Image credit: thecount.com
H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
Some stories of Londoners stumbling around in the gloom or stranded on non-moving trains here. Obviously any emergency back-up either wasn’t there or proved ineffective.
Enappsys, an energy consultancy, said the blackout may have been caused by the unexpected shutdowns of the Hornsea offshore wind farm and the Little Barford gas-fired power plant, reports The Guardian.
Large parts of England and Wales have been left without electricity following a major power cut, electricity network operators have said, with a serious impact reported on rail and road services, including city traffic lights.
Passengers were shut out of some of the country’s busiest train stations during the Friday evening rush hour, while hundreds of thousands of homes were left without electricity after what the National Grid described as a problem with two generators.
The British Transport police said officers were asked to help as services on the east coast mainline were suspended, with many customers being advised not to travel; and London’s Euston station, the southern hub for the west coast mainline, was closed because of “exceptionally high passenger numbers”.
The outage was reportedly also affecting other rail services and traffic lights.
Shortly before 6.30pm, a National Grid spokesperson said the generator issues had caused “loss of power in selected UK areas”. The spokesperson said the issue was “now resolved” and the system had returned to normal.
About 500,000 customers in Wales, south-west England and the Midlands were affected and 300,000 customers in south-east England were left without power, the local distributors said.
A further 110,000 in Yorkshire and north-east England were affected, alongside about 26,000 in north-west England, according to the electricity distributors in those areas.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Friday afternoon commute goes dark on the London underground system.
(ITV News)
– – –
Chaos…
BBC: Major power failure affects homes and transport
6 minutes ago
At the height of the Friday rush hour, all trains out of King’s Cross were suspended and remained so for most of the evening.
. . .
Boards at Waterloo station showed no trains departing on any platforms.
Harriet Jackson, 26, said there was an “apocalyptic” scene on Northcote Road, in Battersea, when traffic lights cut out and cars were not stopping.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49300025
Get used to this. Thanks to the green looneys. Unstable grid with minimal reliable backup.
Power cut? Or infrastructure hack with a crap cover story?
Get over it. It is the new normal. Your dystopian future is NOW!
Analysis
By Ben Ando, BBC News correspondent
The enormous impact of this power failure is likely to lead to questions about the strength and robustness of the system.
The BBC understands that two power supply plants – one a traditional gas and steam-fired power station in Cambridgeshire, the other a huge wind-turbine farm in the North Sea – failed at about 16:00 BST.
National Grid described it as an “unexpected, and unusual event”.
An additional factor may have been capacity problems at Britain’s largest single power station in Yorkshire.
The sudden drop in available power caused protective measures to kick in that immediately cut electricity supply to a section of the National Grid network.
By 18:30 BST the problems were fixed and the system was described as operating normally by the National Grid.
But the knock-on effect is likely to be felt for several hours to come.
There is no blip:
https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
I expected to see some sort of impact?
Frequency dropped below the minimum for grid stability. Not supposed to happen, at least not on an August afternoon.
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.
Reblogged this on WeatherAction News and commented:
Clive Best has an interesting thesis about the cuts;
Damian,
If you go here https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/download.php.
Switch off all ‘Select Fields from data source’ , by toggling the white buttons, that are not wanted (e.g just the Frequency red indicator left on), adjust BOTH ‘Select Start time of Dataset’ and ‘Select End time of Dataset’ for the date and time to 9 Aug 2019 on both (I’d suggest 14:45 09 August 2019 and 17:00 09 August 2019 ). You can now ‘download’ a tiny csv file (a few kbits) if you have set the download correctly.
From my download I note this at 15:55:37, frequency suddenly drops to 48.889 Hz,
My download
Reblogged this on Utopia, you are standing in it!.
A quickee for the moment. Would appreciate tech info on both events. The root cause, tech that is.
This has similarities to the power outage that took out South Australia in 2016. Frequency control issues as the Grid destabilised. Because of not enough Spinning reserve or traditional base load the Wind Based generation systems just do not cut the mustard on riding through these faults. Or perhaps a factor that did cause issues in South Australia was the large winds caused the wind turbines to shut down due to the irregular velocities of the source.
should have said on the last line ..large winds caused the wind turbines to shut down due to the irregular velocities AT the source.
Success!! We have completely decarbonised a large part of a Western nation for a few hours….
tom0mason says: August 10, 2019 at 1:31 am
From my download I note this at 15:55:37, frequency suddenly drops to 48.889 Hz
Yes, below 49 Hz the minimum needed to keep the grid stable comes into view. We saw the results.
Grid rules state that as frequency falls below 48.8 Hz, distribution network operators must apply compulsory demand control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(Great_Britain)
That ‘control’ seems not to have worked, or it didn’t happen?
– – –
AUSTRALIA’S ENERGY REGULATOR SUES FOUR WIND FARM OPERATORS OVER BLACKOUT
Date: 09/08/19 Energy Live News
Australia’s energy regulator is taking legal action against four wind farm operators over a state-wide blackout in South Australia in 2016.
https://www.thegwpf.com/australias-energy-regulator-sues-four-wind-farm-operators-over-blackout/
Big fat low pressure system all over the UK today, strong winds expected.
ITV REPORT 10 August 2019 at 6:48am
Windy conditions, thunderstorms and heavy rain expected on Saturday
Unseasonably windy and unsettled weather will continue to move across the British Isles on Saturday.
A yellow weather warning for wind is in place for England and Wales. The same level of alert stands for much of Scotland and Northern Ireland, but for thunderstorms.
https://www.itv.com/news/2019-08-10/windy-conditions-thunderstorms-and-heavy-rain-expected-on-saturday/
UK power cut: National Grid promises to learn lessons from blackout
Director of operations Duncan Burt told the BBC that its systems “worked well” after the “incredibly rare event” of two power stations disconnecting.
He said he did not believe that a cyber-attack or unpredictable wind power generation were to blame.
. . .
Lord Adonis, the Labour peer and former chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, told the BBC the two generator failures meant a loss of about five per cent of the grid’s power over 90 minutes.
“Why that led to the heart of the national transport infrastructure being closed down is a big question that the grid has to answer,” he said.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49302996
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If that was ‘working well’, what would ‘not working well’ look like?
All caused by the Climate Change Act 2008 where the grid has to buy power from unreliables first. Do too much of that and the grid is relying on
unicorn fartselectronic inverters which rely on synchronisation from the solid, heavy duty coal fired steam turbines. If there is an break in that synchronisation the electronics start frequency hunting and then you get what happened.The answer is to run the base load from the coal fired units and only take power from the unreliables to fill in anything beyond base load. The only way to get that is to repeal the CCA 2008 and get back to the responsible power generation there used to be before the UN and green slime took over running the country no matter what the BBC might proclaim.
National Grids ESO tweeted
[reply] 5 am is wind o’clock ? 😂
Frequency control in the grid has long been seen as more vulnerable in a system with high percentage of renewables . Christopher Booker had been forecasting this for years and it’s a pity that he’s not around to see his prediction fulfilled.
[reply] seconded
Did the wind farm shut down because it was too windy?
https://www.business-live.co.uk/technology/world-leading-offshore-wind-farm-16732410
“The National Grid Electricity System Operator confirmed there had been issues with two generators, though sources close to the Danish giant’s operations said it could potentially have been more.
…in the half yearly results published earlier this week , president and chief executive Henrik Poulsen did sound a note of caution, stating how the company was “not fully satisfied with generation in the first half year where the number of outages and curtailments across the portfolio has been higher than normal”. Availability of the wind farm fleet dropped two per cent over like-for-like periods.”
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/how-do-wind-turbines-survive-severe-storms
“When the anemometer registers wind speeds higher than 55 mph (cut-out speed varies by turbine), it triggers the wind turbine to automatically shut off.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-24706238
2013
Ecotricity, said it was operating at roughly two thirds of capacity. Of its 55 turbines, many in East Anglia, only six were offline and none due to excessive wind. The firm says its turbines only shut down with continuous wind speeds of between 62mph and 76mph, depending on make and model.
OT slightly, but here an admission of bat mortality
https://www.conservationevidence.com/actions/970
I think the conclusive answer to the question is yes – the blackout’s primary cause was the sudden loss of output from Hornsea wind farm, though the precise cause of that remains unknown at this stage: likely candidates are a failure at the offshore transmission platform where the voltage is boosted to 220kV, somewhere along the cable to shore, or at the grid connection point (at Killingholme on the Humber) onshore. The really damning evidence comes in this tweet that shows grid frequency based on 1 second data:
The extremely rapid initial drop in frequency to below the statutory minimum of 49.5Hz is compatible with the drop in wind generation of about 850MW recorded in grid 5 minute data (although there appear to be timing discrepancies between the frequency and power data – but I would regard the frequency data as conclusive, especially with wind). That is followed by a small bounce as the gird starts to try to recover, before a further smaller collapse in frequency to the nadir at around 48.8Hz, which is entirely consistent with the smaller drop in CCGT output recorded in grid data that suggest that Little Barford was probably operating at about 50% of its 727MW capacity. There is a major grid transmission line that runs from Keadby near Killingholme past Little Barford at St. Neots and on to the transmission ring around the North of London. It is almost certain that this power line was delivering power from the wind farm towards London. When that failed, there would have been a sudden extra demand on Little Barford, which would have caused its frequency to drop and that (if not the already rapid drop in grid frequency) would have tripped it out of operation.
Do not be deceived by the reported outage times on the plants. The formal record shows that Little Barford announced it had zero capacity at 15:55:37Z w.e.f. 15:57:40Z. Hornsea is shown as having zero capacity w.e.f. 16:00:00Z – which is a highly unlikely timing, except that it coincides with the start of the next settlement period. That report was not submitted until 16:19:48Z, over 20 minutes after the main event. By 16:00Z the grid frequency chart chows that balance had been restored by the combination of load shedding and running up Dinorwig pumped storage to nearly 1GW, OCGT rapid response, and diesel STOR. It seems that management decided not to report the real time of the loss of power for reasons that might vary between inadequate monitoring systems, or a failure to understand the need to report the true time rather than the next half hour settlement period time, or simply to lie to cover up having reviewed the evidence.
That these disturbances caused such a rapid and severe frequency drop that triggered load shedding is entirely due to the lack of grid inertia caused by the high proportion of generation from wind and solar, which had been running at over 40% most of the day. A 2016 presentation from National Grid has a chart that shows the relationship between the rate of change of frequency that can be expected for different amounts of load loss at different levels of grid inertia: it suggests that they were sailing far too close to the wind. You can think of grid inertia as the flywheel energy stored in the rotating heavy generator turbines. It is measured in GVA.s, which you can think of as gigawatt-seconds. Divide by the level of grid demand, and it tells you how long the energy would last if it instantaneously could become the only source of power on the grid. That gives a measure of the response speed required from backup generation (spinning reserve, fast start, grid batteries etc.) if grid frequency is to stay within limits that avoid blackouts. You have to suspect that at Grid HQ in Wokingham, they will be thinking about having a larger level of spinning reserve.
Apologies for the typos.
Despite the strong winds, we appear to be generating a lower than maximum quantity of electricity from wind. It’s been around 7.5GW since 3am this morning, whereas the peak appears to be around 9GW.
Adam – low demand perhaps? Import share is quite high too, and it’s the weekend (less industry).
I suspect that National Grid may well be curtailing wind output in similar fashion to what happens in Ireland particularly at times of lower demand, to ensure that the proportion of inertia providing generation is not too low, which would risk another event like yesterday’s.
This chart covers the Irish grid in the run up to Storm Ophelia. You will notice the overnight exports to the UK to dump surplus power, but also curtailment in the demand troughs to maintain the non-wind generation proportion at safe levels. The chart also shows wind output being curtailed by high wind speeds as the storm passes through, followed by total reliance on non-wind generation and imports in the calm after the storm.
‘The answer is to run the base load from the coal fired units and only take power from the unreliables to fill in anything beyond base load.’
Ideally, use power from intermittents to charge batteries, then get grid power from the batteries. Batteries can give predictability to wind/solar output. Which they need far more than ‘storage.’
Gamecock – looking at the generation graphic above [oldbrew says: August 10, 2019 at 12:35 pm], we had 27%
gigawattswind power at that time, plus nearly 12%GWsolar.That would need a ridiculous amount of batteries. Using some of that elec for conversion to hydrogen might be an option though?
Then again…
It doesn’t add up… says: August 10, 2019 at 11:41 am
it suggests that they were sailing far too close to the wind
Indeed 😎
ha ha ha ha ha
ROFLMAO
well guys, you voted for the prats that built this disaster. Enjoy.
From experience in South Australia you may never find out the cause, because the gullible believers will deny that there could be anything wrong with their beloved toys. All sorts of excuses and false statements will be used.
@It doesn’t add up
This is what happens in S.A. There is a minimum amount of gas fired at all times. Solar supplies an increasing amount (occasionally) and Wind can only supply the difference between that amount and the actual demand + the amount that can be exported interstate. If wind tries to generate more then some wind farms are instructed to shut down. The average Capacity Factor of wind turbines in S.A. has dropped from 30% to 27% as a consequence.
9 August 2019 at 4:00pm
UK braces for windy and wet weekend as Met Office issues yellow warning
https://www.itv.com/news/2019-08-09/uk-to-brace-for-a-windy-and-wet-weekend/
– – –
Can climate crackpots tell us when our ‘new normal’ global warming will be back – or is it just the UK’s usual handful of hot (30C+) days a year, when a wind from N. Africa blows in?
Actually, stpaulchuck, we’ve no option, as all the major UK parties support this.
This seems a likely explanation [It doesn’t add up… says: August 10, 2019 at 11:41 am]…
When [Hornsea wind] failed, there would have been a sudden extra demand on Little Barford, which would have caused its frequency to drop and that (if not the already rapid drop in grid frequency) would have tripped it out of operation.
IOW the scenario would be that the immediate back-up to the wind farm didn’t work or was inadequate, which started a domino effect of shutdowns. If so, they may well want to try and cover that up for obvious reasons. One way to do that would be to complain of an unlucky coincidence, i.e. no chain of causation – which is what they are doing.
I have a higher resolution frequency chart:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBiv7jxXUAM5KZl.jpg:large
Same source as the other one – Upside Energy.
I wonder how many times this has to happen before the public realise we’ve made a terrible mistake adding wind to the grid.
Hey, oldbrew, I didn’t say it would be cheap!
Note that diesel trains and electric boats run from batteries, not the engine. The engine just charges the batteries.
Trump on windmills, short video 🙂
Another thing with batteries – how long would any ‘back-up’ last? Probably only minutes, even on full charge – but that might be enough to get some real back-up going before the system could crash like the event on Friday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_reserve
The post by ‘it doesn’t add up’ is quite informative. He presents a ‘nice’ puzzle. I have two questions here pls.
What tripped the CCGT. Was it plant freq protection? Meaning external load shedding did not operate earlier.
And: was CCGT governing set to a ‘set load’ or to ‘freq follow’.
The world’s biggest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 1, generates first power
15.02.2019
When fully operational, Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm will be nearly double the size (1,218MW) of the current world’s largest offshore wind farm, Walney Extension
https://orsted.com/en/Media/Newsroom/News/2019/02/The-worlds-biggest-offshore-wind-farm-Hornsea-one-generates-first-power
Maybe this was its first big back-up test?
Little Barford capacity is 740MW.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Barford_Power_Station
It doesn’t add up… ,
Is it possible to tell whether solar power had anything to do with the blackout? From looking at the data at gridwatch there is an estimated reduction in solar output about 20 minutes before the blackout. On previous days when the estimated solar output is falling it appears to be pumped storage that initially meets the increased demand and then other sources take over.
On the gridwatch data for Friday there is 150MW of pumped storage for 15 minutes starting at 15:20 and then estimated solar output takes a 500+MW dive. Pumped storage output is put to 290MW, shortly after that there is an 800MW drop in wind and pumped storage is briefly over 900MW. It seems like they were relying on wind power to meet the fall in solar and were caught out when wind output fell too, and then further caught out by a failure at a gas turbine power station.
How renewable energy makes power cuts more likely
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/how-renewable-energy-makes-power-cuts-more-likely/
OldmanK
It would have been a frequency protection trip: the generator would already have slowed synchronously with the grid frequency, but as it did so it also faced a rapid increase in demand to meet the shortfall on the line from Keadby towards London which was being supplied by the wind farm, which it could only supply by a further drop in its own frequency, and so it would have tripped out, as serious plant damage can result from rotational speeds under load that match vibrational modes of the shafts or turbine blades. You can see when the load shedding started because of the spiked nadir of the frequency curve when the trip point at 48.8Hz for load shedding was reached. By then the CCGT plant had been tripped some time.
I can’t guess an answer your second question until we start to get access to plant generating data at the end of next week. Even then, it will be a hunch because we’ll only have half hour settlement information.
Gareth
The grid regularly has to deal with rapid ramp rates from solar PV in summer, but it is increasingly well set up to forecast the requirement through monitoring approaching or retreating cloud cover on top of the basic variations of the angle of the sun, and also through neural network and other computational approaches.
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/news/eso-teams-met-office-solar-forecasting-innovation-project
I haven’t looked at the accuracy of wind forecasting in a while: when I did I found that forecasting was not very accurate
although some of the inaccuracy was due to curtailment at higher levels of output
I noted on Friday that actual wind output was above forecast by up to a GW in the couple of hours before the problems hit. The grid doubtless dialled down CCGT in consequence, but it mostly remained available as reserve. The wiser course would have been to curtail the wind. Hindsight, eh?
I don’t think they were caught out by the solar element. In any event, they should have had an additional contingency reserve of at least 1GW to cover the loss of one of the interconnectors. Dinorwig wasn’t pressed to its full 1.7GW at any point. The real problem was that RoCoF was too high to allow the grid to be reconfigured before load shedding trip frequency was reached. A problem is that if you lose load on one side of the country, getting supply across from Dinorwig may risk overloading transmission links as the whole grid rebalances. That can constrain the rate at which individual plants are ramped, and certainly the choice of which to ramp. Power flows around the network are calculated from matrices of simultaneous equations. Sometimes the solutions to those can be highly volatile, with a radical re-jig of supply and routing required given a sudden change in availabilities. It’s another one of the technical questions to be asked. The solution is usually more investment in transmission links and switching capabilities, although sometimes adding a link can increase grid instability by providing a route for a flip-flop solution.
‘Urgent’ inquiry launched into power cut that plunged 1,000,000 into darkness and sparked mass transport chaos
An “urgent” Government investigation is to be launched into the UK’s major power cut that affected almost one million people and sparked transport chaos in England and Wales.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/urgent-inquiry-launched-into-power-cut-that-plunged-1000000-into-darkness-and-sparked-mass-transport-a4210776.html
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Inquiry or whitewash? Remains to be seen.
OldmanK, Gareth
long answer post has gone AWOL.
[mod] retrieved from spam bin
Is it the case then, that having large offshore wind farms off the east coast (North Sea) and the largest emergency back-up source near the west coast (Dinorwig pumped hydro), is not working out too well when things suddenly go wrong with one of those wind farms?
Probably the biggest potential source of instability is the Westernlink HVDC from Hunterston in Scotland to Deeside – it’s up to 2.25GW when it’s working, which it wasn’t been between February and June due to a cable fault that tripped it offline, resulting in ongoing and increasing constraint payments to Scottish windfarms. Cable faults are a big risk for interconnectors and offshore windfarms – one that has been overly discounted IMHO. Westernlink has had 4 outages already in its brief life, and the Moyle interconnector to Northern Ireland has also been hit more than once, and the French connection was lost for several months due to a trawler dragging its anchor.
So Dinorwig is well placed to inject power across North Wales into the Manchester/Liverpool area when there are sudden problems with Scottish wind or the Westernlink itself. However, Dinorwig is in mountainous Snowdonia, while the East coast is notoriously flat, making it quite impossible to have another Dinorwig there. You might have to build a bypass transmission line with a direct connection to the big hubs near Drax at West Burton or Keadby. Trouble is, it would rarely be needed, so it would be hard to justify the cost, and routing over the scenic Pennines would be contentious.
There’s a 50MW half hour battery at West Burton.
https://www.edf-sf.com/en/west-burton-edf-groups-49-mw-mega-battery-helps-to-balance-the-electricity-grid-in-the-united-kingdom/
You’d need another 30 to provide a 1.5GW backup. The cost is likely to be eyewatering. I’ve seen projections that National Grid are thinking of 3GW of batteries (of unspecified duration, but likely only half hour) for future grid stabilisation. Mostly, stabilisation is about small second to second fluctuations in grid frequency: batteries typically use only an average of about 3% of their nominal delivery capacity doing this. Providing serious backup to a no wind no solar situation is something else altogether. Calculations I’ve done suggest we’d need ~30TWh with a very beefy charging capability to take advantage of surpluses when it’s windy or peak summer sunshine and the ability to redeliver most of our demand in a 100% renewables grid at something like present demand levels. Possibly double that if we go all electric on heating and EVs.
This chart gives an idea of the operation of the Big South Australian Battery alongside its wind farm:
You can see that its charging and discharging bears no relationship to the wind farm output, because it is operating mainly on grid stabilisation. Overlaying that, they sneak a bit of extra charge when they can to have something to offer into price spikes. You can see the cumulative net charge/discharge (which rises with time because of round trip losses and aircon cooling load). They only ever make use of the full discharge capability in real emergencies, and perhaps not even then. Last summer, when SA had rotating blackouts and grid prices of A$14,000/MWh they limited themselves to 40MW output, and ran the battery out in 3 hours.
You may need to check your spam folder for a reply to your Q.
Just popping in to say Thankyou to Tallbloke & commenters. Especially thanks to It doesn’t add up. Of all the official accounts, this thread is where I got the most useful information. I posted on this on the weekend and it set off a good discussion.
Unexpected UK EarthHour at peak time Friday — just after Wind Power hits new high?
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/08/unexpected-earthhour-at-peak-time-friday-just-after-uk-wind-power-hits-record-high/
Love the high level of discussion here. Merci!
Excellent – thanks Jo, and IDAU… and others 🙂
– – –
Btw…Hornsea 1 is 120 km. offshore from the east coast of England.
Hornsea 3 [sic] latest: 02/10/2019 – Deadline for Secretary of State to make decision
Development of the Hornsea Project Three offshore wind farm with an approximate capacity of up to 2,400MW off the coast of Norfolk.
https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/projects/eastern/hornsea-project-three-offshore-wind-farm/
National Grid ‘had three blackout near-misses in three months’
Exclusive: Industry sources say system operator aware of growing potential of blackouts ‘for years’
The Guardian understands that in every month since May there has been a severe dip in the grid’s frequency from its normal range around 50Hz. Industry sources have confirmed that the grid’s frequency has fallen below 49.6Hz on three different occasions in recent months, the deepest falls seen on the UK grid since 2015. On Friday the blackout was triggered when the frequency slumped to 48.88Hz.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/12/three-blackout-near-misses-in-three-months-says-national-grid
– – –
We’ve all been aware of that, but it’s arrived so no longer ‘potential’. They can’t blame high demand as an issue in warmer months with lots of daylight, as a general rule.
NB The Guardian graphic still shows Hornsea failing after Barford gas plant, but this could be based on time failure was logged rather than time it actually occurred.
Another quote:
The UK’s booming renewable energy output can make it more difficult for National Grid to balance the frequency of the grid, which was originally built to accommodate fossil fuel power plants, which generate more intensive energy.
Who knew? 😆
Dellers wades in…
Delingpole: Boris Johnson’s Looming Wind Disaster
Friday’s power cuts, far from being a freak event, are merely a taste of worse to come.
That’s because brownouts and blackouts aren’t a bug of electricity systems heavily dependent on renewable energy. They’re a feature.
And it’s not as though wiser heads haven’t been saying this for years.
More here: https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/08/12/delingpole-boris-johnsons-looming-wind-disaster/
You can’t expect Silly Jilly to do any serious research, though she obviously found someone to feed her the story. She frequently confuses the concepts of energy (j, GWh) and power (GW, J/sec), and often writes error filled nonsense.
Dellers makes no attempt to go into detail (probably mindful of his readership – I got little response when I commented on another story there earlier). But he’s right about the politics.
All this disruption was linked to Hornsea 1, ‘the world’s largest wind farm’. They’re now proposing Hornsea 4…
Hornsea 3 is awaiting approval from the top (by 2nd Oct. 2019). Maybe read the inquiry report first?
IDAE thanks for the info.
Someone may find this interesting: https://insights.globalspec.com/article/12273/warnings-ignored-extreme-weather-pushed-the-power-grid-toward-the-edge?id=%2D2038727546&uh=c7b5ee&email=crsant47%40gmail%2Ecom&md=190813&mh=55e596&Vol=Vol14Issue9&Pub=43&LinkId=1996024&keyword=link%5F1996024&itemid=345922&et_rid=705579737&et_mid=83925990&loginOk=1&frmtrk=newsletter&cid=nl
Another ‘green’ bill?
The greenwash has started…
Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom:
“National Grid has already confirmed that the incident was not linked to the variability of wind power, a clean, renewable energy source that the government is investing in as we work towards becoming a net zero emissions economy by 2050. Friday’s incident does, however, demonstrate the need to have a diverse energy mix.”
Diverse energy mix? Get a grip, or at least a new script writer.
LIGHTNING STRIKE AND WIND FARM FAULT TRIGGERED UK BLACKOUT CHAOS
Date: 16/08/19 The Times
A technical fault at the world’s largest offshore wind farm was among a series of failures that resulted in Britain’s worst blackouts in a decade, according to initial analysis by National Grid.
https://www.thegwpf.com/lightning-strike-and-wind-farm-fault-triggered-uk-blackout-chaos/
– – –
Wind farm behind massive blackout awarded £100,000 in compensation day after powercut
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/15/wind-farm-behind-massive-blackout-awarded-nearly-100000-compensation/
Bit of a misleading headline. 2 power producers went down – one a gas fired power station – yet you’re leading with the wind farm.
Glyn – 3 points:
1) that was the GWPF’s headline – a question not a claim
2) the full enquiry could take upto 3 months
3) the operator has already said the wind farm had a problem
‘Ørsted said its Hornsea offshore wind farm, off the east coast of England, experienced a technical fault which caused the wind farm to shut down and pulled 800MW of electricity from the grid.’
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/16/national-grid-blackout-report-avoidable-faults-blamed
Entire wind farms shouldn’t be going offline for every ‘technical fault’, so presumably something serious happened but they aren’t talking about it in public while the enquiry is on.
– – –
From the Telegraph…