An industrial engineer from Asturias, Fernando Ley Llano, appeared before the Congressional Industry Committee on March 11th and forewarned of a possible outage which then occurred on the Monday the 28th of Aprilt
He had been given the task of drafting the Industry & Strategic Autonomy Bill, as he has been working in the oil, gas, and energy generation & distribution sectors for 33 years, with major industrial projects in Europe and the Americas.
Remember that the blackout had not yet occurred when Fernando Ley appeared before the committee and issued several warnings, amongst them, emphasising that the Government had introduced a high level of regulation intervention without allowing the sector the opportunity to participate in the drafting of the said regulations.
He also criticised the Government’s poor handling of ‘energy decarbonisation’ and the planned closure of the country’s nuclear plants, relying instead on non-constant renewable energy sources for electricity generation, which he considered could lead to a massive outage. This was back in March, remember.
“It’s not just me saying this; it’s the people who generate electricity in this country who are not prepared for how the Government wants to implement this transformation [from fossil fuel to clean energy]. Is it necessary? Of course it is, but not in this way.”
His criticism was directed at the structure of the public entity that controls the country’s electricity generation and supply, Red Eléctrica Española. He admitted that Spain hasn’t had a generalised outage in the last 30 to 40 years, but cited the zero-energy crisis in Chile (zero energy production) which took 16 hours to get the country back online. A month and a half later, ‘zero energy’ would occur in Spain and drag down Portugal.
During his appearance before the committee he was accused by the ruling party, the PSOE, of being a climate-change denier, but he responded by saying that there is no greener energy source than nuclear energy.
Having witnessed what happened on Monday the 28th, he put the blame at the door of renewable energy (solar/wind) instability as a generation source because of their affect on the grid: at the time 70% of the energy generated in Spain was from wind and solar, which cannot be cranked up or wound down unlike turbines at nuclear, gas, hydroelectric or coal-fired power plants; the latter can be activated or deactivated depending on the system’s demand at a specific time.
Having said that, in some solar plant there is something called curtailment. Thisis done in some cases to be able to respond to increased demand but in others it is done to protect that grid from having too much supply which can actually cause almost as many problems as having too little, Curtailment is basically have more solar panels that normally used (a reserve quantity, so to speak), turned off but which can be quickly put online if there is a sudden increase in demand.
It’s also worth noting that solar energy is DC and needs to be converted by inverters to AC to be of use on the grid.
He concluded by saying that the Spanish grid was in a moment of high instability when the chaos occurred. He praised Red Eléctrica Española for how quickly it sorted the problem out but admitted that he rarely saw officials from the public entity present at important conferences on power generation and supply.
OK, to clear up some misconceptions it should be pointed out that renewable energy is not restricted to only solar and wind generators, but also includes hydroelectric generation. Why is nuclear energy considered clean energy? Because it does not produce carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions.
Furthermore, not all solar-energy-powered installations are fields of solar panels producing DC current, because Spain has a huge set-up involving rotating mirrors that focus onto a central tower where the combined heat produces steam which turns generator turbines. But, just like standard solar and wind plants, they are not constant suppliers of energy but need the presence of sunlight or wind.
Editorial comment: summing up, what it all boils down to is that there is an imbalance in Spain between renewables and fossil fuel, worsened by the drive to close down nuclear plants. Renewables don’t have the flexibility to respond to peaks and troughs in demand. In fact, until viable nuclear fusion comes along, we have to keep nuclear fission as part of the power grid.
(News: Spain)
Keywords: Renewable Energy, Green, Nuclear, Solar, Wind, Over Reliance, Not Stable, Government Forewarned, Ignored
news, spain, renewable energy, green, nuclear, solar, wind, over reliance, not stable, government forewarned, ignored