Howard Penrose, President of Motordoc LLC, returns to discuss the complexities of modern electrical grids. The conversation covers the inaccuracies surrounding the Iberian Peninsula blackout, the intricate functions of voltage and frequency control, and systemic issues in grid management. Penrose explains how renewable energy sources like wind and solar, alongside energy storage, play crucial roles in stabilizing the grid.

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Howard, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? It’s been a bit, a lot has happened since we last spoke. I, I wanna speak about the Iberian Peninsula problem and the blackout that happened in April. Because there’s been a number of inaccuracies about that situation, and you’re actively involved in the groups that look into these situations and try to understand what the root cause was.

That the, the, the Iberian situation is a little complicated. The CNN knowledge, the Fox News knowledge is that solar was the cause of a problem. Yeah, that is far from the truth. You wanna explain kind of [00:01:00 ] what this, how it progressed over time? It started around noontime Spain and they had a couple of wobbles there.

You want to kick it off? 

Howard Penrose: Yeah. First, first my comment is, I like how journalists become experts in, in literally everything, um, from 30 seconds to 30 seconds, right. Basically. The problem had been going on for a little while and, and the grided there had been operating much like it had been for a little while.

And, uh, you know, for years actually, uh, even with the application of alternative energy, we’ll, we’ll call it alternative energy for this, um, you know, so that we don’t bring in that political end of calling it one thing or the other. Alternative energy is what we called it in the 1990s. So, um, in any case.

Uh, they had a number of issues with voltage control, meaning large loads would suddenly drop off and then the voltage would float up [00:02:00 ] and then, uh, and then they would have to do something to bring it under control. They’re at 50 hertz, so their voltage is 400 kv. That’s their primary grid voltage. They have an alarm trip voltage, meaning an emergency trip voltage, where they strip the line at 435 kv.

So, um, what happened now, the final event happened in 27 seconds, but leading up to that, they had an event where they had voltage float up. And they were bringing that under control. And then down in the southern part of Spain, and we don’t have anything set up like this here in the states, luckily they had all, uh, a whole group of, um, solar uh, plants as well as a gas turbine plant feeding a single distribution transformer.

And the, uh, auto taps on that failed on the low voltage side on step up. So it basically dropped out. So, uh, something like, I, I’m trying to remember off the top of my, my head, [00:03:00 ] but it was either 300 or 800 megawatts just offline now. It was a lightly loaded day in Spain ’cause it was a beautiful day outside.

Uh, so that makes matters worse. It makes it unstable and really easy for voltage to flow up where people start to think that that, uh, alternative energy was a fault was because we were at 40%. Of the power supply was solar as the morning progressed, so it had climbed up to about that there was a good percentage of wind.

Um, but they had a nuclear power power plant online and several others providing synchronous protection for any type of inertia. They lost one of those plants. The voltage floated up, uh, to um, about 415 to 420 kv. Yeah. Then there was a whole bunch of control issues. So the operators started switching lines.

There was a connection to France. They, they started seeing some oscillations because they were [00:04:00 ] oscillating against, uh, Europe. And, um, so they switched lines and that caused the voltage to float up again. And they had no, no, none of the equipment. Whether it was solar, wind, or even the synchronous power was set to do, uh, var control, meaning set to do voltage control to bring the voltage back down.

It was all set up for frequency control, meaning that they wanted to control against it, not the, not the alternative energy. Those were set so that they did a straight, what’s called power factor, so they were set to just put out. Exactly what they were supposed to put out. They were not there, they were not set to correct anything, even though they could have been.

And, um, so, uh, at, at about 420, uh, thousand volts, other plants started tripping offline. And as it went up further, even the nuclear plant tripped offline. And then France dropped [00:05:00 ] offline at about the same time, all across the 27 second period. 

Allen Hall: Right. Okay. So this is a unique problem and I think the Iberian Peninsula really raises this issue on a number of levels for the general consumer out in the world.

The grid is actually pretty complicated, but there’s really two things you really want to control there. Voltage, you have to control frequency, you have to control. If you control those two. Pretty much everything else will work the way it’s intended. If either one of those gets outta whack, there’s safety protocols that go into place to protect the equipment, but there’s also other piece of equipment that are trying to bring it into regulation.

When the regulation doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, yes, you can get the voltage outta whack. You can get the frequency to go outta spec, and then clunk, clunk, clunk. Everything starts to disconnect. Like what happened in Spain. My first question about that is it’s a complicated system and there’s a lot of pieces [00:06:00 ] connected to it.

Who is checking in the US or in Europe or anywhere else who’s checking that? Those control settings are in the right place. They were actually set per the requirements. Spain was talking about in some of their publications that there, the settings weren’t set right. They were, we were, they were not properly set per code.

Who’s checking that? 

Howard Penrose: So, so grid code here is set by FIR and nerc. And it sounds like a curse word, a set of curse words, but FERC is the federal side. NERC is actually private. Um, so they set, they set the rules for safety, for power, gener, you, you name it. So, um, and they set the code. Now as an operator, you’re supposed to be, you know, the power generation side.

They still even here, have to do things to meet code. Okay. Is there anybody checking it? No. Uh, the, it’s a site responsibility. Each area, um, goes out and they [00:07:00 ] forecast expectations. Um, and then, and then of course, within that expectation, you have a lot of companies and cities municipal that will all bid on how much energy they’re gonna consume, right?

Uh, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, so everybody agrees to it. And then, and then, um, the operators have to determine the reliability. And the availability of energy based upon certain conditions within that grit. Like what, what plants are gonna be, uh, in maintenance and everything else. And, and that’s important because the actual generation companies can’t talk to each other.

They’re not allowed. Okay. Otherwise, it could be considered collusion. So our own laws fight against us. 

Allen Hall: The Iberian situation leads into some discussions. What happens in America, because we’re in America and there have been a number of brownouts blackouts, uh, ERCOT has have a couple of situations where they’ve had sort of regional [00:08:00 ] disconnects of, or larger scale, like a cascading.

Effect, uh, due to, um, control systems that are not happy with one another. So one system knocks out another and then it, everybody goes into safe mode and there’s just this sort of cascading, disconnected that happens. Those events are a little scary to me, just with a, it feels like we’re not talking to one another, and what you’re saying is we’re intentionally not talking to one another because we can’t.

It talk one power producer to another power producer. 

Howard Penrose: That’s what the operator’s for. So the, the grid operator is there to take all that information in. Most of it’s run via software. What’s been interesting is, say Ercot, because of the event that happened in 2021. What, uh, happened was everybody went back and looked at it and said, how can we fix it?

It turns out that alternative energy was the way to stiffen the power system. So, um, they’ve now made adjustments to how the, [00:09:00 ] to, to take more advantage of the capabilities of wind and solar that they didn’t have before, as well as all the new storage systems, uh, including, you