{"id":8524,"date":"2019-08-16T11:41:09","date_gmt":"2019-08-16T10:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=8524"},"modified":"2019-08-16T12:00:11","modified_gmt":"2019-08-16T11:00:11","slug":"one-thing-learnt-week-power-outage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=8524","title":{"rendered":"One thing we have learnt this week – power outage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC_4304\"<\/a>A week ago today there was a major power outage.\u00a0 Large scale power cuts are very rare.\u00a0 There have only been three on the UK grid since 1990.\u00a0 The 2003 power outage was confined to parts of London.\u00a0 The cause was a transformer that had not been maintained properly.\u00a0 The 2008 outage as I remember it was confined largely to SE England.\u00a0 Sizewell B nuclear power station went down at almost the same time as Longannet coal fired power station in Fife, Scotland.\u00a0 (This latter plant has since closed.)<\/p>\n

In the most recent one a gas fired power station and an off shore wind farm went off line.\u00a0 There was widespread disruption in England especially to the transport networks.\u00a0 Of course once anyone hears that a wind farm is involved, you get the anti renewables mob coming out.\u00a0 The Hornsea wind farm didn’t fail for lack of wind, there was some other reason.\u00a0 I note however it still seems to be under construction.<\/p>\n

This is a complicated area but I’ll attempt to explain it as far as I can.\u00a0 The grids frequency is regarded as its heartbeat and has traditionally been set at the speed of rotation of generators.\u00a0 In the UK this is 50HZ\u00b11%.\u00a0 When there is loads of power then the frequency rises as does the voltage (in crude terms this is the pressure).\u00a0 If there is too little in the way of capacity then the opposite happens.\u00a0 Too much capacity is slightly easier to deal with.\u00a0 You simply switch stuff off.\u00a0 (With the rider that if you shed too much you’ll cause the other problems.*)\u00a0 With a lot of renewables on the grid taking stuff off line is an economic issue.\u00a0 Also as far as I can gather high voltages less damaging.\u00a0 This I assume is because the there is less current (P=IV).\u00a0 The opposite seems to be true for low voltages.\u00a0 Low frequency also apparently affects any motors since they run in synchronicity with the frequency.<\/p>\n

So what can learn from the last two power outages?\u00a0 One big challenge for the grid is that now there are millions of generation systems that are either not setting their frequency physically or are not in the same way as a gas or steam turbine.\u00a0 These systems such as my PV installation mimic exactly what is on the grid, within set limits.\u00a0 Outside these limits then then my inverter (DC to AC conversion device) shuts down.\u00a0 In 2004 when my system was installed this happened quite a lot.\u00a0 I complained and the installer made a special trip up to sort the problem out.\u00a0 My system was set up under embedded generation connection standard G59\/2.\u00a0 (Embedded generation is small scale stuff that feeds in the low voltage distribution network. Not huge power stations that feed into the transmission network.)\u00a0 This meant that at times of high demand\/low capacity when there was a low voltage my inverter shut down.\u00a0 The solution was simple, to set it to the new standard G83\/1 using a powerline modem.\u00a0 This newer standard has wider \u00b1 voltage limits.<\/p>\n

In the 2008 power outage a lot of small generation systems tripped out because they had not yet been reprogrammed from an even older standard G59.\u00a0 This of course made the problem worse.\u00a0 They did this not because the voltage\/frequency was low but because of the rate<\/em> of drop of the frequency.<\/p>\n

What exactly happened in the recent power outage is unclear, but lots of embedded generation did shut down which of course is a positive feed back loop.\u00a0 This must again have been due to the rate of frequency drop, rather than the frequency itself which seems to be set at 47Hz.)\u00a0 National grid carried out load shedding.\u00a0 That is they cut power off to large users.\u00a0 This included hospitals (where at least one emergency generation system failed to start) and traffic lights and railway signalling systems.\u00a0 That’s why you had the slightly bizarre situation where traffic lights were working and other things around them weren’t.<\/p>\n

So what is to be done?\u00a0 The first thing to say is that managing the grid is more of a challenge with lots of renewables.\u00a0 Apart from variability in output thermal plant has some inertia i.e. when it goes down the turbines spin to a halt slowly.\u00a0 But clearly since the amount of renewable capacity has gone up about 3 fold since 2008 its far from impossible.\u00a0 As I write this almost 40% of the UK’s electricity demand is coming from wind and everything is fine.<\/p>\n

There are two solutions that immediately come to mind.\u00a0 The first dynamic demand management.\u00a0 Not everything needs to be on all the time.\u00a0 One example has been in the news this week.\u00a0 A supermarket chain will switch its fridges and freezers off at time of high demand.<\/p>\n

The second obvious solution is to add more storage capacity.\u00a0 Batteries yes, but other technologies such as air or flywheels.\u00a0 In my opinion we need to revisit the Dartmoor pumped storage scheme as well and others.<\/p>\n

The last thing to do is to work why so much embedded generation shut down and perhaps set the rate of frequency change settings differently.\u00a0 There is so much embedded generation on the grid now that it shutting down in tandem makes things far worse.<\/p>\n

Neil<\/p>\n

* This is a problem with lots of embedded generation of one type.\u00a0 The Germans have worried about this.\u00a0 They have so much PV output in summer, that in principle if the voltage and frequency went above limits then the whole lot could shut down leading to a power outage.\u00a0 Remember there is no central control over millions of domestic systems.\u00a0 They came up with a neat idea from the control point of view, though less good for individual PV owners.\u00a0 They decided to set voltage limits differently in different parts of the country.\u00a0 So in sunny parts with higher insolation the limits would be narrower and visa versa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A week ago today there was a major power outage.\u00a0 Large scale power cuts are very rare.\u00a0 There have only been three on the UK grid since 1990.\u00a0 The 2003 power outage was confined to parts of London.\u00a0 The cause … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-one-thing-we-have-learnt-this-week","category-renewables"],"yoast_head":"\nOne thing we have learnt this week - power outage - The oil lamp - shining God's light on peak oil<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=8524\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=8524\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=8524\",\"name\":\"One thing we have learnt this week - 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