No, they were making shit up and then retracting it. More details on how the grid failure nearly extended more widely -
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Could the headlines mentioning “over-reliance on renewables” be replaced by “insufficient battery storage capacity”?
I’m not an expert, but I think the simple answer is no. It takes more than sufficient battery storage capacity. The power system is a dynamical system that not only needs to maintain voltage and current, but also the frequency. Apparently the system in Spain and Portugal is not well designed and is susceptible to failure with small variations in the power demand and supply.
Here’s an article on the outage by the left leaning guardian newspaper
An excerpt
The Spanish grid is undergoing upgrades as it is unable to carry the renewable energy required. Experts have said that the grid upgrades have not matched the pace of renewables being brought online.
Pratheeksha Ramdas, a senior analyst at Rystad Energy, said: “We cannot say that high wind and solar power caused the blackout – in the days before we saw far greater amounts of renewables on the system. But greater amounts of renewables may have made it more difficult to absorb a frequency disturbance. There are many possibilities behind what can cause these: a fault in the system or a weak transmission line. It’s a lesson for other countries: there needs to be greater investment in grid-forming inverters, which can help to stabilise the grid.”
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Sounds like “over-reliance on renewables” could be replaced by “insufficient investment in grid-forming inverters”.
No, you can’t replace “overreliance on renewables” with “insufficient investment in grid forming inverters.”
Nice charts and discussion on spain, starts on page 7 after the doge recap
I correctly guessed insufficient battery storage:
I don’t see any mention in this report that Spain has too much renewables and needs to cut back or install more non-renewables.
Analysis of the role of solar power in the recent power outage in Spain and Portugal
More information is available about the blackout impacting Spain and Portugal. Two large solar installations tripped offline, followed by the loss of an interconnection to France. This created a generation shortfall that caused the system frequency to drop dangerously. Large amounts of asynchronous resources (wind and solar) disconnected from the system in response to the frequency drop, leading to the system’s collapse.
Frequency control is an essential reliability service supported by rotating machines with inertia. Such machines would have limited the frequency drop and helped the system recover from the excursion. More load shedding based on automatic underfrequency protection could have delayed the collapse and possibly saved the core grid. Inverter-based generation exacerbated the collapse and did little to prevent it. This collapse resembles one in South Australia caused by a lack of inertia.
It is true that Spain added too much renewable generation and failed to add sufficient “inertia” along with it. It’s not an “over reliance” on renewables, it’s an incomplete or insufficient implementation of renewables.
Battery storage is a solution for frequency control: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50176. Not a single mention of battery storage in the article you quoted clearly shows the bias of your source, which is to promote climate change denial and everything that comes with that, including bashing renewables.
That is semantics. Regardless of how you word it, it’s pretty clear that the Spain/Portugal system was not well designed to be robust to failures. It’s also clear that intermittent sources such as solar and wind present reliability problems that electrical power system designers have not solved. The article you quote presents technology that could possibly be used to solve some problems, but does not show that it’s been implemented and tested. The article I quoted does not discuss specific technologies, but discusses the problems that have to be solved.
You then devolve into left-wing code talk. What is climate change denial? Is it denial to say that gestures like replacing hydrocarbon fuel power with solar and wind power in the United States and Western Europe will not reduce total world carbon dioxide emissions when countries like China and India and others are building new coal power plants every day?
It’s using semantics to manipulate public opinion. The “semantics” of over reliance implies that the solution is to rely less on green energy. But that is not the solution – the solution is to make their green energy more reliable.
What are you talking about? The EIA link shows you how it is being implemented in the USA as of 5 years ago, and how much it was being incrementally used for grid stabilization, specifically mentioning frequency regulation.
Talk about semantics. It may not reduce the total emissions if energy demand and production goes up, but it will definitely be lower than it would have been without these gestures. Also mass adoption and mass production lowered the cost and made these technologies cheaper than carbon-based sources, so economics is taking over.
NOVA, a residential solar provider, went bankrupt today and they’re really really broke.
After going public in 2019, the company continued to leverage a residential solar boom driven by dropping panel costs and government incentives, expanding to become a nationwide provider. Trouble in its business, which relies on borrowed capital, began to escalate in late 2023 after rising interest rates made homeowners hesitant to install new solar systems.
Without cheap government loans and low interest rates, the product wasn’t attractive on its merits and their business faltered and then died.
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The paragraph above the one you quoted also seems relevant (emphasis mine):
They were offering leveraged money to subprime borrowers. And it sounds like they were counting on new customers to pay previous debts, like a pyramid scheme. This is not really a “green energy” story, it’s a “known-to-fail business model” story, they took advantage of financing incentives and planned to profit from leverage.
No, that’s not the story here (plus you need to own your home typically to agree to this, not the case so often for subprime). Their biz was operating at a huge net loss and negative cashflow for the last 3 years at least, losing $100M’s worth every year. It just sucked and green enthusiasm and incentives allowed it to exist a lot longer than it should have.
Bad debt was only 3-4% of operating expenses, and the latter could run $1B/year. Throw into this huge capex requirements to purchase the equipment, and you have a flurry of borrowing, installing, losing money, borrowing more, and eventually the pyramid scheme runs out of people willing to lend, then runs out of money, and then it all blows up.
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So subprime was only a tiny part of it, but this:
is the story, isn’t it?
This is the story. Green grift and money from the Biden handlers.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) released its portion of the GOP’s reconciliation bill text late on Wednesday, which includes major cuts to green energy tax credits and initiatives enacted under former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
The bill text calls for the repeal of unobligated IRA funds under the EPW’s purview. If the EPW GOP has its way, the “one, big beautiful” bill will also stall the implementation of the IRA’s methane emissions fee for a decade and repeal President Joe Biden’s final rule on tailpipe emission standards, a key plank of the Democrats’ de facto electric vehicle (EV) mandate.
“This legislative text puts in motion plans that Senate Republicans pledged to take, like stopping Democrats’ natural gas tax and rescinding unobligated dollars from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act,” Republican West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, Chairman of the EPW, said Wednesday. “I look forward to working with my colleagues to move our legislative package forward to enact President Trump’s agenda, which the American people overwhelmingly support.” (RELATED: Senate Republicans Move To Nuke California EV Mandate Despite Procedural Hurdle)
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