Friday
Aug152014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Another blackout up north
Aug 15, 2014 Energy: grid A blackout has hit Scotland, plunging 27,000 homes into the dark.
The power loss lasted for several hours before engineers managed to restore supplies.
Energy giant SSE said a transmission fault had been the cause of the power cut.
This is pretty interesting, coming so soon after another blackout took out over 100,000 Scottish homes back in April. Does anyone know if this kind of incident is expected to happen so frequently?
Reader Comments (40)
For all those anti-fossil-fuel proponents, ask yourselves 'when was my Natural Gas supply last interrupted?'
They probably can't remember, simply because it occurs once in a blue moon, and rarely affects more than a few premises.
It would be interesting to hear if they ever figure out just where the problem began. Just how dependant are they upon wind power anymore?
Bish, I sent you this a couple of days ago. It is perhaps more interesting where it happened if you recall the last BO.
*after a bit of digging* I've found a couple of sites which show past power usage / breakdown of what generates how much, but haven't yet found one which shows the daily, Live usage for Scotland. Anyone here have a handy link? *keeps trying in the meantime* I am usually pretty good at finding things, but....
Another relay (ahem) blown?
Stephen
You sent it me yesterday in fact! Are you after a H/T?
OT but interesting the programme for the Blackpool anti frackers this w/e.
http://www.nodashforgas.org.uk/programme2014/
includes Fridays workshops "An Introduction to Anarchism and Anarchist Organising" and "Climate change could be the best thing that ever happened to us"
I'm looking forward to the Youtube video.
^ "Anarchist Organising" - LOL
Otter, have you had a look at Gridwatch and the extra sites that show up when you click on BM Reports under the header? The list of sites there might give you what you are looking for.
Has anyone else noticed the correlation between that windbag Alex Salmond pausing for breath, the result drop in power being generated by windmills and these blackouts?
Pointman
jamesp,
you mean like the other relay that simply did its job and got blamed by a useless jock politician?
I bet that went down well at Siemens...
Must have been Big Bertha! blamed for most of late and now the future?
UK weather: Wrap up, big chill on the way in Bertha's wake
But I like it!
"Does anyone know if this kind of incident is expected to happen so frequently?"
It is now. LOL
It's good training. Buy a generator or two; lay in a supply of fuel to run it; keep lots dry seasoned firewood. Initially you'll need it for only a few hours or a day or so. After you've gained experience, you can move on to being prepared for a few weeks. Oh, and plan to only use your supplies for a few hours per day in order to keep the price down and extend the period. Given the UK's plunge into ruining their power generation and grid, lead times to correct and the insanity of the greenies, you;re going to have years of these blackouts.
That is if, and a very big if, the voters decide they love not having electricity.
Scottish Sceptic did an analysis of the last power cut.
http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2014/07/21/analysis-of-scottish-power-outage/
Perhaps, we should paraphrase Lady Bracknell:
" To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness."
Relay fault 2nd time round; hardly think Siemens would want to admit that <G>.
I think 27,000 homes is more like a power cut than a blackout. But if Earth's magnetic field continues to weaken it is the sort of thing that could become a lot more common in decades / several decades time together with airplanes disappearing without trace.
The Laschamp Event and Earth's Wandering Magnetic Field
The wandering and weakening magnetic field story is one that until recently I knew nothing about.
Frae Bentos ;-)
This article in the Telegraph on Tuesday may spread more light on the subject.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/11029583/Wind-farms-paid-record-sum-not-to-produce-electricity.html
The photo image comes with this comment.
“Strong winds caused a spike in the amount of electricity produced by wind farms, leading to a “bottleneck” of energy leaving the network from Scotland.”
There have certainly been strong gusting winds on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and Scotland seems to have been enjoying the worst of it (or the best of it, dependant on your viewpoint). With a record contribution earlier this week from wind power of around 15% of demand, and probably much greater than this for Scotland, these are new experiences for engineers trying to balance the grid. Added to the fact that grid capacity between Scotland and England seemed to be at maximum and therefore unable to make a participating contribution to balancing the grid in Scotland, it seems to me that the outage could indeed have been due to the grid engineers being unable to control the fluctuating capacity from wind farms.
The article makes reference to the record £2.8m paid to wind farm owners in just one day to shut down in order to reduce supply. It says that the rate paid was twice the subsidy rate of actually producing, but how is this calculated? Is the payment based on an average subsidy, i.e. of typical load capacity of 20-25%? If so, wind farm owners may have thought this to be too little because they would have been earning the rate for the electricity plus a subsidy at or near the wind turbines plate capacity rather than an average capacity because wind speeds were so high. So it may have been that some greedy wind farm owners simply refused to shut down because they were making so much money on these very windy days. With the grid engineers unable to dump extra capacity on England, perhaps it was inevitable that the grid would have become unstable. So I think we have every cause to be suspicious.
If the new interconnector is built between Scotland and England and especially if Scotland votes for independence, I think we should do as the Norwegians and Swedes do in respect of Denmark’s overproduction, which is to sometimes charge for taking the overproduction. Perhaps Salmond won’t speak so highly of his beloved eagle slayers then. My apologise to any Scottish sceptics who may have been offended by this last comment.
Colin Porter, the Norwegian model is to buy surplus wind power from Denmark at rock bottom prices when nobody wants it and to sell hydro-power to Denmark at premium prices when they need it most.
I wrote an article on the potential size of the Scottish wind power surplus a couple of weeks ago called "Scotch on the ROCs" that I feel deserved wider exposure than it got. Absent storage, this massive surplus will either have to be exported to England or wasted via curtailment payments.
Following the discussion here about being paid to NOT produce from wind farms when there is an excess of capacity, I was wondering who does the actual 'switching off"? Colin Porter above suggests that wind farm owners may have not switched off when asked to and this implies that the control lies with them and not the grid managers - is that right? This is a completely barmy state of affairs if the grid manager does not have control over what comes in.
On the other side, it means that someone somewhere has to have their finger on the switch for every wind farm. How many 'operators' are there and how big an area can they control? Does one switch control a whole 'farm' or each turbine? The potential for a serious clusterfuck messing up supply is pretty plain to see even for an non-engineer like me. And by the sound of things, this potential is actually being realized.
Wind power has always been a pile of donkey droppings in terms of cost of power produced, but I didn't realize it was actually worse than nothing in terms of its effect on the rest of the grid.
Another gusty day, another grid outage. If these are due to too many wind farms connected to the grid, it won't take long for the correlation to become very obvious.
Joe Public says: "For all those anti-fossil-fuel proponents, ask yourselves 'when was my Natural Gas supply last interrupted?' They probably can't remember ...."
There is a very good reason for this Joe.
The absolutely last thing we all want is to de-pressurise the local gas distribution network (to homes for example). Some of the mechanical devices operate on the basis that mains gas is at the higher pressure. We cannot simply assume every single house can be de-pressurised and then re-pressurised without issue. Gas re-pressurisation to thousands of homes would therefore involve a huge coordinated effort to provide assurance that there are no public safety risks.
There can be gas interruptions at the large consumer end of the spectrum (they just get a notice, and stop consuming gas). There will be financial reward for providing this kind of service.
Interrupting gas supply to thousands of homes is definitely last on the list, and this is probably the main reason why you cannot personally remember gas interruption.
Ivan, thank you very much!
Euan Mearns
Have you done any investigative work on converting existing Hydro into pumped storage?
As I recall from my youth the Glen Lednock dam feeds water to a power generation facility at St Fillans on Loch Earn the water ending up in Loch Earn. That seems an ideal candidate for conversion into pumped storage. I haven't done any real investigating but I can think of a few more which are similar to the Lednock-Earn configuration. If you take a figure of 500-600MW (about half?) as being suitable for conversion and there is a 30% gain in generation by upgrading at the same time then you've got about 700MW additional pumped storage at what could be described as a knock-down price.
How environmentalists would react to all that water being pumped up and down mountains I'm not sure, but one benefit might be that rivers like the Lednock would be more frequently in a pre-hydro state. Sput Rolla and and the Deil's Cauldronwould be more like their former selves.
SandyS
I did a post on the proposed Coire Glass pumped hydro scheme called "Coire Glas pumped storage scheme - a massive but puny beast". This placed in context the size of pumped storage required to span a 7 day lull in the wind at the UK scale. At the Scottish scale Coire Glas in fact makes more sense.
An issue at Coire Glas discussed at length by SSE is regulating the water level in Loch Long (the lower reservoir). Any scheme using Scottish lochs as the lower reservoir will suffer similar problems. When you are pumping the river outflow dries up and when you are producing it will be in flood. Another issue is that the upper reservoir gets filled and emptied on a regular basis - I've seen this in the Alps, empty reservoirs are pretty ugly. So I doubt converting existing hydro to pumped storage is a starter.
On my to do list is to look at how hydro is currently deployed. I'm not sure whether the UK is even using hydro to balance wind, i.e. to switch it off when it is windy and on when it is not.
" Does anyone know if this kind of incident is expected to happen so frequently?"
Well I'd make a guess that this will not have been the last such incident.
The previous blackout showed that the system has inadequate alternative transmission resources or is mismanaged (or both). Which makes it seem likely that there will be further such events. And we now have a very rough indication of the expected time between such outages.
Euan Mearns
Thank you for the reference to your article, which, I agree, does need much more exposure.
http://euanmearns.com/scotch-on-the-rocs/
There are issues in it which urgently need to be discussed on both sides of the border and before the independence vote takes place. From a Scottish perspective, a worst case scenario would be an increase in subsidy of some 25 times if the population had to adopt all the ROCs with a 100% renewables target, as you point out. From an English perspective, our government seems quite stupid enough to continue to share the grid and the subsidy costs, but allowing Salmond to have his cake and eat it, and to continue to expand renewables penetration to 100%.
Perhaps the good Bishop could raise this issue at the next synod.
If blackouts increase in frequency one of two things could happen regarding industry. Companies will either leave Scotland in search of a country with a stable grid or the Scottish government will have to start compensating for the impact of blackouts on production. Post independence, neither option will be good for Scotland. Still, that hypocrite Salmond could fund the compensation by leaning further on the evil oil and gas industry to bail him out.
Colin Porter, in "Scotch on the ROCs" I'm pretty sure my calculation on the theoretical size of the Scottish wind surplus in 2020 is correct but less sure about any obligation that England may have to purchase this and pay the ROCs. At any time its windy in Scotland it is likely to be windy in England too. And so even if England were obliged to buy the Scottish surplus there may be nowhere for it to go. I am going to start going out to film wind farms during windy weather - I'm pretty sure many will be standing idle, being paid for curtailment.
At present we know these payments are shared throughout the UK. If there is a YES vote then who knows, common sense would tend to suggest that subsidies of all sorts will fall to only Scottish consumers. Why would a newly antagonised FUK (Former UK) want to pay subsidies to Scotland for useless electricity? It is a subject that requires more debate with some expert input.
It is a situation not dissimilar to the banks. Greatly bloated Scottish banks only managed to survive the crash through the support offered by the whole UK economy.
As for the power cut on Skye. If these only occur when it is windy then there would appear to be a smoking gun. Wind capacity has been massively increased in Scotland in the last 3 years and the grid has yet to be expanded to cope. Unfortunately vast amounts of investment has already been made / approved in the grid kind of locking us into this future.
We had more than a little weather last week, some great pics here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-28739164
more (fallible) components in the grid to allow for irreliable wind power, so more overall failures
this can actually easily be calculated with mean time between failure data on components and complexity risk calculations. the art is called "systems engineering", and it should be an important chapter in the business case that led policy makers to sign off on all that "free" wind power
Euan Mearns
I agree that if it is windy in Scotland, it is likely to be windy in England (and Wales), especially in the upland areas and consequently, wind farms on each side of the border will have to close. Indeed it was my observation that Scout Farm, the biggest onshore farm in England and another one that I saw off the M62 corridor in Yorkshire were not operating on Tuesday, even though wind conditions seemed excellent for generation. Being suspicious, I was directed to the Telegraph article which emphasised the curtailment payments paid to Scottish wind farms because limitations in the grid meant that too much electricity was being generated in Scotland which could not be exported.
However, I don't neccessarilly share your pessimism that Scotland will have to support all the subsidy, because there could be an advantage to England and Wales sharing the grid and thus the quota. If Scotland goes independant and takes with it its renewable generating capacity, then England and Wales (or FUK as you like to call it) will suddenly have a shortfall in its obligation to generate renewable energy, which can only be made up by building many more offshore wind farms as there will be a virtual moratorium on land based turbines. As offshore farms are twice as expensive to build and run, it may be seen as pragmatic to share Scotland's assets and to let Slamond take the glory.
It would however make far more sense for FUK to say F*K to Salmond's wet dreams and an another F*K to Europe's green energy directives. If the government really believed in the nonsense about global warming, it would lobby to have the legislation amended to include nuclear in the renewables list. The fact that it does not tells us a lot about ministerial corruption by the wind lobby.
According to the Kaya Identity you reap what you sow. Build a marginal grid and it will give marginal performance. One can also conclude that since it is what the Scots have it surely must be what they want. Any other conclusion suggests the government of Scotland and their English overlords are not responsive to public wishes. Kind of like the US.
When there is a blackout in one area, power to (part of) this area can sometimes be restored by temporarily feeding power to the area via an alternative route. This will temporarily transmit more power over lines/cables than is normally the case for these lines. This will sometimes stretch the lines capacity, which is usually fine.
But, when there are weak spots in these lines, they will result in failure.
However, the thing with powerline failure is that it usually comes weeks or months after the fact.
When a powerline fails months after a blackout, causing another blackout, it may seem unrelated while in actual fact the two incidents are related.
My father worked for a powercompany for years and was involded in resolving powerfailures. The above is from my fathers experience.
Colin Porter, I think nuclear is included in the new market reform - CFDs. But if countries were really serious about the need to eliminate FF they would simply close down indigenous FF production. This is one thing they can do that would make a real difference. This is why Canada has left Kyoto and Australia is shaping up to follow suit.
Euan Mearns
Interesting what you say about pumped storage and reduced river flows. The original hydro schemes did that to the rivers they intercepted. As far as I know on the example I'm familiar with the river flow rarely gets up to its pre-dam higher flow rates. I also think that water from outside the actual catchment area of the dam is intercepted/diverted, The outflow from the dam goes into Loch Earn rather than the River Earn downstream of the loch. I guess this is not unusual and nature seems to have coped with these changes, that's not to say that we shouldn't think carefully about this sort of scheme. It struck me that at some point in the medium term future these hydro stations will require a major overhaul, if they haven't already, as we're throwing large amounts of money at paying people not to produce electricity why not throw a bit at more pumped storage which might actually reduce the stresses on the grid.
As you say empty reservoirs are ugly, but on the other hand not many are visible from areas normally frequented by tourists or where most people live so in that respect would have less of a visual impact generally than the wind turbines.
Finally what pumped storage does is dig you out of a hole which can be measured in hours rather than days.
Haven't got a copy of the full paper yet, but the supplementary material (http://m.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2014/08/13/science.1254702.DC1/Marzeion.SM.pdf) is full of crap, pseudo-equations with arbitrary calibration factors and time scale inconsistencies. Will elaborate later if anyone cares.
Good God! They use Mitchell & Jones 2005 for a data source! That's the CRU TS2.1 database - the one 'Harry' wrote about in his famous readme!
Wow!
Is it possible, do you think, that they haven't heard...?
Where ignorance is bliss, it is folly o expect common sense. The proponents of 100% renewables don't realise it is impossible. When a wind turbine "wakes up" it uses the grid power to the yaw motor to turn the (500 ton) nacelle into position. It then checks the output for voltage, amperage and above all phase angle. Get the last one wrong and you wind up with a giant electric fan of little use.
The same with solar, after a power cut in Australia it takes over 60 minutes for the panels to start delivering again, thus 100% renewables belong in unicorn country.
If Salmond gets his wish he will soon need very fancy footwork to get out of the Electricity Fantasy.
O/T but do readers know whether turbines work clockwise only? I ask because In Bavaria recently I saw 12 turbines in 3 groups all rotating except 2 were going very slowly and 1 was rotating anti-clockwise. I cannot recall any doing so before?
What does Truthout say about the blackout?