Major power failure affects homes and transport
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Imagine a generator spinning at 50 rpm (for the sake of simplicity). Now if the load on the generator is larger than the power it can provide, it will be slowed down and the frequency goes down. If the load is lower than the power output of the generator though this surplus goes into spinning it up, raising the frequency.
There are plants that can more easily vary their output which are used to manage these fluctuation and providing frequency control.
A pretty new and fast one is the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia, based on Tesla Powerpacks which can react in milliseconds, instead of seconds and minutes.
Automated systems respond to sagging frequency by shedding loads - reducing the demand for power, so that the frequency can increase and a new equilibrium can be achieved. The goal is to avoid an uncontrolled cascade across the power network as demand outstrips supply; this is substantially harder to manage than a short interruption.
The UK does have battery-powered frequency management services, but it looks like it was quite a large and sudden drop in generation capacity that caused this deviation, and it took several minutes before it was back to normal. Not totally sure what it was yet, but sounds like a gas turbine generator suddenly tripped, along with a nearby offshore wind farm, taking out about a gigawatt of capacity that normal frequency stabilisation couldn’t handle, resulting in load shedding.
Conservation seems way more sensible than building new and advanced capacity.
With car charging, they're doing one better, and can feed power back into the grid: https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/vehicle-to-grid-char...
It just bother me when we focus on big industrial solutions.
We had the right idea with PV solar: why build a giant farm owned by ??? when we already have these structures everywhere tilted toward the sun and grid-connected.
A lot of companies have this capacity, but are waiting for the right environment to deploy it. Smart fridges, aircons, nest thermostats, electric cars with Wifi, etc. They have all been built with the capability to load-shed or even power the grid at a moments notice, but the manufacturers refuse to just do that for free - they want to be paid.
Many of those products were even sold at a loss because the companies expected to be paid by electricity networks for their fast-response stabiisation services.
Today, they aren't allowed to participate in the power markets, and anyway, markets are settled on a half-hourly basis rather than the 1-second basis that would earn them the most money and provide the most reliability for the grid.
This is all a politics problem within electricity regulators (who would much rather stick with the status quo, leaving some power stations underutilized, rather than pay these 'unreliable' web 2.0 companies). Nearly none of it is a technical problem.
Not sure why they couldn’t become more adaptive too. A kWh isn’t a kWh, but energystar treats them that way.
Using that formula, a 2 pole generator running at a synchronous speed of 3000 RPM will produce 50Hz. Using that 50Hz to power a 4 pole squirrel cage motor will cause it to run at just under synchronous speed, usually 4-5% below synchronous speed at full load (it will spin slightly faster, towards synch under no load). So about 1450 RPM. The reduction in speed is called slip and is what generates torque as the rotor has no magnetic field of its own, it depends on slip to generate the counter field to push the rotor along.
Synchronous motors avoid slip by having their own magnetic field from permanent magnets or a wound armature on the rotor fed DC from slip rings or rotary transformer. Coincidently, a synchronous motor and AC generator or alternator are almost the same machine. The basic idea is a magnetic field mechanically spun around pushes electrons around in the stator windings. Sort of like a propeller pushing through water, the magnetic field lines push and pull electrons along the wires. If the field is too weak the voltage will sag as load increases. You can visualize this as weak field = propeller made of rubber, flopping about and can't push much, full strength = made of steel. If the mechanical power source is weak or overloaded, the shaft speed will drop as well as voltage.
You are literally transmitting the generators rotational speed along the wires and motors follow. Adding generators means they have to be in phase so must be brought up to speed AND phased in before being connected to the grid. This is called synchronizing. So thanks to my long winded motor/generator post you can see how a large load can drag down frequency.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-energy/no-deal-br...
The UK grid is actually pretty well maintained and resilient - and controlled power outages can actually be a positive thing in this sense. It looks like a couple of generators failed within a short period, causing a sudden loss of about a gigawatt. When the frequency drops as a result, automated systems start tripping to prevent a more widespread collapse - it’s much easier to restore power to customers who have been isolated than to recover after a more widespread collapse, like the US northeast blackout in 2003.
Also prefixed by not an expert here; but know a few in the industry and somewhat keep up with it.
The push away from coal to other sources of power (combined with the closure of gigawatts of nuclear power) has put the network under more stress than it's been in the past few decades [1]. I'd expect more of this in the future in cases of multi generator failures; there just isn't that much in the way of generation to take up the slack.
Luckily we're in summer where demand is much lower, if this was to happen in winter the outcomes could have been much worse.
//edit - Just to be clear though, this does seem to be totally benign and could have happened to any other well equipped grid. A gigawatt of power dropping out in such a short space is going to result in some kind of load shedding. Denorwig spins up fast; but not that fast.
The squeaky wheels get the grease.
As for the UK today, certainly anywhere along the South Coast was untroubled by this (including the RJ Mitchell windtunnel[0], which was quite literally a blast).
Although this has the opposite effect - the 120V system is less fragile, since the points of failure are more distributed (a blown transformer will affect fewer customers).
See: https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/north-american-ver...
And it's still creeping upward. The average voltage at my house over the last year was 121.9 volts. https://i.imgur.com/6RMZnXd.png
Is a HILARIOUS headline! In a region with many electric trains it's double-funny! In the future they'll be able to make homes levitate on electrical power (just because they can, and for views and breezes, neighborly one-upmanship etc)and power outages will have even more spectacular effects!
And it will be funnier still!
Maybe there isn't a link. Just a possibility.
To create maximum damage, I am going to want to time my attack within moments of another generator going down. The UK grid can tolerate one big failure, but not two at the same time.
So I sit... I lie in wait... For maybe months... As soon as I see another big generator fail and cause a sudden change in frequency, then within a couple of seconds, I trigger my exploit to shut down my powerstation too.
The storm might have caused one outage, and a hacker the other.
Any decent hacker with this plan in mind will try to hide their tracks. They'll inject a 'glitchy' sensor reading to trigger the failure. They'll make sure all their malware auto-uninstalls itself within milliseconds of the incident, so any investigation sees a glitch in a sensor reading and can't track down the real cause.