System separation in the Continental Europe Synchronous Area on 8 January 2021
entsoe.eu
entsoe.eu
I think it needed some plugin, either Java or Flash, but you could zoom in or out, either to the whole of Europe, or down to the substations in the cities and towns.
It was like google maps or similar. AND it had all the transmission lines, power plants, and substations.
And color coded lines, with KW/MW/GW and arrows indicating the direction of energy flow on them.
Anybody could view it without having an account there. At least I did, from time to time.
This way of viewing it in realtime is now gone, or at least not accessible to the general public anymore.
Does anybody know some equivalent?
Sites with bargraphs and charts need not apply.
[1] https://www.entsoe.eu/news-events/former-associations/#union...
But static. Not living. That was once there, and available to the general public. Personally, I view that as artificial scarcity of information, regarding energy politics. 'Smokescreening' so to speak.
Anyway, you could get a feeling for how things were depending on time of year/day, weather, and so on. Intuitevely, because presented spatially and realtime.
And you don't get that spatial intuitiveness from the substitutes with (often delayed) charts & graphs.
Which makes it impossible to counter bullshit by politicians or other parties with vested interests when they are saying this and that, and you could have said: Ahem, that is not entirely correct, because there and then it was like so, and not what you say!
And the loss of that ability is making me angry!
edit: Regarding the 'intuitiveness' of spatial vs. bars & charts. Even when the possibility to filter for im/export between countries exists, it does not show over which lines it went. Which could be useful in discussions about extending/upgrading lines, or building new ones. It's just not there.
Even if there are surveillance cameras on those masts, there aren't on the masts leading to it. So you could ride your bicycle there, have some fun with thermite, and finally enjoy the stars again!1!!
/me giggles (j/k)
\s
Western European countries (among others) worry about threats to their "Critical National Infrastructure", whether in person (terrorist with a bomb) or as a cyber attack. Providing a big map with all transmission lines, power plants and substations seems like it would be a big help to an unsophisticated terrorist, showing them what to blow up.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Energy-trade-change-in-t...
Seems like they're referring to it but also the comments suggest the data was from simulation of optimal market exchange, not actual electrical flows
If you ever do find something similar I'd love to know. I have a friend at Kevala, doing this privately in the US. But otherwise, yeah, seems to be a dark art.
The network split seems to have made this impossible, during the split, the cycle counts for the two regions diverged, and the split ended before this was reconciled. Will people in one of the regions have to adjust their clocks?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_synchronous_grid#Tim...
Simultaneously, I suspect some systems still do rely on grid time.
On the consumer side, your microwave, coffee machine and even bedside clock will.
Not sure on the industrial side.
I guess a ~0.5% deviation for a couple minutes is going to be tolerable here.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/08/european-clock...
In fact, it is even in the FAQ of the article:
"The transmission grids of the countries of Continental Europe are electrically tied together to operate synchronously at the frequency of approximately 50 Hz"
One of the places I lived in Austin, TX had a range with a clock that used grid frequencies (60hz in the US). It was dead accurate. I only changed it for daylight savings, it never need adjustment.
I’m not sure what the current status is, but my understanding is that there are efforts to retire this system and allow the speed to drift more.
I'd be very surprised. It's cheaper to build in a 32.768kHz crystal for timekeeping than try to access the grid frequency from the isolated low-voltage circuit.
50Hz might have temporary variations, but it's controlled so that over a longer period of time, you always get the correct number of cycles, e.g. 180000 in an hour.
This also means that going off the 50Hz power grid theoretically has better (or even perfect) long-term accuracy. Also means that if you adjusted your clock for this separation event, you'll have to adjust it back :D
That's much, much worse than a cheap digital watch from 20 years ago.
If not, why don't coffee machines that can start on a timer have a backup battery for their clock? That might be cheap enough too. And vital for those moments when there was a 10 second brownout which leads to your coffee not being ready in the morning...
As a European the thought wouldn't have come to me. Brownouts just don't happen (see this 0.5% frequency dip making headlines), and a blackout is a once-a-decade event for any given house (probably even less frequent than that).
So your answer is probably that demand for that feature is far from universal, and a coffee machine is much lower stakes than for example an alarm clock.
This. Can't put the coffee maker on an UPS though. Or not on a cost effective UPS.
> So your answer is probably that demand for that feature is far from universal, and a coffee machine is much lower stakes than for example an alarm clock.
Actually for the alarm clock i'm just going to be late. Not having coffee hurts much more!
A similar event happened in Europe a year ago (also due to problems in former Yugoslavia) and all electric clocks in my house (microwave, oven, alarm clocks) went out of sync temporarily. I was just as surprised as you.
Basically, it's exactly the devices that lose track of time in case of a power outage, and that you need to manually adjust for daylight savings time, that are synchronized to the grid. Devices that use a battery (such as laptops, mobile phones, and CMOS clocks in PCs) must necessarily use some other means.
It doesn't seem to be much correlated with price either: my alarm clock cost over $100 and it was still affected. Surely at that price point they could have afforded a crystal oscillator in the design, if they wanted to, but it seems this just isn't typically done.
It might even project the moon phase on the ceiling.
The idea is that it wakes you up gently by flooding the room with light resembling a natural sunrise. One reason that it might be expensive is that it needs a lot of high luminance hue shifting LEDs, and possibly I overpaid a bit (there do seem to be much cheaper competitors) but it was still a good investment because it does make my mornings a lot more pleasant.
> I'd be very surprised. It's cheaper to build in a 32.768kHz crystal for timekeeping than try to access the grid frequency from the isolated low-voltage circuit.
IIRC, the grid frequency is usually more accurate. Probably because it's carefully monitored and managed by the power authorities like the OP describes. If you build a clock with its own frequency reference, than any error will accumulate and have to be monitored and managed by the user.
Those products don't use isolated power supplies --- normally they use a capacitive dropper. A high-value resistor to an IC pin is sufficient to drive the clock counter, and a resistor is definitely cheaper than a crystal.
The microwaves and ovens I've seen do not actually require you to set the clock. None of their cooking features and functionality depends on it. It's just a convenience feature. I doubt that most people actually need two clocks in the kitchen, so why not just set one of them (or neither if you don't need a kitchen clock at all)?
I guess I've been lucky in that all the microwaves I've had over the last couple of decades, and the ones we had at work, do not show the time unless you've set it. My current one, which has 7 segment LEDs for the time digits, blanks all the digits, leaving just the colons. My prior one showed "--:--" if time was not set. The one before that had a graphical display and just showed blank where the time would normally go.
Depending on where I am I see one of them so all must be synchronized to the millisecond so that children are not late to school (school is nearby, which exponentially raises the risk of them being late because it is just "4 minutes" away).
This is one of the scientific uses of such multiple clocks.
It's an old Bosch HBN202S
On top of that it had a dedicated button for toggling between AM and PM when setting the clock, which served no purpose whatsoever after that point. I wish I knew what the designer was thinking when they came up with that.
IIRC if you're dead serious and money is no object, all the major national time labs also allow you to run a private leased line to their facility for direct checks.
The private line idea is maybe doable (but which protocol? NTP doesn't offer the needed precision), but as all substations would need one, my guess is that eventually money would be an object...
You might enjoy reading the documentation for NPLTime [1] which uses PTP over telecom fibre networks.
Of course, their target market is banks with record keeping requirements so it probably costs a fortune.
Looking at the (partial) graph suggests that the south-east part ran faster for the entire duration of the disconnection.
Does this mean grid-synced clocks in the south-east part are now permanently ahead of the atomic reference, or are they planning a mitigation (which I assume would have to mean disconnecting again and running the SE part slower for a bit)?
That's the standard procedure. Maintaining an exact frequency can be hard, but counting cycles is easy. So the frequency will slew to slowly compensate back.
Edit: Here's a Tom Scott video on a UK–Continental divergence that happened a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bij-JjzCa7o
Clock synchronisation is a nice side effect, but what amazes me is how it is possible to keep this thing swinging somewhat synchronously year after year, and how huge chunks of it doesn't crash and burn when events like this happens.
(I have worked as a consultant for a power supplier, I was more puzzled afterwards : )
: )
Anyway, what I learned was that the grid has many very nonlinear phenomena which are extremely hard to model and predict, because of the dynamics. Much more complicated than the simplistic answers some here have given you. So...relax?
:-)
There's nothing to do to keep them in sync: every single[1] alternator connected to the electric grid is rotating at the same speed, which is driven by the frequency of the electricity. This is a physical effect.
The big challenge isn't to keep things in sync, it's to keep the supply equals to the demand. (when we don't, the frequency goes up or down depending on which is higher than the other)
[1]: in thermal stations only, wind turbines are not directly connected to the grid because their rotation speed depends on the wind…
You either know a lot less than me or you know more and understand it better. I honestly can't tell : )
It feeks like my brain collapses just from starting to think about thousands of kilometers of grid, thousands of power stations, millions of consumers etc. (Not that the amount of them matters, just the supply or demand they deliver/drive.)
In the interest of learning, here is my model that I map the things I do understand to:
The way I (as a hardware/software engineer who started in electronics and had a brief course on power electrics) reason about it is torque, as if they are kind of sharing a common shaft and applying torque to it while consumers are braking it.
This simplified mental model would explain - kind of - how it can stay in sync, only in reality we are talking not a linear axle or shaft but this continent-wide grid where gigawatts of supply and demand can occur within minutes or even less and the phase differs by quite a lot over the span of the continent. (In my mental model this is the axle twisting.)
Also at 50Hz the wavelength of light in vacuum should be around 6000km if I typed correctly and DDG understood correctly. A rule of thumb we learned (in high frequency electronics back in electronics engineering) was that once you cross a tenth of that the normal rules doesn't quite apply. If this can be applied to power grids (an I think it can) it becomes even more complex I guess. (The simplification we can apply in "small" circuits is that we can pretend evey point in the circuit is at the same point of the phase at the same time.)
Keep in mind everyone: these are just my models. I'll be delighted if littlesymaar (or someone else) knows this extremely well and manages to enlighten me because it would be fun to really "get" it.
Edits: A lot.
Also: Just operating one power plant can be complex: I remember one presentation from former students or something about how important it was in Eastern Europe back then to be ready to cut immediately if neighbouring plants failed or cut so that your plant wouldn't suddenly oversupply and burn out.
But the shaft of such length is not very "rigid", and the task is to keep it from wringing and breaking by keeping all parts of it rotating at the same speed.
(As a side note: have you heard of selsyns?)
One thing that might help with the stability intuition: The generators themselves are synchronous machines, but they have parasitic induction machines deliberately installed in the form of damper bars. Those damper bars mean that the vibrating mode between the generator rotor and the stator field is well-damped. Similarly, the vast majority of total load is in the form of induction motors which naturally have a damped response between the motor rotor and stator field. So resonating patterns and shocks are quite difficult to set up. Even sharp step inputs are attenuated to be not-sharp over short distances.
In the US, one common test for grid step response is dropping an entire nuclear power plant. Not one reactor: the entire site. So several GW of electric supply is dropped instantaneously. The limit typically isn't any kind of oscillation, its the ability of primary frequency reserve to pick up the slack before you start triggering under-frequency trips.
Must admit I’ve never heard of this before :-)
Is this an automatic process? Or is it more like someone from the company's energy provider calls them and tells them to shut off some devices? And is there not a potential problem, that if too many shut of at once, you now have a surplus again? Or is it coordinated by one single entity?
Participants can either be positive (they consume more energy, for example PHES systems), or negative (they inject or consume less energy).
All these ancillary services are paid (annual auction + per case). Nowadays, it's getting bigger with VPP: virtual power plants, which aggregate small loads (i.e. small ~1MW generators) in order to propose a bigger load to TSOs.
It's all automatic
If you're interested: https://www.swissgrid.ch/en/home/customers/ancillary-service...
Often such customers will have flexible demand in the form of non-critical heating or cooling, pumps that only need to run some of the time, etc, which they are very happy to turn off temporarily in return for extra income.
This is indeed an automatic process, triggered in near-real time in response to signals from the grid.
Imagine the massive spinning generators as a big mass that slow down just a little bit when you switch on a light and then that generator has to add more steam (or open hydro valve or whatever).
So anyone with an accurate enough measuring device can exactly monitor the state of the grid. We use this device [0] for example.
There are generally frequency containment reserves (FCR) that consist of different ways of generation and have their different reaction times, power and energy capacities.
Hydro for example can react in about 15 seconds, battery inverters in milliseconds. Gas turbines in minutes, coal fired plants in hours.
You can also shed energy by switching off loads (Demand side response).
The system operator is responsible for grid balancing in the short term, they have direct facilities under their control and they have contracts with generators and consumers. And there are markets to bid your generation and flexibility.
The markets in the Nordics for example are:
- FCR-N (Frequency containment Reserve - Normal operations)
- between 49.90 - 49.99 and 50.01 - 50.10 (reaction time up to 20s)
- FCR-D (Disturbance) - between 49.7-49.90 and 50.10 - 50.30 (reaction time up to 2 seconds IIRC)
- FFR (Fast Frequency response) - below 49.7 - reaction time 0.6s IIRC
Once a day you bid your capacity for the next 24h (for each hour) and then you measure the grid frequency yourself and when you detect a deviation you activate your response. You get paid for availability and activation separately. There is a ton of qualification and logging you need to do to be able to participate but the activation message is the grid frequency itself, no further communication needed.
Outside frequency regulation there is energy markets where generation and consumption is agreed 24h ahead.
I have always wondered, would that still hold true if the grid was fully solar-based? There would be no rotating mass in that case.
Grid scale battery systems are often used for voltage or frequency stability as opposed to deep discharging as generation offsets, although that will change eventually if batteries get better enough or really cheap LNG stops being a thing.
However, in order to provide primary frequency reserve in the other direction, you do need additional local storage. You don't need very much. Just 10% of rated power for 15 minutes gets you to very deep renewable penetration.
The trouble isn't with the technology, its with the economics. Once you set a sufficiently high price for frequency support and primary frequency reserve, suppliers will show up.
In cases like this, our systems would detect the frequency deviation, and shut off loads within 100 milliseonds to reduce the demand on the grid. This helps in cases where demand is greater than supply.
The entire system is automated - the required time frames are so quick that you don't have time for humans to be involved. By the time we're aware that an event has occurred, we've already reduced demand on the grid.
Handling high frequency events where supply is greater than demand is tricker. Sites that have long running generation can be instructed to shut down their generation, but large-scale batteries are probably the best solution in these cases. They can be switched quickly to start charging (if they have spare capacity).
As you've identified, one potential issue is that you can end up over-responding to the event and move from a low frequency event to a high frequency event.
The way we do in in Ireland is that our response is proportional to the frequency nadir. Not everything is tripped off at the same time.
As other posters have noted, the actual frequency deviations that occurred are not that big. 49.7 Hz is not that low compared to normal grid frequency. In fact, some of our systems wouldn't even activate at this level. They would see it, but wouldn't trip off any loads.
As for how we control them so quickly, it's usually via a direct connection to a breaker of some description, or where there's a SCADA system that can trip out the loads in the required time frames. Before the site can participate in these services, we perform extensive testing to ensure they meet the required time constraints.
Our system monitors the grid voltage and current at 8 kHz, and we down sample that to 50 Hz (average grid frequency). We can detect a frequency event across 3 phases within 60 milliseconds. (We check all three phases for multiple cycles to reduce any false positives.)
When we trip out the loads, production stops. We'll notify the client why their loads have been turned off, but the SMS message will usually arrive a few seconds after the trip.
The clients that participate in these services get paid quite well to make their loads available and they're aware of the process. They agree to turn off demand without notice when there's a frequency event.
It's not suitable for every site. We work quite a lot with pharma companies for "regular" demand response, but very few can do FFR. Shutting down a pharma plant with no notice can cost a lot of money in wasted product and down time as they clear the wasted product off the production lines.
https://www.dw.com/en/clocks-in-europe-are-running-late-beca...
I believe that if you adjusted your clock during the conflict you had to adjust it again when it was resolved as the resolution was to increase the frequency for a period to reverse the loss of frequency.
The grid was separated but it didn't cause more power outages.
Would it be possible to have multiple smaller grids, still interconnected, but without being kept in sync?
I'm not sure if what I'm saying is possible or efficient, but converting AC to DC, transmitting the energy, then converting DC to AC so the frequency becomes irrelevant.
> Wide area synchronous networks improve reliability and permit the pooling of resources. Also, they can level out the load, which reduces the required generating capacity, allow more environmentally-friendly power to be employed; and allow more diverse power generation schemes and permit economies of scale. [0]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_synchronous_grid
HVDC of course has the disadvantage of extra conversion equipment. HV circuit breakers are also significantly more complex as an arc will form as long as current is flowing. With AC this happens at the zero automatically, nothing like this with DC.
I am amazed the grid goes all the way to Iraq
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
In general, interconnection allows for the sharing of generators. My 30 year old coal unit might not need to run because I can buy electricity from your cheaper gas plant.
Instead, an electricity grid should be able to survive any partition like this while still keeping all frequencies within the nominal range. The total cost of such a system is lower in most cases (you need more idling generation capacity or droppable load, but less transmission capacity)
The EU system here failed to do either here.
According to the German Bundesnetzagentur (the equivalent of the FTC/EIA), the number of times where they have to intervene with the grid due to grid instability is constantly rising due to Germany shutting down nuclear and coal plants.
> https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Sachgebiete/Elektrizitae...
It's perfectly possible to have a stable grid even with solar and wind.
The problem is that neither nuclear nor coal power stations are load following and "base load" has lowered over the years (industry has moved to Asia, devices became more efficient, etc.).
Stand-by power (like natural gas powered generators) hasn't been built up the way the way it should have been. Same goes for smart grid technologies and buffer storage; not to mention the maniacs (especially in South Germany) who basically protest everything - from nuclear power, to wind power, to required infrastructure like north-to-south high-voltage transmission lines.
It's way too oversimplified to reduce the issue to just wind and solar.
Where do you get that from? None of the sources reported a close blackout, as far as I understood it there was a lot of emergency capacity left. We weren't even in the emergency frequency range, as the other commenter pointed out.
Even the linked article just states that those interventions got more often after shutting down coal+nuclear, but it's not critical, it _only_ costs money to compensate the operators: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redispatch_(Stromnetz)
It's probably much less money than all the nuclear subsidies.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart.htm?...
Nuclear power went from 20GW to 10GW. Hard coal went from 28GW to 22GW.
Ok, but gas went up from 23GW to 29GW. Brown coal stayed the same.
Renewables went up by by 50GW for PV and 50GW for wind. Consider that wind often hits a 50% capacity factor. That is 25GW in additional power just from wind alone.
Some of those plants may not be running continuously but they are still useful for emergency responses.
The load shedding mechanisms worked, supportive power generation was automatically activated and there was no widespread blackout.
You are right that it appears like there was insufficient capacity at the north-west/south-east separation point and I guess that is going to be investigated but apart from that everything looks like it worked.
Romania had a power blackout for a bit, but everything worked as intended and the romanian grid blacking out didn't pull in the rest of the european grid.
A partition between power grid is acceptable to preserve the largest amount of the grid remaining functional. Marrying the partitions together is bothersome but not something that takes forever (took 1 hour in this case).
While 49.7 is very low, most of your devices will not notice and will be fine. Most industrial equipment is largely already coded to handle frequency shifts in favor of keeping the grid stable.
[0] https://www.hoogspanningsnet.com/ , entry of 08 januari 2021 - similar sentiments were expressed in articles linked from there