Have The Intermittent Energy Blackouts Begun?

Today there have been widespread electricity blackouts across Europe, beginning in Spain and Portugal in the early afternoon (local time), and then spreading to other countries including France, Andorra, Belgium and the Netherlands. Is this related to the increasing penetration of intermittent generation from wind and solar facilities?

For years, many in the climate skeptic community have warned that expansion of intermittent renewable electricity generation on the grid will, sooner or later, lead to frequent blackouts. The reason for the warning is easy to understand: The grid has some rather exacting operational requirements that the intermittent renewable generation technologies cannot fulfill. Primary among these requirements are, first, minute-by-minute matching of electricity supply with electricity demand and, second, grid-wide synchronization of the frequency of the alternating current. When wind and solar generate provided relatively small portions of the electricity consumed, other generation sources, particularly thermal (fossil fuel) and hydro, would fulfill these requirements. But as wind and solar come to dominate generation, the problems become much more difficult to solve.

Here at Manhattan Contrarian, I have mostly steered clear of covering this topic. Although I think I understand the main issues, I am certainly not a grid engineer. And there are many smart people who are engineers and who have the job of “balancing” the grid to keep it consistently up and running in the face of the challenges of intermittent wind and solar generation. Maybe they can succeed. I doubt it. But I definitely have wanted to avoid “crying wolf,” predicting over and over that frequent blackouts are imminent, only to find that the engineers have come up with solutions that seem to work reasonably well.

As of this writing, it does not appear that a definitive cause (or causes) of today’s blackouts has been established. However, there is every reason to think that the increasing penetration of wind and solar generation in Spain is the most important part of the problem. Here are links to some articles that have appeared so far today: this one from the Daily Mail at 8:41 AM EDT (which would be 2:41 PM in Spain); this one from Yahoo News at 10:21 AM EDT (4:21 PM in Spain); and this one from Climate Change Dispatch (no time indicated, but based on a paywalled piece from the Telegraph, with a time stamp of 3:21 BST).

According to the piece in the Daily Mail, Spain’s state electricity network operator, known as Red Electric, reported that today’s problem began with “‘a very strong oscillation’ in the electrical network [that] caused Spain’s power system to ‘disconnect from the European system.’” On the question of the initial cause of the “oscillation,” there is only speculation. Proposed causes range from “extreme temperature variations along very high-voltage power lines in Spain,” to a hacking attack.

But whatever the initial cause of the “oscillation,” what is clear is that the Spanish system then lacked the ability to respond sufficiently to keep the power on. Why? The Daily Mail puts forth a very plausible explanation of grid instability resulting from heavy reliance on wind and solar generation. The Mail attributes the theory to “some analysts” (unnamed):

[S]ome analysts have suggested that the Spanish grid operator's reliance on renewable energy sources to supply the majority of the nation's electricity could have led to the blackout. Traditional generators, like coal and hydroelectric plants or gas turbines, are connected directly to the grid via heavy spinning machines.  When turned on, these massive machines are in constant motion and the inertia created by their weight and momentum acts like a shock absorber, helping to insulate the grid against a sudden disturbance - for example, in the event of a transmission failure.  Solar and wind power do not provide the natural inertia generated by these so-called 'spinning machines', leaving the grid more vulnerable to disruptions and subsequent oscillations in the electrical frequency.

Just before the blackout hit, it seems that solar facilities were generating over 60% of Spain’s electricity:

At 12:30pm local time today - five minutes before the widespread blackouts occurred - solar power was generating some 60% of Spain's electricity. . . .

But how about wind generation? This is from the Yahoo News piece:

Spain has one of Europe’s highest proportions of renewable energy, providing about 56pc of the nation’s electricity. More than half of its renewables comes from wind with the rest from solar and other sources. That means Spain’s electricity supplies are increasingly reliant on the weather delivering enough wind to balance its grid. For much of the last 24 hours, that wind has been largely missing. The website Windy.com, for example, shows wind speeds of 2-3mph, leaving the country reliant on solar energy and old gas-fired power stations.

So when the “oscillation” occurred, what is going to keep the grid steady on its 50 Hz frequency? From Michael Schellenberger today on X:

[A]ll of Europe appears to have been seconds away a continent-wide blackout. The grid frequency across continental Europe plunged to 49.85 hertz — just a hair above the red-line collapse threshold. The normal operating frequency for Europe’s power grid is 50.00 Hz, kept with an extremely tight margin of ±0.1 Hz. Anything outside ±0.2 Hz triggers major emergency actions. If the frequency had fallen just another 0.3 Hz — below 49.5 Hz — Europe could have suffered a system-wide cascading blackout.

The bottom line is that there were multi-hour blackouts in many places today. A random “oscillation” of some sort, which could have been easily handled in a world of fossil fuel power plants, became a huge problem when wind and solar generators could not respond to it appropriately. And so people were stuck for hours in elevators or subway trains; traffic lights went dark; banking and cell phone networks stopped working; and so forth. But within a few hours all of those were back in business.

So was this really a big deal? As Schellenberger points out, with just “a hair” more frequency variation it could have been far worse. Will that happen some time soon? I’m not going to pretend I know. But I do know that the electricity system in most of Europe and many U.S. states is in the hands of crazed fanatics who have no idea what they are doing. My own bet would be that there are many far worse blackouts to come, until this idiotic “net zero” thing is abandoned.