear. Modern designs are safe, effective, and amazingly capable. They just aren't as cheap as paving the world with solar cells or burning natural gas left over as a fracking byproduct.

[jonatron]

Old power station turbines can be repurposed as inertia services via a stability market. Example in the UK: https://www.neso.energy/news/deeside-power-station-begins-wo...

[ZeroGravitas]

Batteries are sweeping stability markets wherever they are set up. They're simply cheaper and better at it.

[zejn]

No, these are two different things. One is stability market, where batteries are now king, the other is physics of fault ride-through, where actual physical inertia is a real neccessity, at least for the time being. That is why synchronous condensers are installed.

Every major renewable grid has installed additional intertia to avoid blackouts.

[ZeroGravitas]

No, batteries do that better too.

Variously called "synthetic inertia", "virtual inertia" or "grid-forming inverters".

Some people treat the spinning metal like vinyl records and think you can't get that "warmth" with the new tech but on objective measures, including cost, they win.

People install them because they were the old tech for this, and there's lead times and caution, it's just slowly changing legacy not something batteries can't physically do better.

[zejn]

Ah, that's nice to hear. This also means we won't have to have another type of hardware on grid, since the batteries can make this work.

[jonatron]

I'm not sure this is true in the UK at least, which may be because the grid operator is conservative / cautious https://www.energy-storage.news/uk-grid-forming-batteries-mi...

[laurencerowe]

> By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.

This really depends on the amount of battery storage installed. In California we now see battery discharging through to the morning.

https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/

[ndr42]

No that's not the case:

  However, several officials and energy experts have rejected the idea that renewables are to blame. EU energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, stated that there was "nothing unusual" about the electricity mix at the time of the blackout, and that the outage was not due to a "specific source energy". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

[jfernandezr]

Spain's blackout was exactly 1 year ago, no other blackouts since. And the mix of nuclear stayed almost the same.

That was not a stabilization problem per-se, but the companies that had to do the stabilization just didn't although the were being paid for that. Please read the final report.

[m101]

No blackout for a year: nothing to see here.

People didn’t do what they said they’d do: No problem with the system it’s the people that didn’t do what they said they would do.

[alecco]

The government refused to protect nuclear plants when prices went negative for a long time, so of course they were turned off because the companies were losing money. That was the obvious plan all along.

And no more blackouts because now they are running nuclear 24/7 to keep things stable.

And again, it's not completely Spain's government fault as it obviously came from the EU and their anti-nuclear stance.

[otherme123]

Nuclear was working as usual the day of the blackout and the previous days.

What does it even mean to "protect the nuclear"? Give them free money for the sake of it? They are already facilities being paid to keep the system in sync, or "protected" as you say, and they are paid very handsomely. But someone got greedy, it seems.

For one year we had to hear that the blackout was to blame on the renewables, and now that the final report is out and places zero blame on the shoulders of the renewables, we couldn't read anything in the newspapers (electric sector is a main supporter of local press through ads or indirect ownership), or we have to read incredible bad blame redirects like "this is on the government for not protecting nuclear".

[crote]

Wait, so not giving unprofitable power plants subsidies to keep operating at a loss is "anti-nuclear"?

And sure, it is a Really Good Idea to contract additional intertia to keep the grid stable. But why shouldn't that be done on the open market? Why pay a fortune for spinning a reactor's turbine at idle load when running a gas peaker plant's turbine at idle works just as well for a fraction of the price?

[alecco]

You can run nuclear (or gas or whatever) at a minimum to keep the network stable. Read my comments. Solar and wind are very unstable and unless you have the latest generation hardware (costing hundreds of millions) you need some stable source.

[fundatus]

> made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear

They don't _actually_ want nuclear, luckily it's just lip service. Because it doesn't solve the problem surfaced by the US-Israel-Iran war: You'd still be dependent on other countries for your (nuclear) fuel needs.

[madspindel]

> You'd still be dependent on other countries for your (nuclear) fuel needs.

Like Canada and in the future also Sweden? Two really hostile countries to be dependent on.

[crote]

Sure, if you ignore the fact that Kazakhstan supplies about half of the world's uranium. Canada accounts for only 10%, and Sweden currently produces zero due to its extremely poor ore quality.

The most promising additional uranium source is Australia. But if Europe wants security it should be sourcing it domestically - which just isn't going to happen.

[citrin_ru]

Dependency on nuclear fuel is less of a problem because you don't need to re-fuel a station often. Lack of gas creates a much more urgent problem.

[otherme123]

> And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.

"Experts" that now are being proved wrong. In Spain we have a good share of "experts" that are practically hired by the electric industry to parrot their interests in TV and other media for months or even years. Half politicians end their career either in Iberdrola or Endesa or Naturgy, the other half in some bank.

[nxh76]

Also worth tracking whether consumption is increasing. Rebound Effect can kick in - when energy prices fall most people use more energy, produce/consume more junk, use more heat/cooling etc. Its like dealing with very low interest rates. It can produce a whole lot of brainless behaviour.

[crote]

Some countries are already (accidentally) solving this problem.

The problem there is that they can't upgrade the grid fast enough at the neighborhood level. Combine that with residential electricity contracts where you pay the spot market price, and suddenly you've got a whole bunch of people who want to source or drain electricity at the same time, with a total capacity which far exceeds what their local grid is physically capable of.

The solution is to change a grid connection fee which depends on the peak load, where drawing/supplying a steady 1kW during the day is significantly cheaper than doing 12kW for 2 hours and 0kW for 22 hours. You're incentivized to spread out your load, so you are less likely to fall for needless consumption of "free" electricity.